Barb Burg Pink
It was foggy the day of the funeral. We had flown in from L.A. — my husband, my daughter and I — picked up our son from college in Connecticut and drove the hour and a half to Irvington, New York, the town where Barb lived. When we got to the house, it was somber, yes, but there was also the energy of a party 20 minutes before everybody comes.
“We’re all wearing something pink for the funeral,” Barb’s daughter told me, showing me the fuchsia-colored purse she’d gotten from her mother’s closet. “Because my mom always wore a little pink. It was her color. You know, Barb Burg pink.”
It was? Huh? My husband turned to me. “Did you know Barb always wore pink?”
I looked at him, shrugged. “No,” I said. “I didn’t know that about her.”
Barb was the first friend I’d made as an adult. We’d met working in the publicity department of Bantam Books. She was Barb Burg, Bantam Books. I’d known her for almost thirty years. Frankly, I thought I knew everything about her. But I didn’t know her favorite color was pink. I had never seen her wear pink, never noticed anything pink at her house. Where did this pink purse her daughter was now holding even come from?
I felt so strange. Of course it made sense that Barb and I had whole parts of ourselves we didn’t know about. Except for the few years I’d lived in Manhattan, we’d spent our lives in different cities. There were the Christmas vacations when my family stayed with her family in New York, and the Spring Breaks when her family stayed with my family in L.A. But mostly our friendship lived over email, where we wrote story-length letters to each other, and during the hours we spent talking on the phone.
Sometimes we didn’t see each other for years at a time. But I always considered Barb one of my best friends. Maybe my actual best friend. After all, she knew more about me than anyone. And I thought I knew more about her. So why didn’t I know about Barb Burg pink?
I’d had a similar sinking feeling when I’d come to visit her a week earlier. That was when the cancer that had started in her rectum — then spread to her lungs and liver, then one summer night spread to her brain — finally got the best of her, and she started to fade from this earth.
From the minute I got to the house, I felt like I was playing catch up. I knew what was going on, but I didn’t really know. That’s what happens when you live on the opposite end of the country from someone. There is a difference between what we write in an email — the way we tell a story over the phone — and the way something IS.
Who are all these people? I’d thought. They were her friends, her neighbors, her kids’ friend’s parents, her colleagues, her nieces and nephews. She even had a brother I’d never met before. My best friend had a whole life I didn’t know about. It was weird.
Now I was at her funeral. When I’d visited, she’d asked me if I wanted to speak. She was so weak at that point, her voice had come out like a gravelly whisper, and it took me a minute to understand what she was saying. Oh. Would I give a eulogy? I nodded and told her I would.
So when I got home, I started scribbling down some thoughts. I dug through my drawers and found old letters. I searched photo albums for pictures of our two families together: the kids riding Big Wheels around her cul-de-sac, posing in front of a fountain at Universal Studios. I jotted down notes about the special friendship she and I had had over the years, trying to come up with a coherent narrative.
But I didn’t get my speech together in time to speak. The day before I was planning to come for another visit, I got a call from her son.
“She’s gone,” he told me.
“What? When? Just now?”
“It was a few minutes ago,” he said. “My dad and sister and I were there. It was peaceful. We told her it was all right to go, and then she did. It was as good as it could have been. Really,” he assured me, “it was as good an end as you could get.”
I listened and tried to process what he was telling me. I started to cry. That was another thing I didn’t know about Barb. Just how little time she had left.
