Lili and I have been best friends since the early 90s. We have the type of friendship where we just fit together without effort, so comfortable and right. When we lived relatively close together (NH and CT), we saw each other frequently, but when she moved to Hawaii, it became harder and harder to see each other in person anymore, but we’ve almost always stayed in close contact. We also both traveled for a living (which she still does), and hooking up in places like San Francisco was wicked fun over the years. Getting to live and work with her right now is so much fun! She is sharing her office space with me, and it’s so easy to just hang out together.
There was a point in this journey of looking for a surgeon to take out that damn tumor when the insurance woes were just unbearable. We thought we’d finally found someone in Oregon, but couldn’t get out of state approval, just like I’d found in Missouri. Lili keeps really good insurance, because she too had a brain tumor in the early 90s, just before I met her. So she proposed to me — no, seriously. Frank and I were going to rush a divorce, he’d give away the bride, Lili and I would marry, and I’d have magically better insurance. I was so looking forward to the wedding! Actually, the thing that made me laugh the most was my name change.
My legal name is Lisa Gay Richards. I was going to drop the Richards, and stick with Lisa Gay. How cool would that have been? I sometimes think of doing it anyway …
The part that made me giggle like a loon? That would be the part where my mother would explode into a million tiny pieces, and it would have been visible all over the world. Ha!
(Thank you so much to everyone who donated to the dog fund! We are almost half way there in a mere two days!)