I often think of my best friend Marion, especially when I’m dancing at an outdoors event. I imagine her gazing down at me from one of those high nimbus clouds in the sky, saying, “You go girl!”  It was Marion, after all, who taught me how to move and we never tired of dancing with each other. Some of my fondest memories are of dancing with Marion, starting when we were giddy undergraduates at Brandeis University sock hops. We rarely paired off with men – most of them weren’t interested – so we danced with each other, shimmying around the wooden floors of Usdan Student Center with happy abandon. Marion was all fluid grace, her arms and legs toned by years of ballet classes, her warm brown eyes aglow with joy. We danced together at nightclubs in New York, Chicago and Miami and across the years at each other’s weddings and our children’s Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. Even when she was sick and on chemo, we pranced around to jazzercise videos on the plush rug of her family room.  

I first heard from Marion the summer before our freshman year at Brandeis University. We had been accepted into a college known for radicals, the home of Angela Davis, Abbie Hoffman and Susan Saxe (convicted of being an accomplice to murder).  So when I received a letter from my prospective roommate, a Marion Jackson of Queens, New York, images of a beautiful African-American revolutionary danced in my head. Marion had her own misconceptions. She arrived in our Brandeis dorm room after I had already unpacked and wandered off, and upon spotting the scale next to my bed in our dorm room and a booklet on how to lose weight displayed on my desk (I had used it to shed a few pounds over the summer), she immediately assumed I was obese. Her shock when I bounded into the room – 5’3” and 110 pounds with a trim, athletic build – was palpable, as was my surprise when I discovered that she was a sweet-souled Jewish girl, with a protective doctor-father who looked me up and down to make sure I was good enough to room with his princess.

Marion and I bonded immediately, over our shared excitement at being on our own for the first time in our lives. In many respects, Marion, having grown up in NYC, was much more cosmopolitan than I, a jock from the countryside outside of Philadelphia.  In her nonjudgmental way, Marion taught me some basic survival skills at a liberal arts college, such as how not to go around saying to students who owned a fancy stereo system: “You must be rich or something.” Or why it was gauche to cut up all my meat at once. In turn, I stretched Marion’s boundaries for adventure, daring her to hitchhike with me into Boston for clubbing on weekends, or introducing her to the joys of waking up in a pup tent on a beach a few feet from the warm waters of the Florida Keys.

When Marion’s parents died within a few weeks of each other in the spring of our freshman year – her mother from pre-senile Alzheimer’s and her father from a massive heart attack – Marion’s extended family turned to me to help her through the devastating grief that followed. I attended her father’s funeral and did my best to distract her with stories of my latest romantic escapades.  Marion was numb with grief, a stoic shadow of her usual self, but I could sense that she was grateful for my presence. We roomed again our sophomore year, growing closer still as we embarked on a race to see who would lose their virginity first. Marion won by a few weeks; she had a steady boyfriend, after all, and I had just started dating a geeky math graduate student (who dumped me shortly after the big event).  

Even after I went abroad our junior year and Marion, still restless and grieving, transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, we stayed in close touch. She flew to London the winter I spent in England, I visited her in New York several weekends the following summer, where we cut the rug in one Manhattan nightclub or the other, meeting men and getting each other out of tight spots. We stayed the best of friends, even after I moved to Miami to write for a newspaper there, and she headed to Chicago to do graduate work in speech pathology. I remember lots of late-night phone calls, usually from me lamenting yet another failed relationship, occasionally from her, agonizing over whether she should settle down with Carl, a guy she’d met in Chicago.  She would visit me on the Cape, where my family had a house; I would fly to Chicago and visit her for a whirlwind weekend.

We stayed close as we embarked on our careers, married and started raising children, making sure to see each other at least every two years, sometimes more. I knew I needed Marion more than she needed me – she had a wider circle of friends than I did. Yet as I careened through marriage and divorce, she was always there for me, patiently listening and giving me the kind of level-headed advice and love I needed to make my way through the shoals of adulthood. (I write about some of those shoals in my memoir, Brassy Broad: How one journalist helped pave the way to #MeToo).

Then came the night that Carl called me, grief and rage slurring his voice, to tell me that Marion had been diagnosed with Stage 4 ovarian cancer.  The first word out of my mouth was a curse; how could this be happening to such a wonderful woman, my best friend. But if anything, her diagnosis and will to fight brought us closer than ever before. At the same time, I could feel her slipping slowly away from me. She didn’t have as much time or patience to hear about my petty problems; she had more important things on her mind: finding effective treatments, preparing her husband and children for the inevitability of what might be coming. And yet even in her distraction, she was far more present than I. The last time I flew out to visit her over a Memorial Day weekend, we both knew the end was near. Marion’s face was gaunt and she had lost a great deal of weight. Even then, I couldn’t find the words to say what I needed to say. So she said them for me. One evening, sitting on the bed in the guest room, she gently drew me close and said, “Ali, is there something you want to tell me? Now’s the time.” I started crying and telling her how much I loved her, needed her; how would I exist without her? And she held me close and told me that I was a good person, that I should keep believing in myself, that I would be fine. I sobbed even harder and she comforted me as if I was the one who was going to die, not her. Even at the end, Marion was the wise one in our relationship, the teacher, the adult. She had taught me how to shimmy, how to live away from home, and now here she was teaching me how to die. Marion died 11 years ago this month, but her spirit lives on in me, especially when I’m dancing.

Epigraph:

“I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.” 

Brené Brown