My sisters are my bones. They finish my sentences, instinctively hear the warning signs in my voice. We still giggle over stupid things — generally, at all the wrong times, like in the middle of a church sermon or a solemn gathering.

When my husband was blown up by a roadside bomb in Iraq, shattering my world, it was my sisters who stepped into the void, along with some of my dearest girlfriends. They began the business of filling my shoes while I sat by an ICU bed, praying for signs of life. They lined up food deliveries, kept the curious from the door, organized rides for our kids and paid our bills. They understood the business of ministering. 

"This sucks," my one sister said. "You guys don’t deserve this." She knew she could tell it like it was. There was no room for sugarcoating, and I didn’t want any sunshine blowing up my backside. The reality was grim.

Months later, it was my turn in the hospital, when doctors found a potentially cancerous tumor lurking in my abdomen. I turned to my other sister. "I want to be you," I said simply as I lay in my bed with the catheter, too weak to move.

"But if you were me, then you would have missed out on your fabulous life and your fabulous kids and your fabulous self. And who says my life doesn’t suck?" We both had to laugh at that one.

Those of us over 40 are on the other side of life’s mountain now — the downhill slope. But isn’t that the fun place to ski? Isn’t that where you really feel the wind in your hair? It’s certainly not the chairlift ride up: This is the part where the husband gets prostate cancer, the child is hit by a drunk driver, the grandfather gets Alzheimer’s. But it’s also the part where we get to use all that collective wisdom: where all those mothering and befriending and"getting over it" experiences coalesce. We finally learn how to love ourselves, and we’ve built the architecture to support one another in a myriad of ways.

"Are you sure you need to go, Lee? Have you even met Karin’s mother?" my husband asked me as I searched for my keys to drive to the funeral. He was taking stock of the bags under my eyes, the unopened suitcases from our recent ten-day vacation, the stomach virus that was still plaguing me. It wasn’t the most convenient time to drive 90 minutes each way — but then, death isn’t devised to be convenient for any of us.

"I’m going," I said simply. "This is what it means to be a good friend." And he nodded. He has witnessed firsthand the giant karma wheel of girlfriend-dom, the legions of friends and women who cared for him and his children while he lay incapacitated for months.

And as I watched the people filing into the church that day, it was the presence of girlfriends, peppered throughout the rows in clusters, that made me smile. This is just what we do, I thought. We drop everything and put friendships first. I wouldn’t trade being us for anything in the world.