When I was eight, my best friend was Brian Bennett. Brian and I enjoyed the same games. We laughed at the same nonsense, the same elementary school jokes. We played so hard together my father says that when he tucked me into bed at night I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. It was 1967.

Brian’s mom and mine often took us to the library there in Fort Bliss, Texas. That year, he and I read one hundred books a piece, recording each title and author on a certificate I still have in my scrapbook. We enjoyed sports, and books involving sports. I remember Matt Christopher’s Too Hot to Handle. A boy named David Kroft loves baseball — his father and big brother were really good at baseball — but David is a slowpoke and thinks he makes too many errors. How will he handle the pressure of living up to the family name?

Brian got sick. He had a brain tumor. I didn’t know what a tumor was. He was at William Beaumont Hospital up the hill from our house on Field Road. I was born in that hospital. My mom and dad had both gone there for surgeries. I thought Brian would get better.

They didn’t let kids visit patients in hospitals back then. One night, I woke up in my father’s arms. He was holding me tight. His chest was heaving. His tears were falling on my face. He rocked me back and forth as if I were a baby. And he told me that Brian died.

I was confused. Why couldn’t I have gone to the hospital to tell Brian to get better? Why didn’t he come home? At the funeral, on a sunny day, I watched Sgt. Major and Mrs. Bennett crying. I watched the casket being lowered into the ground. I rubbed my eyes with two questions. Why did Brian die? What will I do without him?

We didn’t go to church when I was growing up. We went on Christmas and Easter, I’m told, but I have only vague memories of that. My first vivid memory of church is of being in the Fort Bliss main chapel for Brian’s funeral. I became aware of something that day, something that I would appreciate only later; that Church was like my mother. She was where you could go when you couldn’t cope; the one whose skirt you could hold on to when it was time to say goodbye. And she was better than the hospital. She let you in.

The cemetery where Brian was buried we could see from our house. It was down the hill, beyond the other end of Field Road. My mother says that every day for months she could see Iris Bennett, Brian’s mother, walking back and forth at the grave.