I noticed many things about her last week when we spent a few days together.

She always knew what was next and was there to offer her assistance, whether I asked for it or not. She didn't need an invitation and seemed to live inside my head. She could view the road through my windshield, and she can probably see through yours, too.

She would always laugh so hard and well, it was contagious and infectious in the healthy ways those words don't imply. Last week, however, she rarely broke a smile. She looks and even skiis like a much younger woman, but I know her zeal and her spice and they were gone.

She borrowed my chapstick a couple times and I teased her when she wiped it off only after she used it, never before. Her germs weren't shared with just anybody, she explained.

As a kid, I would follow her everywhere, for many years her only niece, and wonder how she could take so much grief from her boys, my forever Bermuda shorts-sporting, California cousins.

That family was always laughing about something, or more likely, someone. It was humor based on truth and honesty so cutting that only love could make it palatable, and there was plenty of that, too.