When I was seven, two of my little girlfriends died.

Joni was eight.

Danielle was six.

We lived on Deauville Drive, in Huntington Beach, California. Across Garfield Street there was an area that had a hill, and the hill and land next to it had been bulldozed to build houses. Joni and Danielle, and brothers from one of the families, and a couple of other kids, ran lickety split across the street to play one sunny day.

They told their mothers they were going to our elementary school, through the path between the houses, past the barking dogs and the honeysuckle that poured over a fence.   They snuck to a place they weren’t supposed to be, looking for an adventure.

They dug a cave into the hillside. A neat cave. Kids like caves.

And when Joni and Danielle were in that neat cave, having lots of fun, the cave collapsed and they suffocated.

We realized something was wrong when our family was driving to church and Mr. Amato, whose family made great sandwiches in a shop at the mall, was half carrying Danielle’s mother up the street along with another man.  She was crying, head back. There were mobs of people, fire engines, and police.

Joni and Danielle were there one day, and then they were not. We drew pictures at my house, then we didn’t.

Joni was darling. I wanted to look like her. Dark hair, page boy cut, lots of thick black lashes. Danielle was thin and quick with huge green eyes. They were fun.

As an adult, I realized the devastation that Joni and Danielle’s deaths caused. Their families were ruined, the community  shocked and grieving. At the time, I simply went back outside to play under the blue sky, daydreaming under the pink bougainvillea in the backyard.

All the kids did. We didn’t know what else to do. I remember crying, though, and not quite understanding what had happened. Those were the days when children did not go to funerals, so it wasn’t final to me, wasn’t quite real.

At forty six, I’ve read a number of articles about “aging gracefully,” and “getting older,” and “the dreaded middle age,” which I suppose I am. I read about women who desperately want to look younger and go to great lengths to do so. Botox, surgery, laser peels, etc. I’m not criticizing, I’m just noting it.

Though it’s hard to believe I’m four years from fifty, and though I thought I would be smarter and wiser by now, the truth is that aging doesn’t bother me. I’m simply glad that I’ve been given the gift of aging.

I think it has something to do with the impact of death so early in my life with Joni and Danielle and with deaths following theirs. As a teenager, I watched my Grandpa die month by month of cancer. I lost my beloved Nana before him. My parents were both dead of cancer by the time I was forty, same with my parents in law.

A close friend’s husband died at 33. His daughter was three. Linda, my best friend’s mother, who I loved, died in her early fifties of ovarian cancer. I lost two friends to lung cancer.  One of those friends, four days before she died, in bed, too weak to open her eyes told me, “I like soup.”

I will never forget that. Louise was dying way too young, I knew it, she knew it, but she could find something she still liked: Soup.

My other friend, Margie, who at one point studied to become a nun, patted her heart when I sat with her one afternoon a few weeks before her death and told me, “Cathy, God is right here. He’s right here.”

Perhaps I have learned one thing from these deaths: People should be more concerned with living life with love and compassion and understanding, with having adventures and new experiences, with travel and learning and reading, than their appearance.

I will never be a size six again. I may be a size eight if I’m lucky, but I doubt it. Today I’m hoping, mildly, for a 10. Those two lines between my brows ain’t goin’ nowhere. My eyelids look heavier to me and the poison oak on one of them is not helping.

I always want to look my best, for me. I like my kick ass boots. I like my heels. I like my bracelets and earrings. But I can’t possibly get caught up in the “don’t look your age” movement, with this vanity and self absorption.  As if aging is a curse, something to hide. As if it makes you less important.

Who cares? Looks are external. They’re not your soul, they’re not who you are inside. They’re not your character or how you hug your family and friends and how you make other people’s lives a little easier.

I think of Joni and Danielle now and again. All they lost, all that their families lost.

Joni and Danielle’s families would have given anything, even their own lives, to have them around, aging gracefully or aging horribly.

I wasn’t with them that day in the cave. But they’ve been with me my whole life. I can still see them, and their smiles, like it was yesterday, as we played hide and seek in our yard by the jacaranda and magnolia trees.

I will, hopefully, grow old and wrinkly, my sight dimming, my hearing not so good. I might get cranky, my bones might creak, my knees might wobble.

They never will.

Quite honestly, I am simply grateful to be here still. Wrinkles, extra pounds, and all.

Every day, I am grateful.