Many times during high school and during the times we talked during the first two years of college, Reg told me how difficult it sometimes was to talk to parents old enough to be her grandparents. With characteristically Irish cynicism, she concealed her feelings for her parents beneath her complaints about her personal generation gap.

Reg's awareness of her parents' age extended beyond annoyance at misunderstandings. She worried about her father's frequent illnesses and constant smoking. I learned that Dr. Fitzsimmons had narrowly escaped lung cancer a few years before. He still rolled his own cigarettes, even though he had barely one lung left.

As I said, however, we haven't talked since early 1990. I never quite figured out why (and now it doesn't matter), but for a long time Regina wouldn't return my phone calls or letters. Feeling the hand of death on our friendship, I slipped back into nostalgia, and hoped that sometime we would be friends again.

That time came last week. As I moved into a new apartment in Boston, I pondered the possibilities of friends' unknown relatives' deaths, and the reality of my uncle's. Then, when I called my father in Chicago to give him my new phone number, he told me that Dr. Fitzsimmons had died of a heart attack.

My parents saw Regina at the funeral, and she asked them to tell me to call her. Although I talked to my father at nearly 1 a.m. I immediately called Regina, knowing that on a Friday night she would still be up at midnight.

The conversation was awkward at first, but we soon fell into the old routine of friendship. Neither of us has changed much in two years, although she says my accent is more East Coast than before.

Now that death has brought us together again, I hope that awareness of our mortality will keep us close. We have exchanged address and phone numbers once again, and promised to write. I'll try to visit her in Wyoming when I graduate this spring.

And the next time I go to church, I think I'll light a candle.