Editor's note: On May 1, Villard Books published "Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-life Parenthood," edited by Camille Peri and Kate Moses. This collection gathers 37 essays on contemporary motherhood, both original, never-before-published stories and favorites from our first two years. In this new essay by one of the book's editors, motherhood is the force that draws the author back to the parents of her two best friends, who both died of cancer in early adulthood. Join Camille Peri and Kate Moses in Table Talk all this week.

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By Camille Peri

May 5, 1999 | Rose opens her eyes and he is there -- his breath soft on her face, hollow little chest, eyes lit like half-moons in the night. When he was 4, nightmares of fire would send him bursting into their bed to wedge his body between hers and his father's. Now he is whispering to her to come and see the midnight stars. They stand outside, two tiny human figures under an enormous sky. Rose is shivering in her robe and slippers. Toby's feet are on the ground but his head is floating somewhere above, her 8-year-old guide through the galaxy.

Rose opens her eyes again. He is not there. Toby, the eldest of her three sons, died eight years ago, but he comes back to her often in her dreams. A parent's worst nightmare. Now she wonders, Is that watching your child die or outliving him? For a while, it seemed that she was sentenced to live out the nightmare literally. Sleep would plunge her back into his early dreams of burning buildings and dizzying cliffs, and she would be helpless to save him. After a while, his dream-self got older. Now sometimes he is a young man, robust and healthy, as he was before cancer killed him at the age of 30. When she has these dreams, she knows it will probably be a good day.

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I met Rose when I was 24 in what now seems like another life. Nancy, a law student and dancer, had become my best friend and Toby my boyfriend when they each came out to San Francisco to start their adult lives. All of us were shedding childhood and convention, trying to figure out our places in the world; within the triangle of our friendship, I felt safe to be anything, to try out everything. Nancy and I were friends until her death from cancer four years ago, just after her 40th birthday. I thought Toby had left my life years before, when we split up and went on to marry others. Yet as he and Nancy were linked in my life, so were their deaths -- they died four years apart to the day. Each died within weeks of my sons' births -- no sooner was I flooded with the overwhelming instinct to protect my children than I was up against the jarring impossibility of doing that. Since then, I have been unable to separate them from my children -- I often see Toby in the eyes of my older son, Joey, and hear Nancy in the laughter of my younger son, Nat.

For a long time, the lingering connection to my dead friends both fueled my love for my children and made me fearful. When my children were babies, I could avoid probing those feelings, but as they grew older and I started saving baby teeth or wisps of hair, trying to hang onto the parts of them that were slipping away, I could no longer ignore the proximity of loss. I began to think of Toby and Nancy not only as my friends, but as other mothers' children. And so this year, on the anniversary of their deaths, I found myself drawn to their mothers, and through them, back to my friends.

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Toby was my first real love. We met in the clouds, on the 24th floor of a posh Nob Hill Hotel where we both waited tables. We were both creative and ambitious and romantic -- and that drew us together for five years. When we got off work at 2 in the morning, we would sneak into the supper club where performers like Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald headlined, and Toby would do a private show for me, playing Gershwin or Bach on the piano until the security guards kicked us out.

At that time, Toby was studying photography. I remember he would wind my legs around each other like taffy or sit me naked near a window to catch the light falling in halos on the curves of my body, shooting photos while a pot of spaghetti sauce bubbling on his tiny gas stove provided the apartment's only heat. He was the perfect first love -- artistic and sensitive and playful. When he was hellbent on moving in with me, he showed up at my door to woo me with a bowl of freshly made chocolate chip cookie dough; when I was angry and he didn't know what to do with me, he'd turn me upside down by my heels and shake me. He gave beautiful and quirky gifts -- a finely embroidered antique blouse, a bolt found while hiking under the Golden Gate Bridge. He pried open the French doors that had been carelessly painted shut in my tiny apartment so that I could hear the bells from Grace Cathedral on Sunday afternoons.

Toby quit school after a year; five years later, he was assistant cameraman at George Lucas' special effects studio, Industrial Light and Magic. When I think of Toby, I think of light and stars: I picture him on the roof of our building, sitting in a director's chair under an indigo sky, guiding me through the constellations before the fog wrapped around us and swept the view away.

The other person who opened up my young adult world was Nancy. We met in VISTA, the domestic Peace Corps, working at a San Francisco law office that represented children. In my eyes she was worldly -- she had worked for the defense in the San Quentin Six trial and become friends with celebrated defendant Johnny Spain; and she was chic -- she wore high heels with shorts and let her bra straps show long before it was stylish, a perfect role model for the shy woman I was then. She had a blessed sense of how to pamper herself and others -- together, we drank freshly ground coffee, with cream, in bed; took saunas; ate oysters when either of us had any money; browsed at tacky lingerie shops.

Nancy was steely determination and generosity entangled with a wry, sarcastic sense of humor. When she became a partner in a criminal defense practice, she provided her clients with more than legal help -- she gave them jobs, sometimes money and much of herself, in friendship and faith. But her first love was dancing. Even in a business suit she looked like a dancer -- I used to imagine her gliding through court, her rib cage high, hands flowing in graceful arcs as she argued her cases.

Nancy held my hand through my breakup with Toby, at my wedding to David and through my first childbirth. A few months later, when I learned of Toby's death, she was the first person I called.

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