A Tribute to "It's Debby with a Y, Dammit!"

This was the title of a college paper my mom wrote about her long time best friend. I was a tween (back in the nineteen hundreds we called it "preteen") when mom went back to school, so I made it my business to insert myself in her school work. I remember the paper better than any novel or story I've read. By the time Mom wrote it, we had been living in Illinois for five or six years and it had been that long since we had seen Aunt Debby. They met when we all lived in San Diego; she and her kids, Shanna and David, became our family out there. Even after all this time, Shanna and I were just talking on the phone and marveling at how we all still consider each other family.

In the paper, Mom eloquently told of how she and Aunt Debby met at the bank of mailboxes at our apartment complex. She described the outspoken, decidedly candid woman she met there that day: the woman whose confidence and frankness came to influence my mom's once quiet and reserved disposition. Debby unabashedly corrected people who dared misspell her name, with a boisterous, "It's Debby with a Y, dammit!"

Mom has always said that Debby never knew a stranger; this was one thing they either had in common from the start, or Debby rubbed off on Mom in a significant way, because it's a long-standing family joke that Mom makes friends wherever she goes, even when she's supposed to be doing something else. Just last month Mom helped me travel to Georgia from Illinois with all three of the boys. We stopped for gas and found we had a serious snafu with the canvas luggage bag on the roof. Before I even finished assessing the situation, mom had recruited a seasoned trucker to secure the package for us and save a bunch of money in the process.

For the past month or so, Debby has been bed-ridden, plagued with a fatal brain tumor. She finally let go last week, just after her birthday. Her kids were at her side, she was surrounded with love, and she peacefully breathed her last as her family sent her into the arms of God. My heart aches for Shanna, David, their beautiful families, Debby's mom and sisters, and my own mommy, whose life-long friend left far too soon for our comfort. But I trust that not even a flower withers before God's timing, so I know that He who knitted her together in her mother's womb on His timing and in His will, also drew her into His arms on His own timing and in His own will. Of course this doesn't help us not miss her, or help us not want to hug her, or not wish she was still here to warm us with her incredible laugh (oh, how she could laugh! She had the most beautifully uninhibited laugh I think I've ever heard).

So, today, as her family and friends celebrate her life, I celebrate with them. And I am grateful for the boldness, the outspokenness, the unwillingness she had to simply keep her mouth shut when she saw an injustice of some sort, or when she knew you were about to make a mistake. She didn't hold back. She didn't just sit and "tisk" and watch you do the wrong thing. She was true to herself, and she was true to her family. She was a mentor to my mom, to me, and to countless others, and I will forever be thankful to God for my Aunt Debby.