Dear Sharon, Lynn and Cappy, I thought of you today.

It happens at the darndest times. Like when I’m making copies at the printer. Or taking a caffeine break. Or driving home when the sun is sinking like a big orange ball beneath the horizon.

Actually, I’ve thought of you every day since you each left this world last week and far too soon to my liking, but I didn’t have a say in this. The fact that you died within days of each other is an emotional sucker punch. You didn’t know one another, but I knew and loved you dearly.

Your earth vacancy reminds me that there is a lot I don’t know, so I have to cling to what I can reconcile my pithy brain around.

Sharon, you left us most recently and unexpectedly, so this one is fresh and raw.

A few days before you fell ill, you posted on Facebook the most marvelous picture of you leaning forward on an airplane seat — pre-take off — before your trip to Iceland. You were dressed to the nines. You always were. You had a hot pink shoulder sweater with a tres chic shoulder cut-out. When I saw it, I imagined you’d say “Why, I like to travel in style!”

You began most sentences with the word “Why.” “Why, I think this is a splendid idea!” you’d often say. When we first met, you were a candidate for our college’s academic vice president position. You would eventually be one of my best bosses. Ever. During your job interview, you said, “Why, think of the things we can do together!” And I did. And we did. We launched a few decent programs that are still around, you and me, mostly you.

I take solace that when you became sick, you were doing what you loved: traveling.

Lynn, I knew you the least of all but I loved you deeply. We met just two years ago at a charity dinner. You introduced me to your joie de vivre for life, a fondness for Veuve Cliquot and your faith in a higher power.

Yes, I got all that just from our first time we met. That night, you also met my daughter, whom you would soon embrace with your trademark Lynn lovin’ during her own health issues. Then, just a few weeks after we met, you found out you had a rare, incurable cancer. And you fought it — hard and beautifully — through every treatment, every setback, every step forward, every moment of gradual acceptance.

Oh, Lynn, you taught me what grace is personified.

And Cappy, it seems like we met decades ago because, well, we did, my fellow graduate student and hard-working, underpaid and overworked teaching assistant.

I remember the first time we met in our small shared office in the history department. You were a young mom and wife and I was just plain young with a heck of a lot to learn in grad school and life. You guided me through both.

We were eyes wide open and minds receptive to an intellectual world of possibilities. You became a well-respected professor of history. Our Friday nights sitting on your back porch on the bayou ranks up there still to this day. We’d wax prosaic on the historic works of our favorite philosophers, the demise of history majors and my love life, the latter of which you gave brilliant, woefully unheeded advice.

Then we lost touch. Like, for decades. We reconnected a few years ago thanks to social media. I’ll forever cherish your posts about your grandchildren, your husband’s annual fig preserves and your occasional political rants.

Then, you died of a chronic illness, the ultimate in paradoxes. I am so over paradoxes. I knew you struggled with a chronic illness, but doesn’t chronic mean you’ll keep living? That’s what I chose to believe. I wish we had one more Friday night on the bayou, but I’ll forever cherish the ones we had.

So, my three irreplaceable friends, what’s the universal message in all of this?

I don’t know, really. Shakespeare comes to mind because he said everyone can master a grief except those who have it.

I just want to hold on and not let go. So I will hold tight, Sharon, Lynn and Cappy. I’ll hold on to the gift of love you gave to so many while you were here. Thank you for the beauty of knowing and loving you.