Tears Ran Down Their Legs

Cooper Thornton
7 min readDec 26, 2023
Artwork by Brian Andreas/Flying Edna

This has been a hard one. Hard to even sit to write, let alone know what to write. I’ve been avoiding it though I keep walking by my laptop knowing that until I get this out, I won’t be able to move forward.

I’m posting this two weeks after having written. Apparently it’s also been difficult to post. A kind of unpleasant finality.

A dear friend died this Sunday morning. She went into hospice home care Friday, nine days earlier, and quickly declined. I was scheduled to go see her this past Saturday, but was told last Tuesday night to come sooner because it didn’t look like she’d make it to the weekend. I went Wednesday and stayed til Friday.

She is Bettie. And she is and always will be glorious. I have never known life without her. As well as her husband, Tom, and their four kids. They and my parents met when each couple were just starting out with their first born under a year old. Tom and Bettie had three girls and a boy, Spence and Ginnie had three boys in a girl, all in that order. When my folks were living, they were my parents’ oldest, longest lasting, friends. Particular was the friendship between Ginnie and Bettie. They were the heart of our families’ friendship. They and their husbands, my dad, Spence, and Bettie’s husband, Tom, traveled often together, often spontaneously, when one of them would find a few days free and lasso the other…

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Cooper Thornton

Parent, Actor, People Lover, Observer, Writer and Most Often Happy Depressive in NC by way of LA by way of UK by way of BC by way of TN, where it all started.