When my friend Lucy Grealy died last December, I tried to write about her and failed. I was broke, stuck in Tallahassee for the holidays, and couldn’t return to New York for her memorial, so part of my desire to write was borne from my frustration at not being able to participate in this final act of her life. I needed to do something, and being a writer, I thought the thing to do was write. But I couldn’t get anything out on the page. It all seemed forced, trying to find meaning in things that had happened when perhaps there wasn’t any meaning to be found. It was the kind of writing that Lucy and I had no patience for, so I gave up on the idea and focused my energy on a dog I had rescued from a neighbor’s abandoned yard. Katrina was ugly and awkward, with no social skills at all, but once she understood that I would actually be kind to her, she didn’t want anything else to get in the way. After three weeks, she attacked my other dog, Brando, and bit me five times when I tried to split them up. Everyone advised me to get rid of her, to have her put down, but I couldn’t do it. Somehow, because of timing, this dog and Lucy were connected in my mind, and if I let go of the dog, it meant Lucy was really gone too. When I took the dog to the vet to be spayed, a friend offered to pick her up and, instead of returning her to me, sent her to a “rescue” group in Texas. I never saw her again.

And then I started writing. On a four-hour bus ride I wrote by hand on the back of other manuscript pages. I was writing about Lucy and endings. It seemed to make sense. I didn’t know that it would be anything I would publish, but I felt like I was learning something by writing it, so when I arrived home from my trip, I reached into my bag to retrieve the pages. And discovered that they were gone. I had somehow, improbably, allowed them to slip from my possession. They were on the floor of the bus, or the station itself, or the seat of the cab I’d taken from the station to my home. I didn’t try to reconstruct them, because it would be impossible, and I thought perhaps the writing had served its purpose for me. Perhaps, like a lot of my writing, it wasn’t actually meant to be read.

Like any unexpected death, I will always remember the way I heard of Lucy’s. It was in a Publisher’s Weekly daily email of industry gossip, the kind of thing you scan for news of who signed a new deal or got a nice review. You don’t open those emails expecting the blunt headline announcing a friend’s death. Yet, unexpected as it was, I knew immediately what must have happened. Later, I learned that though the fact of Lucy’s death was correct, they’d gotten most of the details wrong. They didn’t even have her in the right state.

I called an old classmate who had become great friends with Lucy while at an artist colony. I remember her both of them telling on their return, “I met a friend of yours!” That was Lucy; sooner or later, it seemed, everyone would meet her. “Why did she do it?” I asked, in the middle of a conversation that had already acknowledged why. “Didn’t she know how this would make people feel? Did she think it wouldn’t matter?” This other friend said, “Maybe she forgot…maybe she forgot that she’d asked me to spend Christmas with her.” It suddenly occurred to me how selfish we both were, thinking that she should have considered our feelings instead of her own, that our friendship alone was reason to live.

“Lucy,” I said, “would make a great ghost.”

I met Lucy for the first time at a reading in a small library in the East Village just after I moved to New York. Her book Autobiography of a Face was out already, and everyone was talking about it, but she seemed shy reading in her tiny voice and not knowing what to inscribe in the books people brought up to her afterwards. (“Elvis rules,” she wrote in mine, after a great deal of deliberation.) Later, she often read as part of the KGB Bar reading series that I began, and the room was always packed, and people in the back of the room would rudely shout for her to speak up, not realizing that was as loud as she got. Even though I heard her read countless times, it is the first one that I think of. She read a section of her memoir in which she hides in the stall of a school bathroom, reading the graffiti on the wall. “Be here now,” someone had written, but Lucy didn’t want to be.

In the beginning, I was shy around Lucy. I was shy in general, and often convinced myself that people didn’t remember whom I was; it was an excuse for not speaking. But Lucy did remember me, and I worried that she would mistake my shyness not as awe but a kind of repulsion. The truth was, once you knew Lucy, you didn’t think much about her face at all, even though it had been left deformed from childhood cancer. There were too many other things that over ruled it. She was smart, she was funny, she played pool and said outrageous things that weren’t just outrageous, they were true. To talk to her you had to break through a constant mob—mostly men—that formed around here at any event. As the years past, Lucy became one of a select pack of people who would take over the far corner of any party. Being part of it made me feel somehow at home.

I remember one year she arrived late to my birthday party—it may have been the year I somehow managed to throw three birthday parties for myself in the space of a single week. Lucy came in late and the party immediately formed around her. She’d just been on a blind date with a former Presidential advisor who had replied to an ad she placed in the New York Review of Books. In the space of the cab ride from the date to the party, she had managed to turn it into a perfectly formed story. At another party, she pulled me aside to tell me about the wife of a famous novelist and how this woman had aggressively pursued friendship only to dismiss Lucy as unworthy. They were sad stories really. They were stories about being lonely. But when Lucy told them they seemed funny, episodes in the great adventure that was her life.

The problem with endings is that what happens in those last moments is what people remember most, and that is why Lucy’s own ending to me seems all wrong. The obituary headlines all described her with the phrase, “who wrote of her disfigurement.” Truthful, of course, but reducing her to the single feature she hoped to escape. Lucy would have appreciated the even more unfortunate tag that described one of her New York Times obituary page mates; he was, in his headline, described as “a dreamer.”

One of the great things about living in Florida is that when New York magazine does a cover story on the death of one your friends, you aren’t confronted with the image every time you walk out the door: Lucy’s face, the headline Tragic Beauty, the title of the piece: The Face of Pain. Instead you hear about it in emails and phone calls, how some people were moved to tears and others angry. You go back and forth on the idea of reading it all, because distance affords you a choice in the matter. In New York, I’d have to read it, because I’d have to respond.

We talked a lot about endings, Lucy and I. The trouble was always figuring out where they belonged, and how to wrap things up when in life everything seemed to fade out open-ended. When I was putting together The KGB Bar Reader, I had asked Lucy for an essay on the tango that I had heard her read more than once. It wasn’t until I received a hard copy that I remembered it had never had an ending. I called to tell her, “It just sort of stops.”

“People seem to always have a problem with that,” she said. “They want there to be some point to the end. But I like my essays to just stop.”

I told her I didn’t want a lesson, that my problem was in the timing. It just didn’t feel like an ending. I rearranged some paragraphs, so that the essay ended with her final encounter with her tango instructor, and her realization that “I wanted the passion, but I balked at the work.” Lucy wasn’t sure what she thought of that. It’s an epiphany, I said, not a lesson. I had a weakness for people who were willing to confess their faults. She had titled the essay “What it Takes,” and I wanted to change that too. The tango, she wrote, was like dancing a sad thought. And so, I thought, was her writing. She seemed puzzled when I used the phrase as the title of the essay, though she didn’t complain. Later, when she republished the essay in her own collection, she brought back her original title, but kept my ending. I felt incredibly flattered. But like so many other things, I never told her.

On the Sunday before Christmas, one of my friends emailed to say she had just been to the memorial and that none of Lucy’s friends felt guilty enough. What was curious was that this same friend insisted that she’d never been close to Lucy, didn’t know her well, which I suppose excused her from including herself among the guilty. Another friend called and, unsolicited, said: “I wanted to let you know that everyone feels guilty.”

On the day Katrina went to the vet and never came home, Brando sprawled out in the bay window of our living room and didn’t get up. Hours passed. He didn’t eat. He didn’t play or go outside to the bathroom. The next morning he was coughing up blood. He had been with me when I dropped Katrina at the vet, and so when I brought him in to be checked his spirits rose as we walked through the door. He looked back and forth, hoping, I think, that Katrina would still be there, waiting.

I understood the feeling. I’d been doing it for days too, Googling Lucy’s name, seeing what came up, rereading the same AP obit every time it appeared. Trying to make it real. At some point that Friday before her service, her website disappeared, replaced by an error message. “The site you are trying to find may have moved or no longer exists. If you were brought here by a link, the link may be broken.” Then that Sunday, while everyone else was gathered in New York, her site returned and nothing had changed. She was still there in the photos. And there she was talking again about endings, in an interview with Fran Gordon, from Poets and Writers magazine. “I was really interested in the ways that songs ended,” Lucy said. “Whether they just simply stopped or whether they tried to sum things up, whether they faded out in the middle of a line. You know, what they defined as a conclusion. Whether it was a conclusion like, ‘This form has come to its natural end,’ or ‘We're going to just stop it right here,’ and/or [whether] just stopping it at a random moment was the natural conclusion to the form.”

Lucy would have loved that essay I left on the bus. Not the content necessarily, but the idea of it. The unsolved mystery of whether anyone picked it up and whether somewhere someone is reading my illegible handwriting about a girl named Lucy, without knowing anything about what she looked like, or who she really was.