As the saying goes, you can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family. But sometimes, just sometimes, when the planets aligns just so, there are exception so this otherwise universal rule. In those instances, which are as rare as they are precious, we are privileged enough to find a friend who becomes family.

That’s what Sue Gosline was to my mom, myself and the entire extended Stagnaro clan. She was family.

My mom first met Suzie, as she always called her, more than eleven years ago. My mom was coming off her unsuccessful first retirement and had taken a job in Chenango Memorial Hospital’s business office. Sue worked there, too. Gradually, what began as a casual workplace acquaintance became a close-knit friendship forged over innumerable lunches and their mutual “downstate” roots. (My mom comes from Brooklyn; Sue from Long Island.)

For the last decade, she has been my mom’s best friend. During that time, they took more shopping trips, played more rounds of golf, shared more lunches and sipped more glasses of white zinfandel (or gin and tonics, depending on the season) than I could begin to count. But more than that, they shared the highs and lows of life as only true friends do. No matter what was going on in each other’s lives, they were always there for one another – laughing together and crying together through thick and thin.