I admired them both, not necessarily because they are women, but because of who and what they were and are.

The first friend was a gentleperson, as is her husband. They had been married for almost 50 years when she died, had lived in many places, and over and over had made a true home together. Both she and her husband were intensely private and both kept their grief at her impending death to themselves. When she died, bravely I thought, and mostly silently, it seemed almost a reward somehow. She complained to us only once when we visited her in the hospital.

"I don't know what's wrong with me," she said, as if somehow being fatally sick was somehow her fault. "I was so well and now this ... it just doesn't make sense."

And it didn't and still doesn't. Somehow it seemed it should have been otherwise. Somehow it seemed she ought to have had an easier death.

The other woman I know is equally as admirable. She's always been an inspiration to those about her: quick, generous, helpful, like the first woman part of an intensely close couple. For years she's taught Bible classes, worked in and for her church and for others. Her working life was like that, too. She seemed born to serve and not to ask.

Her faith in God has been an example to others. She's always been helpful, especially to other women, and she's always seemed indestructible.

But, of course, like all of us, like our other woman friend, she wasn't.

And again that doesn't seem fair. Rather, it seems there ought to be some reward for being what many of us are not. It ought to be that those who serve ought somehow to get credit for what they have done, with less painful deaths.

Those of us who gripe and complain their way through life (to whose ranks I confess to belonging) expect to be sandbagged. We expect for all our complaining to suffer an ending about which we can complain even as we pass on.

After all, so this reasoning goes, you reap what you sow, you cast your bread on the waters and it comes back to you—maybe it even comes back to you manyfold.

But, of course, it doesn't.

Life, we discover if we live long enough, isn't fair. It is life, and life ends--and when it ends, it ends equally for us all.

Still, it seems there ought to be some kind of lesson in the lives of my two friends. There ought to be something from their passing that we can take with us even as they have been such splendid examples while living.

I thought a lot about that in the last couple of weeks.

You'll no doubt not be surprised to learn that I haven't come up with any universal truths. But it does seem to me these two women have proved one thing: that it's not so much how we lose our lives as how we lead them.

Our rewards in life are not so much in how it ends. Life ends for everyone, no matter who they are. Rather, our reward is the life that we've had.

It's the good that we've been able to do for others, the inspiration we have managed to display, the enjoyment in just living that we have been able to show to our friends that really matters.

Certainly, that's true of these two women.

And so I wish in whatever's left in my life that I can be like they were and that when my life ends I can accept that eventuality with as much grace as they've shown me.