What do women talk about when they know they don't have forever?

Yesterday I finished reading a book that moved me deeply.

Elizabeth Berg's Talk before Sleep is a tale of what women talk about when they know they don't have forever.

Ann and Ruth have always talked as only great friends can - honestly, and about everything: husbands and marriages, sex lives and children, their work, their hopes, their disappointments, and their dreams.

Both women are very different in character. While Ann is cautious and conventional, Ruth is outspoken and eccentric. This difference give each of them something they long for and need to learn.

Then everything changes.

Faced with a crisis that redefines the meaning of friendship, they begin to share something more profound than either of them might have predicted.

It is the story of these two women and their friends, talking, laughing, crying together that lures you into the pages, makes you part of it and leaves you breathless and crying at the end, but at the same time assured that you are part of this womanhood of the universe.

Today I want to share with you two quotations from this book which struck me with special meaning.

I saw that every person is a multifaceted and complex being, worthy of respectful exploration and discovery; that this longing we can't name and try to cure with relationships might only be us, wanting to know all of our own selves.

What matters most is only who you were to someone else.