In the South, at least the rural South, children refer to the friends of their parents and grandparents as Miss (or Mr.) $first_name. Miss Bettie and her husband Mr. Tommy were two of my grandparents' closest friends.

"We courted together," Miss Bettie explained, at my grandfather's funeral last spring. "I did love your grandmama and granddaddy." She squeezed my arm and kissed my cheek absently.

Mr. Tommy died some years ago, when I was in high school. He was cleaning out the gutters of his house with a leafblower, and he fell. He didn't recover from his injuries. Mr. Tommy sat a couple of rows ahead of us in church. If we got there before the prelude, my brothers and I would go tell him good morning, and he'd fill our hands with cellophane-wrapped hard candies. My mother hushed us as we opened our candy, rattling the wrappers.

Miss Bettie never had candy for us, but she had something I didn't realize until I was an adult - she had the ability to treat children seriously. She always gave us the impression that whatever we were telling her was the most important thing she'd heard that day. She responded to our stories with serious stories of her own. She treated us as equals, and not as children who needed to return to their own seats.

Miss Bettie also had a wicked sense of humor. She once confessed to my mother that she'd had to drive to the store after dark, which she didn't like to do, to get cigarettes. "It's like beer and toilet paper," she explained. "You can't run out of cigarettes." She was a 90-something year old Southern Baptist, small-town lady. This is not something a lady would say, especially not in my hometown.

She was also incredibly giving. She spent her days visiting people who were shut-ins, or in the hospital, or who just needed someone to talk to. She never wanted to join the "seniors" group at the church because, she said, "then they'll think somebody needs to take care of me!"

When my grandfather was alive and living at home, alone, across the street from Miss Bettie, he joked that he could never sleep in because Bettie would worry that he'd died in his sleep. One morning about 8:45, Miss Bettie called my mother. My grandfather had not opened his garage door by 8:30, and she was worried. She offered to go over there, but about that time, he came outside to get the newspaper. He had overslept.

Throughout my mom's illness, Miss Bettie has been right by her side. She was someone my mom could count on, someone who listened and never judged, someone who would gossip and make my mom laugh. She helped my grandfather grieve when my grandmother died, and she gave us all a connection to my grandparents' pasts, when they were young and smiling, frozen in black and white.

A couple of weeks ago, Miss Bettie was diagnosed with cancer. At 92, she decided not to get any sort of treatment. About a week later, she had a stroke, and never really came back from that. She died quickly, never beholden to anyone, never needing the care she'd spent her life giving to everyone around her. She is leaving a hole that just can't ever be filled.