Following is the speech I gave at the service:
Hi, I'm Elissa. For those of you who don't know me, I was Peggy's roommate for several years when we both lived in New York City. My friendship with Peggy was unlike any other friendship I've had in my life because it captured a transitional moment: we were both in our 20s, we were both single, and we were both trying to figure out our lives. We met because we both had roommates that we had nothing in common with and we'd hang out in the stairwell between our floors, trying to figure them out. In that stairwell, we started a tradition of late night chats and I quickly found out what a kind, generous, and funny person Peggy was.
To me, Peggy was more than just a roommate, more than just a friend. She was the sister I always wanted but never had. She understood me when nobody else did, and around her, I was unafraid to be vulnerable because she never had any judgments and she always had compassion. She was calm and collected where I was impulsive and hot-tempered, she was patient where I was easily annoyed. I often wondered what she even saw in me, as our personalities seemed so far apart. But a strange thing happened. She began to rub off on me and I can honestly say that the best parts of my personality have largely been shaped by watching how gently Peggy tread through life. In an unrelenting city where you had to hit the ground running or get out of the way, being far from family and friends, it was easy to feel lost in the crowd, it was easy to feel lonely. But with Peggy as my friend, I never felt alone. We spent so much time together in those days that with one look, we knew each others thoughts, to the point of it weirding out my friends, who joked that we had some sort of telepathy. In one of our apartments, I drew two superhero figures to place on the wall, one with a P and one with an E on its chest, because those were our alter egos—Super Peggy and Super Elissa, ready to take on the world. Super Peggy and Super Elissa did things like go to Jamaica, where I went snorkeling for the first time despite my irrational fear of the ocean. I'm a weak swimmer, so I had a life vest on, but instead of leaving me to float in the sea like a buoy, Peggy dragged me by the life vest and swam next to me so I could see the coral. And when she accidentally kicked over some of that coral with an, “Ooops!”, I quickly looked over my shoulder and kicked us out of there as quickly as my floating body could before we got in trouble. That sort of describes a lot of our dynamic.
As Peggy's roommate, I met her family, her friends—probably a good portion of people in this room at one point or another came and visited or stayed over at our place. To know Peggy was like having a Golden Ticket to knowing her fantastic friends and family. And I feel so fortunate to have been given the chance to be invited into that inner circle.
We first lived in a tiny 5th floor walkup in the West Village, with the steepest set of stairs ever—this apartment's stairs were so steep, we would call each other before walking up these stairs to ask if the other one needed anything from “Down Here”, like it was another planet. We made silly New Year's resolutions that year to watch a movie a day (mine) and to eat a new cheese every day (Peggy's), we missed the July 4th fireworks that year because we waited on the banks of the wrong river. It was in that apartment that I retreated to on September 11th, and it was in that apartment that Peggy waited faithfully with me until I heard word that my father was okay. We sat in that apartment and watched the news, crying for days, until we finally shut the tv off and walked outside. We stood in line at a hospital in the ghost town of lower Manhattan to donate our blood because we had to do something other than crying. We were in shock, we were full of a collective sadness, and we were spilling over with this weird energy, this—we need to do something, anything, to try and help to reverse this awful thing that had happened. It's not unlike how I feel right now.
Our second apartment was on the Upper East Side and we learned a bit from our first apartment—we were on the 3rd floor, and we had increased our square footage. We had a fully functioning kitchen, but still didn't cook much. To this day, I can't look at the combination of boxed mac and cheese mixed with canned tuna without thinking of Peggy. Peggy's friends and relatives often came over and took us out for meals, I think out of pity. When Mr. and Mrs. Chung would come to visit, I think the idea that we were living off of bread, cheese, and french fries was so secretly horrifying to them, they'd always bring up food and stock our fridge. Thank you so much for that. Peggy loved the home-cooked meals and she was the type of person who even though she could have kept it all to herself, always shared it with me. All that good home cooking took a toll on our waistlines, so Peggy bought one of those stomach bands off of an infomercial we saw once. The band would zap electric currents into your abdomen so you'd have a six pack without having to do a single sit up—it was buy one get one free—and we'd sit for days on end watching tv, getting zapped in our bellies, all while talking about our fears, our hopes, our futures.
We had lots of fun and funny moments in that apartment. I can tell you about the time we managed to lock ourselves into the apartment and had to call the fire department to get us out (they laughed at us, too), or the time I discovered a bar with twelve different flavors of martinis and tried all of them, which was followed by us missing the Dalai Lama speak the next day. That's the kind of friend Peggy was. She gave up the Dalai Lama to help her silly roommate nurse a wicked hangover. She made me her mom's chicken soup when I had the flu even though she didn't eat meat, and she brought me Jello when I had my wisdom teeth pulled. All these things she did for me, just because she was the type of person she was. My parents always said that they felt safer knowing I was with Peggy, that we had each other to look out for, but the truth was, it was a very uneven deal.
In our final apartment in Brooklyn, we lived on the second floor and it was about 5 times the space of our first apartment. In this apartment, Peggy wanted to have a blue room. So she picked this color called Robin's Egg. As we painted, Peggy said to me, “Um, does this seem a little bright to you?” And it ended up being this neon baby blue color. So for whatever reason, we decided to put more paint on it, maybe like three more coats. And it only got brighter and brighter. As we watched it dry, we looked around and noticed that even our skin looked blue, that's how bright this blue was. And I said I guessed that robins' eggs really were that bright in real life and she said, “Oh. Yeah....” The realization set in, “Aw, maaan.” We were in this apartment when I met my now husband, Josh, and she met Brian. And I won't divulge any of our talks about them, because that would violate girl code, but basically, we were both smitten with them and we both fell in love very quickly. Peggy and I had so many parallel key moments in our lives—we got married in the same year, we had our first kids in the same year—that I can't even begin to register what it means for us to not continue our parallel lives.
My most recent memory of Peggy was just last month, when Liam and my daughter Eva were shooting basketball hoops in Peggy and Brian's kitchen, squealing and cheering, as me, Josh, Brian, and Peggy egged them on to “Shoot!” As we doled out high fives and laughter, Peggy leaned back in her chair at one point, massaging her tummy because little Oliver was kicking, probably in anticipation of the fun times around us, and she smiled. In that moment, I know, she was content, she was happy, she was at peace, she was full of the love surrounding her. She was no longer searching or seeking, because she had found her home, her heart. I look back on all of our years in New York City and having seen and been a part of her life journey, in that moment, I thought of how far we had both come since those days in the stairwell. This was the future we had often talked about, but couldn't picture. We had made it.
Thank you for letting me share my memories with you. I know I will keep all of these and more close to my heart, so that I never forget what a special and completely irreplaceable person Peggy is to me. As Gandhi once said (in the film, I've no idea if he actually said this or not in real life), “There are no goodbyes for us. Wherever you are, you will always be in my heart.” Rest in peace Peggy, I love you. Without you, I don't really know how to be Super Elissa anymore—I'm just a lost buoy, floating alone at sea.