Mardie's laugh was authentic and hard to miss. I smiled when I heard my friend laugh. Everyone did. There is something about such authenticity that makes us feel safe, comfortable.

She did not have an easy life but it did not phase her. Mardie made her own way. She was a beauty in the beauty business. Committed to a career in styling hair, she also owned her own salon and was an excellent businesswoman.

Not surprisingly, Mardie was a talented artist, creating beautiful paintings of flowers and landscapes. Both my husband and I loved going to art shows where Mardie and her friend Lois exhibited and sold beautiful work.

I always admired a magnolia that she did not offer for sale. Then, one day Mardie and her daughter Ronda came by my office with a big, beautifully wrapped box. With great joy, they opened it and presented it to me. It has a prominent place in my living room where I sit facing my beautiful gift. I will leave it to Ronda. Mardie would want that.

Mardie celebrated inner beauty in everyone while her talents helped others to look beautiful. All the while, she was not conscious of being stunning herself - a trait seldom encountered in such a beautiful woman.

I will never forget the devotion she felt for her mother. Until Ruby's last day, Mardie loved her mother completely and served her lovingly. In Ruby's last days, Mardie lay in bed with her, holding her, speaking softly, certain her mother would go to her reward with the sure knowledge that she was loved.

Mardie's daughter, Ronda, loved her mother and her grandmother as Mardie had loved Ruby. The affection was palpable among the three of them. I haven't known three generations where the love was more evident, more visible. I rejoice in knowing they shared such devotion.

Mardie's third husband, Fenton, worshipped her. They had barely two years together before her sudden passing. He was a widow when they met - at church - in the fall of 2014. Once Fenton saw Mardie, he knew she was the one. Love at first sight, literally. They were married in the spring of 2015.

Fenton and Mardie were like teenagers. How few of us experience the joy of young love when in our final decades. They were together, completely in love, until her final day this October. I will always be grateful to Fenton Cartwright for giving Mardie the experience of what it meant to be adored.

There was one other new experience that meant the world to Mardie in her recent years. Ronda married a wonderful man a few years before Mardie met Fenton. Bruce embraced his mother-in-law from day one and gave Mardie the comfort a mother experiences from a caring son whom she loved and who loved her in return.

There were so many people in Mardie's life that made her final years the best. Ronda's best friends since her youth, sisters Barbara and Linda, embraced Mardie and included her in their family circle. Surrounded by a circle of love, no one was more deserving.

My greatest comfort through dealing with the loss of one of my dearest friends - more like a sister than a friend - is knowing she felt totally loved throughout her last years. Her golden heart glowed as never before.

My greatest comfort
through dealing with the loss
of one of my dearest friends - more like
a sister than a friend - is knowing she felt
totally loved throughout her last years. Her
golden heart glowed as never before.

I will miss laughing with Mardie and feeling the total trust and peace of her friendship that continues to comfort me. I am far from alone. If I were to name all those who basked in the glow of Mardie's golden heart, I would fill many pages.

Ten days before her last day, Mardie called me to arrange a visit at my office after coming up for a doctor's appointment. She was concerned about being very tired and having unusual headaches - a forerunner of the silent stroke that took her the following week. After what was to be our last hour together, Mardie greeted her other friends in our office, who had not seen her in months. When they embraced her, they asked her why she looked so wonderful.

"I'm happy!" Mardie exclaimed to each. "I'm just happy!"

Ten days later, this woman with a golden heart left us silently, unexpectedly, and without any lingering suffering. I am comforted to imagine that Ruby came for her, laying beside her to hold her as lovingly as her daughter had held her a decade earlier.

Jean Loxley-Barnard has been a writer all her life and studied both sociology and psychology at George Washington University where she earned a B.A. Her company, The Shopper, Inc., encompasses all the Loxley-Barnard family publications - The Shopper Magazines and Doctor to Doctor Magazine. She has been in the advertising, consulting and publishing business for 39 years.