I was recently featured at Sally Cronin’s Smorgasbord Blog in her series – Who has influenced you the most in your life? Today I’m sharing the person who introduced me to many things in life – especially love, my best friend of forty-six years, Sanja, who I lost last summer to the dreaded cancer.
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This series is about the person you feel has had the most influence on your life and has shaped the person you are today, and what you have achieved. That might be in reaching personal goals or to do with your career.
Who Has Influenced You Most in Your Life?
I didn’t have to think too long about who I’d choose for this important person who opened my world to life, living, friendship; and the first person in my life who showed me unconditional love – my soul sister and best friend for forty-six years, my Sanja.
There was a me always inside me that I kept hidden from my family while growing up. I observed everything I saw and heard, didn’t dare question anything, and was never invited to share my thoughts, dreams, or aspirations while growing up. Nobody asked, and so, I never felt the comfort to share.
‘I love you,’ were unfamiliar and uncomfortable words for me while growing up. I mostly lived in my head, documented my feelings, and my sanctity was music. For an outgoing personality, I always felt stifled by all my thoughts and dreams; I felt uncomfortable sharing with anyone in my family circle. My circle was small. I grew up solely around liberal Jewish people and community – including school, and a predominantly Jewish high school. I always felt out of place, feeling though I didn’t really connect with anyone and always looked forward to just coming home from school and playing music and living in my imagination. I had no exposure to other cultures, save for the interesting and sometimes savory characters my mother brought round to our home from her extra curricular activities – mostly gambling.
My marks were always high in school, despite me being a last -minute studier for a test – I always did and do my best work under pressure. I was closest with my father, and my Aunty Sherry, my mother’s sister. Yet, I was still hesitant to share what went on in my head with anyone. My mother was rather intimidating to speak with, mostly because all four of us kids learned young, how to dance around my mother’s moods and angry outbursts. My father used to warn us – “Lookout today kids, your mother is on the warpath again.”
It wasn’t until my parents finally divorced when I was almost seventeen that my father sold the family home. My aunt was the rental agent in a very sought after building complex that had wait lists two years long to get into. My father and my aunt knew well of the turbulent childhood I endured under the rule of my mother and miraculously came up with the great idea to set me free on my own and put the onus back on my mother to take care of her other three children. The deal was sealed when my aunt got me my own apartment, lease signed and rent paid for the first two years by my father as I learned to stand alone on my own. I was elated to break free from the chains of emotional domination by my mother and eager to live my own life at only a few months before my nineteenth birthday.
My aunt also got me a part-time receptionist job right in my building in the gym and recreation center. That is where and when my life opened and began.
Most Saturdays were quiet at the gym. Sanja would sit in her lifeguard office up at the pool as I’d sit at reception, often bored, and we began calling one another to gab to pass the empty hours. Within weeks our lives became intertwined forever – until forever was cut short last August when she was unjustly taken from this world.
Sanja was unlike anyone I’d ever known. She was originally born in then Yugoslavia, a free spirit who exuded joy and happiness no matter the occasion. Sanja lit up a room wherever she walked in. From the day I met her there was a light in her that became the light that guided me through my own life and learning. I wasn’t realizing it at the time, but that girl was a beacon gifted to me. A beacon who led me through life – all the good and the bad she was there for, and I was always learning from her. She brought me into her world of people, friendships, and love. And I learned a lot about how real families interact. None in my new circles, except one, were of the Jewish faith in my ever-growing circle of friends, and eventually, my Catholic friend Marg married the only other of our friends who was Jewish. My circle grew, making more friends with many cultures who’d emigrated from other countries. There was love, friendships, conversations, and much I’d learned as the sheltered girl who joined this circle of life.
Sanja taught me many things in life without realizing she was teaching me, and it all felt good and albeit, a little strange at first when my growing social life was first evolving. But the most important thing I learned from her was unconditional love. I had never known unconditional love, never knew it existed. Growing up around my parents’ fighting and my mother’s rule, I was always trying to be the peacekeeper, yet, not feeling liberated to say what I felt because I was insecure about how my feelings would be taken, with an outburst from my mother or a threat for speaking my feelings. I never realized while living at home how much I craved being loved and listened to without reprimanding, until I learned it existed.
When Sanja would hug me if something wasn’t going well, or if something happened to me, which somehow often did, she’d kiss me and hug me and told me the words – I love you. It felt strange at first, but as time went by and we became best friends and sisters for the rest of our days together, I felt like she was the mother I never had, and the big sister I never had – even though she was five months younger than me. She was my guiding light, my twin-flame, sister, and soulmate. And I’m glad she knew how much she meant to me. She is the other hole in my heart that sits beside the hole from my beloved husband.
Like a first true love, I learned from my best friend what love meant.
©DGKayewriter.com2026
Originally posted at: Smorgasbord Blog Magazine – Guest Post – Who has influenced you the most in your life? #BestFriend by D.G. Kaye | Smorgasbord Blog Magazine
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