Nice. Good opportunity to find something in common to talk about with your friend. Sometimes it helps to ease the grief process to reminisce about the loved one's peaks, successes and things they enjoyed.

That helped me get through grieving over losing my mom in November. She had experienced such a long, gradual and inexorable decline through Alzheimer's that I'd lost sight of how much she had accomplished before then. She was a late bloomer. But she'd also been a lot of fun when she was younger, and took us camping and fishing. It helped to reminisce about those times.