1) Where I live now in the college town that I now live in, I was going to go get my mail from out front and I saw across the street a(n older) (shorter) (fatter) (white) woman with (big) (frizzy) (pulled-back) (grey) hair going up to the steps of the house of the one (aging) (hippie), and so I called out and over and asked her if everything is okay, since I hadn’t seen her in a while.
“She passed in January,” she was like, and she walked over and talked a little, and she said that it was all very sudden and all very odd, she had a spot on her chest that didn’t look like anything, but it had dug in back behind and become sepsis, and there was no going back from that.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I was like, and I said how I had opened a bottle for her once when she saw me out reading and walked up the driveway and asked me to do so – “Thank you for helping her out,” the woman was like – and I said that I hoped that it wasn’t too much pain for her – it wasn’t – and that I always saw people over there and it seemed like she had a good team around her.
“She did,” the woman said, just staring up at me with this broad smiling face, lost in her thoughts.
. . .
2) Right after I moved from the city that I used to live in, I got an email from the one retired school nurse at the resthome, that my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t breathe and went to the doctor’s, and it was pancreatic cancer that had spread and was advanced and was interfering with the musculature around her chest that helps her to breathe.
And, she had said that she had wanted to work as long as she could, but already within a week she was at home, and she wasn’t able to work again but all the workers had taken up a list and gathered money for her and they had sent that along, and of course I said that if they did that again, to let me know, since I’d also send some money, and even if it was going in right away and someone had to contribute money for me and cover me that way, I could send a check or something to them later and pay them back as soon as I could, though no-one ever did.
(I'm not sure if they ever took up another collection.)
Since she also checked and the resthome could forward a card for me, I sent one, something "Thinking of You" and a little lighthearted about how I was doing and how I had heard the news and had thought of her and I think of her every time that I do jigsaw puzzles, since we both liked them and we got yelled at once for doing one in the resthome common room to the point where we did too much of one once one late evening and a resident had noticed the next morning when she got up and so she snitched on us and word got back to the nurse in charge of our unit and she had to say something to everyone, though I think she knew that it was just the two of us.
And, that made me feel better, knowing that I had put that energy out into the universe there at a very, very bad time.
Then, like two months later, the card came back in the mail to me, with a big official and threatening- and definitive-looking bleeding dark red ink mark on its pastel yellow envelope, no known occupant and no known address and that it was unable to be forwarded.
And, immediately I thought that something must have happened with her money and her insurance and her apartment, and she had had to move back to her family village in (Mexico) for end-of-life care or whatever, and that it was a private tragedy that happened quickly and no-one knew of, so of course I said nothing to the retired school nurse or to anyone at all.
Then, a few weeks beyond that, I get another email from the retired school nurse, and it was the news that she had passed, and she knew that week that she was going to pass, so she took the time to cook this special peanut candy for everyone and had sent it in with her (diabetic) (American) husband who she had met through taking care of his mother years ago, though she couldn’t come in person to give the candy to everyone, it was already too late for that.
That was her way of saying goodbye, and, as it turned out, the forwarded card situation had merely been a mistake, fortunately, though I was never able to talk to her again, even though I had reached out, and I really don’t remember the last time that I saw her.
That Thanksgiving when they gave out the turkeys and trimmings to all the staff like they had started to do during the first year of the pandemic, they did so in her memory.
And, that was how she died.
Everyone thinks it was too soon.. . .
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