Morbidity and Mortality
Tuesday morning, our neighbor Jean died. She was the widow of Robert Russell, a World War II vet who had worked in Parks and Recreation here in our little tobacco community, later earning the slightly incongruous title of Town Poet. He died in 1997, leaving her a 1920's-era farmhouse, barn, and pumphouse overlooking corn fields that the town's art teacher owns. Too much property for her to keep up with (as everyone said at church), but she kept plugging away at it gamely, doing a decent job for a woman in her 80's with emphysema.
It was the emphysema that eventually killed her. She'd been hospitalized over the weekend with a bad case of bronchitis. Mom saw her on Sunday and she seemed to be improving at the time, but apparently not. Her lungs gave out.
The thought of it frightened me - the whole notion of dying unable to breathe, the sheer panic of it all. "Allison, she smoked for forty years," Mom said. "And if you're on enough morphine, you're not aware of it." The brainstem picks up the struggle while the conscious mind is...somewhere that is else. I'm not sure I find it reassuring that she died of something reasonably avoidable, but maybe proximate cause is beside the point. I think it was Chuck Palahniuk who wrote that, given a sufficiently long timeline, the survival rate for everything drops to zero. We are going to die, and some bored secretary at the public health department needs a plausible excuse to write for the little box marked "Cause of Death."
So of the two elderly women living between our house and the road, one of "Our Ladies" - as we called them - is now gone. We cooked meals for them - they don't really cook much anymore, and Mom was affronted at the idea of them eating lonely cans of soup - and I used to go back with our dog to go check on them and say hello. Mrs. Russell loved Grady and bought bags of "dog cookies" to give him when we came. Mrs. Grigeley, who we used to think was the more frail of the two, can take him or leave him. I let Grady out this week while handling something else in the house and then got irritated when he didn't come back. I found him sitting on the Russell porch, waiting for his cookie.
I'm sorry. My grandfather died in February of last year and I was with him when it happened. Since then I think differently about death.