It is strange to be writing about loss again. Death has always been on the periphery of my life. It never impacted me directly. We all know it is inevitable yet live our lives in denial.I met Ms. Gates when I was in college. I lived two doors down from her and one day was asked to assist with something. I can only assume it was related to electronics: hooking up a DVD player, making sure the cable was working; installing the new flat screen; etc. These were the primary causes of my visits during our first couple of years. After helping her for the first time she gave me a delightful card which I have currently misplaced. To paraphrase it stated she was “certain this was the start of a new and long friendship.”
Through my visits I got to know her and heard stories from her youth and life in Memphis and around the country. When she was younger she loved to play golf and continued until she was physically unable. She used to travel with her aunt and had fond memories of trips to San Francisco and Quebec City many years ago. She had a long career in church work and later in social work. She taught at the University of Tennessee Memphis. Once she claimed to have seen Marlon Brando in a production of Streetcar Named Desire prior to its opening on Broadway (I was never able to validate that, but I like to think her memory was correct). Her mother borrowed money from her piggy bank during the Great Depression with a promise to pay it back. She marched with MLK Jr. and the sanitation workers during the strike in Memphis. She taught herself to read and write Russian.
I got the call that she was not going to make it on a Friday night. When I went she was asleep and lacked coherency. On Saturday she was much better and her wit and intelligence had returned. She was introducing me to the nurses (she did the same on Sunday) and was full of jokes and extra chatty. She told me on Saturday that “most of life is just kicking the can down the road” and asked me if I was guilty of this. I had to confess that I was. We talked about her youth and it was not without anguish that she recounted the last day of school in 6th grade when she was supposed to bring materials for an arts and crafts project but forgot. She remembered the embarrassment of being relegated to color on a white piece of paper while her classmates completed the assigned project. She wondered why she had not walked the two blocks to retrieve the stuff from her house…she had lived so close to the school. It was remarkable to me that in her dying days something so seemingly trivial that occurred over 75 years earlier could still resonate so strongly. I wonder what memories are haunting me.
Last November she fell and at that time I assumed she would be dead within in a year. Falling is lethal after a certain age. My mother sees it at her work all the time. Still, we had hopes that she would leave rehab and I did research for her about Assisted Living and Nursing Homes she could make her new home. Her last research request a couple of weeks ago was to find out what modifications you would need to make to build a handicap accessible bathroom. I think we all knew that she was not actually going to be leaving, but it did not stop us from dreaming.
Death forces you to evaluate your life and determine if you are truly doing what you want to do. What things have gone unsaid or undone? What cans are you kicking down the road until your dying days? What dreams ignored? Ms. Gates will forever hold a very special place in my life. She was one of the most intelligent people I have ever met and her mind stayed sharp even as her body deserted her. She loved martinis (though I was not hearty enough to drink the one she made me one afternoon to treat an ailment), reading, MSNBC, golf, and poetry.
It was a pleasure to call her a neighbor and friend.