I've been watching coverage of what happened in Arkansas earlier today, specifically the unimaginable tragedy of the death of Arkansas Democratic Chairman Bill Gwatney, and it brought to mind something I've been struggling with over the last week and a half...
My old next door neighbor, a woman named Dee, succumbed to ovarian cancer eleven days ago.
It really caught me off guard. I knew she had contracted the disease, fought it through radiation, and gone into remission, but because she had moved to the valley to be closer to her daughter, I missed the step where the disease had come back and this time... she'd decided the end was the end.
I found this out through our gardner, a bright, compassionate man named Cruz, because along with being our next door neighbor, Dee... who'd yearly hosted a Halloween spaghetti open house... who had been in the neighborhood long enough to remember when the police would welcome your arrival by asking to paint your house number on your roof so the helicopter chasing a rapist or robber could get a better orientation as to where it was... who was always the strongest, softest, voice of reason in any local crisis... this Dee ALSO ran the landscaping company that took care of our yard.
So, anyway, it was through Cruz, in his halting English and my halting Spanish, that I finally got the news that, "Our Dee, she will be done very soon."
And then she was done. Nine days later. She was sixty six.
I bring this up because I was looking for a phone number in my computer address book and I came across her name and home number and cell number and business number and I paused for close to a minute with the cursor hovering over the DELETE button.
But I never pressed it, deciding that, though all those phone numbers surely now go to that awful "YOU'VE REACHED A NUMBER THAT'S BEEN DISCONNECTED" recording, it will be so much better to keep alive the possibility of tripping over her entry in my address book from time to time and, in so doing, wandering into the garden of the many wonderful memories that her name evokes.
Peace to Dee.
And peace to Mr. Gwatney and his family.
UPDATE: If anyone happens to wander back into this diary, Dee's obituary is here.