Three Weeks of June

I spent three weeks at my parents’ house.

The stated goal was to help my parents sort and purge some of their documents, boxes, and miscellany. We got a good start, sorting and removing three curb-bins worth of old bank statements, academic updates, pay stubs from the job BEFORE the one my dad retired from decades ago. It felt good to start the ball rolling; many more boxes remain, but it does get a bit easier when records are old and less important… except for the landmine of social security numbers everywhere! Keep the shred bin handy.

I put up the bat-signal that I was in town, and over the three weeks I had the pleasure of interrupting the sort/purge with a couple of visits with friends I basically haven’t seen in person since my graduation… From high school… Nearly thirty years ago. Thankfully the internet means we’ve kept tabs on each others’ lives, even if only in the vaguest of senses (“oh, they live in Madrid now… and for the past two years. Cool.”)

But backing up: I’d been in St. Louis less than a week when we received the news that a family friend had died. Sallie was perhaps the oldest “family” friend, as she and her husband had met my parents shortly before I was born, and saw me shortly thereafter. She’d been in my life for every minute thus far, and she died on a Sunday in June.

The day and date may have been unexpected, but the death was not. Sallie had been gradually fading. VERY gradually, as was her wont. More than twenty years ago, her husband died. He died of a probably-preventable thing – a misplaced desire to put off a colonoscopy a few more years meant that his undiagnosed colon cancer acted fast and killed him in a hurry.

“Hubby” was a pleasant guy, and a good friend to my parents. He loved Sallie and she loved him. And he was a fool in key ways. One was the whole “preventative medicine” thing, but he also neglected to talk or share information about the finances, which meant the money was effectively hidden after his death, and Sallie almost lost her house due to his poor planning. He wasn’t planning to get sick and die with her not knowing, but he didn’t mitigate it, either.

Sallie and her husband had no children, and her brother’s family chose a religion that alienates non-believers, locking her away from her nieces and nephews. So the closest she had to children may have been me and my brothers. And we grew up with her in our lives as not quite an aunt, not quite a grandmother… but something. SOME kind of family. We saw them most holidays.

After his death, she started her decline. It feels somewhat disrespectful and maybe incorrect to say, considering it took another 20+ years, but it feels correct in my mind. Over the years, her physical health broke down, more than just the effect of age. She had trouble walking, and gave in by becoming more and more sedentary. Her visits to our house for Thanksgiving became more labored, then stopped altogether. She gained weight, retained fluids, and became confined to a chair and then a bed.

She did all this without needing to leave her home, as she was wealthy and had a live-in carer. A privilege of her money, she didn’t ever need to leave her beloved home with its comforts and stability. She didn’t want to leave, and her truly heroic and angelic carer meant she never had to. The carer – her friend to the end – was a true blessing.

Her brother’s family did come to visit near the end, but largely to get her to convert. Probably also to get her to change her will to benefit them, but I’m sure that’s a scandalous assertion of my own invention. She denied them, and eventually gave instructions to not admit them.

My family visited with take-out food, until eating became a problem. Then they’d just visit. In the last few months a dementia closed in and even visits became unpredictable. Thus, her death on a day in June was surprising, but not a surprise. Her struggle is ended, and the burden lifted from those who cared for her.

In some of the cleaned-out documents in the dark corners of my parents house, I found a thank you letter, addressed to me! Pulling it from the envelope, it was a letter from Sallie. She was thanking me for sending her some pictures, something that occurred long before I became a photographer. I was probably 12? Lord knows what the photos were, but she complimented them all the same.

I suppose that makes her the first person to give me a written review.