Death Is a Funny Thing

My next door neighbor died.  

So it goes.  

I knew that was what happened even before my dad told me.  It was strange to know like that, especially because we weren't close.  She was nice enough.  Up until I was about 10 years old, she would bake us pumpkin bread every year around Thanksgiving time.    Her death didn't really surprise me I think because she was older (in her 70s) and she'd defeated cancer.  I remember seeing her after she'd gone through surgery to remove the tumor that had grown inside her, and undergone chemotherapy, when her hair was growing back.  There were just little tufts of fluff by that point, and what with her nearly-bald head covered with feathery hair and her beak-like nose, she looked like a bird.  She looked vulnerable.  But she survived, and her cancer didn't come back for almost ten years.  She died because of a foot infection.  A foot infection.  

When I was 11 years old, my piano teacher's husband, in his nineties, died of a foot infection as well.  But she wasn't the sort of person who would die of a foot infection.  This is what bothers me.  She'd conquered cancer.  When she fell and broke her hip a couple years ago, she got through that, too, an injury which kills many people who are younger than her.  She was a survivor.  And she died of a foot infection.  

She'd ignored it for a couple weeks, and when her husband convinced her to go to the doctor, he said it should clear up soon.  

"Just put some heat on it.  That should make it more bearable in the meantime."  

She died a few days later.  Of a foot infection.

My neighbor was the Rachel Lynde of our neighborhood.  She was not the kind of person who had such a death, an ordinary death, a trivial one.  She deserved a death that was more...romantic.  Even old age would have been better.  At least that means she died in a kind of peace.  But a foot infection.  Festering bacteria. ... that just isn't right.

My mom was crying.  She had called our neighbor the night before to see if she knew anything about a strange car parked in front of our house.  There was a man inside eating a sandwich who stayed put for a couple hours.  Our neighbor said she wasn't feeling too well.  "I should have known," my mother said.  "I should have gone over and done something for them."  I put my hand on my mother's shoulder.  I wanted to say that there was nothing she could have done, but I wouldn't want to believe that.  I don't want to say it was just because of old age; that'll mean my own parents will be "old" in 20 years.  

I wonder how her husband's feeling.  We never talked much, but he always goes for long walks around our neighborhood.  I see him sometimes.