...And One

 America drifted past seven hundred thousand dead from COVID-19 last week. I have been lucky so far to have stayed safe from the disease and any direct personal contact with it. 

Until now. Not to worry, dear readers. Yours truly is still fully vaccinated and masked and testing negative whenever the question has arisen. But I am no longer free from knowing someone personally who has died from the plague. Late last week, the Grim Reaper descended on the house across the street. To be more accurate, for the former occupant of the house across the street. To mother of the expansive brood that supplied our neighborhood with peals of childish laughter and cries of teenaged angst passed on. Aside from the relative proximity of this news, this makes me nervous to think that this pillar of strength might be taken down by something as common as a virus. This was a woman who, after surviving her own urban Oakland childhood, married and settled down to churn out seven new lives and oversaw the upbringing of assorted relations and strays. 

And once they had all flown from the nest, or were pushed, she and her husband retired to a life of quiet reflection while enjoying the occasional visit from their kids and grandchildren. Or rather that would have been the happy ending, but instead once the tangled upbringing of those children was done, the marriage that was generated primarily out of the need for two parents disintegrated. They left the family home of so many years, the one across the street, and we kept track of them all through occasional encounters at the grocery store or on walks up the street. You see, when they scattered, they didn't go too far. They could be found just a few doors down, or around the block. 

We heard stories about how mom had slipped into a bad place, living with a daughter or two, getting a tattoo or two. Picking up (returning to?) a drug habit. And living a life that was in many ways contrary to the mother of the neighborhood persona she had crafted for all those years. 

But she survived. 

Until last week. I can imagine that her immune system had been taxed in ways that defy easy description by medical science, and probably had a healthy distrust of all things vaccine and mask related. Or maybe she just surrendered to the void. 

Which is a shame. Because we don't need to lose anyone else.