It was a second floor, garage apartment in Hyde Park, in Austin. She moved there during COVID, sometime in 2020. She moved out of a house with people who had been friends who had become controlling and strange, into an apartment with a lease facilitated by a friend who was controlling and strange, but that is another story.

It was a second floor, garage apartment and you gained access by walking up a set of wide, wooden outdoor stairs. There was a landing, a tiny deck, at the top. There were a few plant pots with tropical plants, and a neat row of plastic Birkenstock shoes: colorful. There was a screen door and an inner, wooden door that was white with a small window. In it, she lived with her turquoise furniture, bone collection, shadow boxes, chandeliers made of old sets of silver and chains, and her plants. Her kitchen was small but lovely; everything was small and lovely. There were two rooms and a bathroom and a kitchen. One room was her bedroom, bedazzled with plants and specimens and interesting rocks, a chandelier in the corner. The other was a living room with a white leather hideabed, a round vintage plastic table, low to the ground, and two old chairs covered with interesting, faded fabric. In the corner was the preserved carcass of a roseate spoonbill, suspended in flight and hanging from the ceiling. There was also an antique dentist drill, complete with spittoon, which strangely had belonged to my first husband, years ago.

It was Texas in June, summer, hot, even in the morning. I was there in the morning, and we stood out on the small deck with the colorful shoes and tropical plants, and gazed out through the giant bushes that bordered the property, through their leaves, out to live oak trees and a pond in the center of the backyard. She said, “there is something weird in my eye. Like a cloud?” “There is a cloud in your eye? Both eyes? The same?” “No, just one, like a grey cloud at the bottom of my eye”.

Later it was discovered that her cancer had spread to her brain and that was when she had to start radiation and we didn’t get to come to Maine together, which I had been wishing for, but it is ok now that it didn’t happen. Earlier that spring we had gone to Galveston and stayed in an amazing apartment right on the beach, and ate at Gaido’s. Her face was a little swollen then, and she had no hair so she either wore fabulous hats or fabulous dresses with her bald head. It was the last Easter, and we didn’t know that. When she started radiation, they made her this crazy radiation face shield that she said she would bedazzle for Halloween that year. It really would have looked cool.

I will never forget the moment that I realized that she might have brain cancer, after breast cancer, lung cancer, and bone cancer. How exactly did she keep going so long? She is, after all, a miracle. Radiation made her mind muddled and she sort of forgot some things, but the most important things she valued stayed sharp. It was in October, before Halloween and her chance to bedazzle the thermoplastic radiation cap that her doctor told her that chemo had killed her, had destroyed her liver and she would soon die. She said that normal livers were like sponges, allowing substances to pass through them, and hers was like a rock. Quickly, her abdomen filled up with fluid and ammonia, there appeared little white glints, like lenses, in her eyes, and she died a month later. She told me that I had to start working in hospice, and I just finished my training and have my first patient. To be with someone who is dying is a great gift of mercy and trust, going both ways. Today I thought of her and saw her sitting in the corner in a hot pink dress, off the shoulder, bald head, laughing and clapping her hands. What a world. What would she think if she was alive today? I suppose she would be laughing and clapping her hands, about something.