Kinda Bumming Today

Forgive me if I'm not my usual cheery, irreverant self today, but I just learned that one of my neighbors died this week. It was sudden - no one had seen her all of last weekend, and then her daughter found her in her apartment on Monday. It makes me realize how you never know what will happen. I just saw her last week. She was in her car driving out of our apartment complex as I was walking in. We waved to each other. I didn't know it at the time, but it was the last time I would see her.

Usually I try not to get too chummy with my neighbors, in case they turn out to be kind of weird, or want to start coming over to visit all the time. I know, it's sort of anti-social of me, but I do like to keep to myself a lot of the time. But this lady was one of the few neighbors that I am friendly with. She was eldery, a widow who lived alone, although her children and grandchildren lived nearby. But she was fiercely independent. She once told me that, until very recently, she used to keep a loaded gun in her apartment and so she never locked her door at night ("If anyone got in, they'd never get out."). Her late husband was a police officer, so I guess she learned how to handle a gun from him. But that's the kind of spunky woman she was. And passing away suddenly in your own home beats dying in a nursing home, sick and feeble, sometimes for years, hands down.

It's especially sad for her family that she died around Christmastime. I lost my father ten years ago this month, just two weeks before Christmas, so I know how it can affect one's holidays for the rest of one's life. I still think about my father more at Christmas. But in a strange way, I derive a little comfort from the fact that he passed away around Christmas. When I go to church every year on the anniversary of his death to light a candle in his memory, I am comforted by the pointsettias and the Christmas decorations that adorn the church. And if I'm lucky, I'm treated to a rehearsal of the organist or the choir practicing Christmas music. In fact, on the first anniversary of his death, in a beautiful cathedral on the Upper East Side in New York City (near where I worked at the time), the organist started practicing while I was there. I was crying a little bit, and the first song that the organist played was my favorite Christmas carol, "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." It's pretty, yet kind of mournful, medieval and monastic in sound. I felt that it wasn't a coincidence -- that it was a gift to me that day, a sign that my father knew I was there, and that he was at peace. Sounds crazy, I know, but it made me feel better to think that. And maybe in time my neighbor's family will find the same comfort that I do during the holiday season.