It was time for it to come down. A decade ago I taped an odd collage onto the pantry entrance wall. On a piece of black construction paper, now faded, was an obituary for Jean K. Brabandt … and a little prose/poem I had written in response to her death.
Jean was one of my first buddies in Loveland. We’d get together for lunch or just a cup of tea. Her sense of humor, or rather, her sense of delight, was what drew me to her. Tiny and spunky, she was full of surprises. I visited her little senior living apartment which she had somehow made habitable. When I commented on a lovely watercolor on one wall, she offered to show me others and promptly pulled another half dozen out from under her bed.
The fact that she was more than 20 years older than I was irrelevant. We both had personal histories in the Chicago area. We both had traveled abroad. We went to the same church. And we loved to laugh together.
The little prose/poem I wrote was sort of an apology. She had said that her doctor advised her to eat low-salt soup. I found some and was going to call to deliver the cans but time slipped away. Then she slipped away.
For 10 years, I kept the faded obituary and prose poem as a reminder. The time to reach out to friends is always sooner than later.
Always.
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Thank you, Mim. Beautifully said. You touch experiences and feelings in all of us and you give comfort.
ReplyDeleteA good reminder, Mim. I too have dear friends who are older. They live in other states and have given up computers, so it's either call or write a real snail mail letter. It's too easy to put these things off...I need to just do it.
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