Sad

This is why I am so uptight about having things done well in advance (I wrote Friday's exam last Friday). Because sometimes something comes along that knocks you on your keister.

My friend Dorothy - she was somewhere in her late 80s - the first person who ever welcomed me here, the first person who ever made me feel like I was something other than this Yankee stranger who talked funny - passed away last night. She belonged to the same church as I did and was also a member of my AAUW group.

She had had a bad fall and probably broken her back. (Ladies: do your exercise, get your calcium, don't diet excessively and don't drink too much soda or eat too much red meat!). She was in a nursing home...she wasn't expected to return to her home but I assumed that that meant she was going to spend the rest of her life (perhaps a couple years) there.

I had plans to visit her this afternoon. Even dug out some back issues of a travel-related magazine I get that I thought she might enjoy looking at.

(I'm glad I got the e-mail rather than just driving out to the nursing home and finding out once I got there.)

I'm really sad. As I said, she was my first "friend" here. The first person who made me feel like I didn't make a huge mistake moving here, that it wouldn't be best for me to just turn tail and move back home.

Part of that may have been that she was an "outsider" herself - she grew up in California (wow, she had some great stories...she remembered the Pearl Harbor attack, she remembered learning to drive and driving some fairly large machinery partly because most of the men were off at war). She moved here with her husband back in the 50s or 60s...so she knew the culture here but also remembered being an "outsider" well enough. She kind of took me under her wing and I really credit her with part of my decision to stick it out, rather than to resign after my first year, move back in with my parents, and teach night classes at the community college near them.

She cared about the research I was doing and asked about it...one of the few people outside of my department who did.

She could be kind of..."rude" isn't quite the right word, maybe "brusque" or "abrupt" is better...with people who were foolish. She had high standards and if you didn't live up to them, she let you know.

But she also respected other people...and her high standards were PART of that respect. She expected good things out of people because she believed them capable of such.

But she was also caring...she could show great sympathy when, for example, I was frustrated by university politics or by the foolishness of some people.

I'll miss her. I hope she's reunited with her husband now, all pain gone, her hearing perfectly restored. I hope she's getting the answers to all the questions she had during her life (she was a tremendously curious person, both about scientific matters and about matters of faith).

She's going to leave a giant hole. a GIANT hole. I had kind of "adopted" her as a surrogate grandmother (even though she was probably protest she was a bit young for that) as both of my grandmothers had passed years before. And she reminded me a bit of my maternal grandmother, with the opinionated quality and the exacting standards.

They're asking for prayers for her family. But if I might, I'd also like to ask for prayers for me, because she was a really, really good friend of mine, and I'm very sad right now.