My Neighbor Will No Longer Be Sending Butter Through The Mail

The word "normal" is not a useful term. I mean it is seriously lacking in a reliable control group. Because my neighbor's "normal" has in the past included seasonally replanting and watering a garden's worth of FAKE indoor and outdoor plants and flowers. And "normal" for the last ten years has included exercising in a velour track suit by walking laps around inside the sealed garage with headphones on that are attached to a cassette player that is NOT on. And taking out her earbuds when she sees you talking to her and saying, "What?" It has included catching her after she'd used her keys to get into one of our apartments and was digging through the bedroom drawers. It has included being married for a total of one day in her 89 years. It has included complete social snarkiness and awkwardness resulting in her being a social pariah in many ways. It has included her rarely having visitors and in even my patient neighbors of our tiny building who have lived with her for forty years only ever meeting or hearing about one relative - her brother, who died five years ago. That's all I'm saying.

So when asked, was she acting "normal" the last time I saw her? It's not an easy question to answer. She had acted even stranger than "usual" the last time I saw her. I knew that much. And she looked even more blue than usual; that much seemed true. And when no one saw her for several days but we could hear her TV on nonstop 24/7 (more unusual) for that time and so we tried to call her, she mumbled incoherently and paranoidly into the phone more bizarrely than usual before hanging up and refusing to answer. And when we tried to get her to come to the door, to get in, to break into the chained, triple locked door, and finally got the fire department and a stranger who says he is her nephew, a current minister and former guard at San Quentin, to kick down the door today to find her, not quite dead, but disintegrating into her easy chair, where she'd been planted apparently for around four days, babbling and distant and unable to understand who we were or what we wanted, surrounded by the crumbs of partially eaten cookies and chocolates which she had apparently been living off for several days, that was definitely unusual, even for her. But that she was carried out, bewildered, on a stretcher and the doctors and "family," what she has of them, tell us she will never come back to her home of forty years? Is that normal? That's all I'm saying. That, and that it is deeply painfully scary to grow old so very alone.

UPDATE (a week later): R.I.P. Ms. M.S.