Amy at Rest

My sister-in-law Amy died last Friday, and I am almost unambivalently relieved for the former dynamo who, over the past few years, was the living answer to her own existential question: considering me at my most fundamental, what would be the worst possible way to die?   

For close to eighty years, Amy was loving, ardent, smart; a lover of the arts, curious, an active advocate for social justice, voracious reader, skilled frame-maker, master gardener, and intuitively talented baker. The last few years of Amy got tangled up in Lewy body dementia, so add to the previous list lost and confused.

When she was already declining, she struggled to clear out her jumbled home of forty years. Then, in the two days before she moved, she slowed down. In the afternoons she sat in a plastic chair on her front porch, armed with her trademark S’well marble water bottle.

“I told the neighbors I’m moving,” she said, when I stopped over to take a box of books to Goodwill. “I figure if they see me here, they can come up and say goodbye.” Amy radiated a deep contentment, like Buddha. “This is nice,” she murmured, closing her eyes, sitting in a patch of sun, leaning her head back. I love to think about this moment in time, when Amy stopped pushing forward and waited patiently for the past she deserved to catch up to her.