someone i knew

A good friend from college called this afternoon to tell me about another friend's death; Betsy had had to track down the 93 year old father of our dead friend in order to find out if she was indeed dead - we'd know that she was battling stage 4 colon cancer, mostly alone in her tiny Brooklyn NY apartment (her mother in a nursing home who no longer recognized her family) and her father in New Jersey, a sister in London, and a 20 year old daughter still acting out from the death of her father just a couple of years ago. Anner had been sober the past 11 years and was a certified yoga teacher and was loved by the law firm for which she worked. Betsy and I talked for near an hour - trying to put Anner's life to rest. She had always seemed fragile to me, needing to be taken care of; ironically she took care of her much younger muscian husband who didn't work and who, Betsy says was obese. And then she took care of a daughter (of whom we know so little) and the series of boy friends. Anner, we let you go, the small pieces which we touched -