They took my friend Joy away today, zipped up in a red body bag. I’ll not forget that last unglamorous moment we shared.
Instead, I’ll remember seeing her last month at my Christmas party shaking hands with one of my large male friends, and saying in her best Rodney Dangerfield voice with a knowing wink, “You know what they say about big hands!”
I’ll try not to think about what her dementia-riddled brain whispered to her, convincing her to go outside last night in the biting February cold.
The coroner’s van rolled over the patch of driveway we played hopscotch on. She got mad once when I beat her, and fussed that I was showing off in front of the kids. I have a picture taken of that day, and I smile whenever I think about it. She would have been in her sixties then, and she was even more competitive than me.
Joy had more shoes than anyone I know. I never saw her in the same pair, ever. Brightly coloured with glitter, or other wild adornments, they were never cheap or out of place. Her flare was on-brand and she wore it all with stylish chutzpah.
Good Boy barks at everything in the night. Did he hear her out there and bark while I slept peacefully on while she was out there, naked and dying? I will think things like this for a long time.
I’ll try to think of other things when I look at that part of her backyard now. I’ll think of the rope swing hanging from the tree that she warned us all never to swing on when we first moved in. “That’s Oliver’s swing,” she explained, her last-born child who died tragically at just 16 years old on the water. I hope the new people don’t ever take that down. Maybe I’ll have to warn them.
Maybe I’ll make my ears remember her operatic laugh, and how her quick-witted, ripe humour could bust you right up.
I hope she had happy thoughts as she made her way out there last night. She was a woman who was naked more often than not, so that part isn’t shocking to those who knew her. It’s actually quite right. There was a sign to that effect in her front garden for a while, warning any callers about it. But, I’ve never known her to venture outside like that when it was minus ten. What called her out?
It was so cold this morning I didn’t go out to add the daily chemicals to the hot tub, thinking I’d do it on my walk at lunchtime. I’m glad I didn’t do that and find her, dead frozen, clutching her bra in one hand. It’s bad enough that red body bag is drilled into my neural pathways.
And I have to get rid of those three cute little custard tarts in my fridge I meant to take over to her on Wednesday. I didn’t get around to it, and now they’re the picture of regret. They are so cruel when they say, “You blew it. We were your last chance to talk to Joy, do something nice for her, and to see her smile, and maybe even get one of those sweet old lady kisses on the cheek.” “Love you, darlin’,” she’d say.
You should know she spent quite a few years hating me. I’m not really sure what the problem was, but when I bought her Mum and Dad’s house next door to her, one of her brothers waved a cautionary finger. He pointed at her well-kept little brown bungalow and said, “Good luck with that.”
I think I’ve had pretty good luck.
One time she convinced her ever-smiling second husband, Wayne, to haul out the pellet gun and shoot our cats, which were in her yard, apparently trying to eat the birds she was trying to feed. I was knee-deep in a septic tank backflow in the bathroom when the kids alerted me to that particular sideshow. I had to call the police to have a patrol car on the street, just to freak her out a little.
She didn’t talk to me for a few years after that. Wayne did, though. He said he was working on her for me. Sweet Wayne died, too. Joy lost a lot of people she loved.
One day when I was working in the yard, I overheard her talking to the weed-and-feed guy. We didn’t have a fence between our properties, and once when she was on vacation, I planted a long line of little needle trees purloined from nearby woods along our property line. Those trees weren’t yet more than a foot and a half high, and I could see her pointing over them at me in the yard telling the sprayer guy, “See that woman over there, she’s my best friend.”
That broke my heart a little, because I’m pretty sure I could have been a better friend.
Anyway, dementia made Joy my friend. I think she clean forgot what she ever held against me, and I was thrilled about that.
On one of her happy, lucid days, Joy told me she was grateful I didn’t hold a grudge for all the water under our bridge. I told her I couldn’t and that I loved her.
I chose to find humour in the tons of times she called animal services on me because my crazy, untrained, thick-as-a-plank dog would break his tether and chew off the siding on the house, or cause some other neighbourhood ruckus. It cost me $250 to bust Cheese free every time she reported us.
But when Good Boy got here, he more than made up for crazy Cheese. Joy loved him like he was her own, and in many ways he was. He spent as much time over there as here, and she loved it when he did. He chased alongside and greeted every car to enter her driveway, and made big sounds if he thought anybody was hinky. He’d drop his ball at her feet and she’d complain how slimy it was, but bend over painfully to give it a throw. She fed him bread foldies filled with mayonnaise, grapes, or any other ridiculous thing she had.
I’m already spooked by her absence next door. I feel eerily alone without knowing she’s over there, and thuddingly sad that I’ll never get one of those old lady kisses again.
And dammit, those tarts.
