She thought about it a lot before she died. The details of her wonderful, ordinary life were not the issue. It was that she was now in her late eighties, frail but able after her recent illness, of impaired ability to move, hear, see or speak, and that while ripe of mind she had little to say of interest to anyone. As she thought about the people in her lifetime, whom she loved dearly, well, most of whom she loved dearly, she knew that to many she was a frail shadow of an old woman. None of them seemed to realize that she was once one of them, had been for a very long time.
Georgette had known a touch of all the things life has to offer. The wonders of childhood with usually loving, always providing parents, now long gone. The angst of her teen years, with her first love, her first broken heart, and her first really big mistake (her second was pretty remarkable too, truth be told). She had known loss, suffering. She had seen most of the world, not all, and had watched the advances and failures of civilization such as they were. She watched the waxing and waning of peoples, of history. Witness to great beauty, to great tragedy. She had, in fact, been young for most of her life, having only recently found herself old. She had lived a usual life, though if you had asked those who knew her back then, it was actually nothing short of extraordinary. To her, ordinary.
She looked over at the built-in bookcase in her tidy, well kept cottage, at the photos of her in her younger years. She was a beauty by any standard, emerald of eye, dark of hair, fit of figure. She had been an athlete, and a pilot for several decades flying C-17s in the Air Force. In "retirement" she flew in Africa and later in the Middle East after the Great Religious War, for various humanitarian organizations. It was all there, in fragments, on the shelves of her life. She heard the children in the yard next to hers, and she smiled, remembering of her childhood, and the childhoods of others she had shared. There were too few actual memories left, but she remembered how it felt, and smells, sounds, glimpses out of the corner of her eye, could bring back a thought from years ago, untethered from context. Most of her memories came to her in her dreams, fleeting, ephemeral mixtures of people, time and place.
Several of the photos included her wife, the last twenty or so years ago, a few years before Sharon had died suddenly after complications of an accident, an accident that killed their two adopted children, a boy and a girl. Sharon had died younger, and there were no memories of her as an old woman to overshadow who she had been. No one remembered Sharon in the image of an old, frail, inconvenient woman. Decades ago Georgette and Sharon had been among the first to be allowed to legally marry. What a wonderful time that was! This memory was forever intact in every detail, though some fifty years past. This deepened Georgette's melancholy, deepened by the understanding that Sharon was remembered by too few anyway, and when Georgette died, no one, really, would ever think of Sharon again. Sharon had never know her birth family, and had always said her life began when she met Georgette.
Georgette's history was filled with stories, moments that ran from the mundane to the exceptional, and it was filled with ordinary and extraordinary people, each with their own stories. One seemed to move through one's own space and time, she thought, with illuminating moments when one was aware, if but for a moment, that others too had life stories unfolding around them, separate, independent, and in an overwhelming number, completely un-reliant upon hers. We are each meaningless to the vastness of humanity. There was the sense that even the lives she had touched would have gotten along fine without her. Nature always finds a way. This was loneliness, feeling one did not matter in the scheme of things.
Love was like that, unrequited. She had loved many, oh and how palpable and frightening, painful and joyous was that love. She felt she never knew if anyone really ever loved her like that, perhaps not even Sharon. I mean, she thought, who loves like that? In her heart she knew Sharon had loved her, but she was sure never quite as much as she loved Sharon. There were the words, things done, but were these tangible, real, or social scripts in motion?
Several days had gone by before anyone noticed she wasn't there anymore. They found her in her bed, alone in her cottage by the sea, comfy under her Tanzanian quilt. She had fallen asleep while reading and seemed peaceful, ordinary. Her windows at the foot of her bed were open upon the postcard vista that had been her village all these years, always wanting it to be the last thing she saw before falling asleep.
"We found the old lady," he said into his radio. "Yeah, she's dead." No one gave a moment's thought that this too was their fate, if they were lucky, to die old in bed while one slept. She was buried a few days later, unattended, a small grave with a small headstone in the village by the sea, next to her love, Sharon, and their children.
It was a few years later that Stephen crossed her obituary online, quite by accident. Someone had incompletely coddled it together, with a photo of an old gray haired woman in thick glasses, hunched down in her chair, who had died fairly well off, willing her small treasure to charity. His father had died recently, and he realized more cogently with his father's death, that this was it. This one life lived. Every life mattered for every life was a story of untold richness. He felt compelled to learn her story and to share it, to see the young vibrant woman who sat in that chair, and died alone in her cottage by the sea. It took far less time than he had thought, to find people who had known her and remembered her easily, who had photos of her, tales to share with much exuberance and love, from all around the world. People who were shocked to learn not of her having died, but that they were only now learning of her death. People saddened to their souls that she died alone, forgotten, an old woman.
The snow had only just began to fall, the winter's first. Some three hundred people gathered with Stephen at Georgette's modest grave, he who had only recently come to know Georgette, but now knew her more than any one person there did, for he had compiled all of her story that he could. He did this because her life mattered. They all came laughing, smiling, renewing friendships, remembering her and how she mattered to them. All had come, some eagerly, some sadly, some shamefully, to be with Stephen and Georgette this November morning. And all of them remembered Sharon.
Not one remembered Georgette as an old frail woman.
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