A death alone Last night, we heard knocking on our door at 11 PM. It was four strangers who had come to tell us that my wife's mother, Phyllis, had died. Phyllis had just turned 83 and lived across town.
→[More:]The last time we'd all been together was on Thanksgiving. On that day, we had one other guest, a friend of ours with cancer who probably won't live much longer. We never thought Christine's mother would be the one we'd lose in two months. She apparently had a heart attack in her living room while trying to feed her parrot. She probably lay on the floor dead for about a day until a neighbor saw her. That's the part I'm having a hard time with. Neither my mother nor my father died alone. I'm wondering what passed through Phyllis's mind, and ludicrously, what the parrot thought as he saw her fall and lie there. Thank you for reading this.
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