Recently, someone I knew for many many years passed away. Pretty much the last year of her life we really were not connected on any level.

Maybe that sounds horrible, but it really wasn’t. It was the right thing to do and I have no regrets.

She was a woman who at one point in time was literally like another mother to me and she would sign her emails and leave voicemail messages as “your other mother.”

But the last few years of her life, the cracks were showing. To me, then, she really wasn’t the person I had first come to know. But then I began to wonder which person did I know?

There are people we know in our lives who are or were chameleons for lack of a better description. Usually, it’s for survival. Sometimes because it’s easier to try to hide who they really were or are.

Anyway, this woman either really began to change or I just finally saw the person she was underneath. And there’s no dancing around it, there were underlying issues. And she definitely grew up as part of a generation or an era where you didn’t talk about this stuff, and people would laugh if you even mentioned something like had a seasonal disorder for lack of a better description. The highs and the lows grew more distinct as she aged.

And I’m not writing this to speak ill of the dead, it’s more like the commentary on the things I noticed and have contemplated since she died.

Now this is someone I actually cared about a great deal for years. But even when she was hale and hearty, if you were on the wrong side of something she proclaimed, she would sting like a hornet.

There were things I helped her out with in her later years that I discovered a couple of years before she died I didn’t have to, and she just took the things anyway. I would buy flea and tick meds for her dog and give her groceries because she said everything was too expensive. And I did that gladly. She was old and alone.

She was a lot of fun for many, many years. We would go into Lancaster County to hit the plant nurseries and the greenhouses as soon as March rolled around. She was an amazing gardener with a wealth of knowledge.

She’s also the person who taught me how to can, and introduced me to quilting. Now there’s no way I could be as creative as she was with either canning or quilting, but I can do a fair job of mending and restoring an old quilt and basic canning.

The older she got, and the more self-isolated she got, especially during Covid, and that changed her. Lots of people got very isolated during Covid and you combine that with loneliness and age and it changes people.

It got to the point where it wasn’t a pleasure to speak with her. It wasn’t a pleasure to hang out with her. It was kind of a pins and needles thing because you didn’t know which version of her you would get. And you also just get tired of being manipulated by people sometimes. And the manipulation part of it was actually something I was warned about when I first met her.

So I just kind of quietly backed away. It was hard, but it was the right decision. After all you don’t want to fight with someone who is decades your senior.

I figured out she was sick before she told people or told me. I did feel badly about that because this is a woman who had a lot of heartache and tragedy in her life over the years. She started to tell mutual friends she was dying, and told them not to tell me and of course they did.

I probably will never forget her calling me to tell me she was dying. It was almost like talking to a stranger. There was no real emotion in her voice. It was rather perfunctory. At that point, she told me she would be dead in a few weeks. She actually got somewhat of a reprieve and had a few more months.

Even though I chose to stay away, I did keep tabs on her and try to be helpful from afar.

She held court in her house the last months of her life. She even had people cooking for her that she really didn’t speak to before this which I found that strange and almost cruel on her part. But when someone’s dying, do you really judge how they are those past few months or do you just observe? I mean, do we really know how we would be in that situation?

In the last couple of weeks she was alive, she was calling around wanting people to see her. And I think that was because people in a lot of cases had stopped going to visit her. She made this proclamation that she was dying and that she had terminal cancer and I think when she just didn’t die right away, people stopped coming, which is just the cruelty of death.

But the funny thing about when people are dying, or have passed on there are a lot of death hypocrites that come out of the woodwork. I’ve seen this happen in this case.

It took a really long time for an obituary to come out from the funeral home handling her remains. There will be a memorial service in few weeks now. I knew her plans before she was even sick because she literally had this death list. I was on that list as a person of importance on said list until basically I told her I wouldn’t be able to take her dog if something happened.

At one point in time I would’ve been glad to, but circumstances changed. Life happened. I said I would help find the dog a home she would approve of but that was not good enough. Another mutual friend did help rehome her dog, who is very sweet. I hope she’s enjoying her new family.

Anyway, there’s an online obituary and the death hypocrites have surfaced. They are politicians.

One a local politician, who could never return a phone call or an email, the other a former local politician who became a state representative who is just waxing poetic because it’s an election year. That Emmy-nominated performance on the obituary guest book and her political Facebook page is pure performance art, and it is so obvious.

Sorry, not sorry but that disgusts me. And somewhere up above the woman who died is laughing. Life is its own circus, but death adds its own drama. And she had their proverbial numbers.

Will I be going to the memorial service? No I won’t. I go to very few funerals and that’s the way it’s been ever since I got diagnosed with breast cancer. That’s my oddness.

I had said goodbye to this person more than a year before she passed, and in a weird way that has actually helped in this situation. I will remember them in my own way fondly, but realistically.

But undoubtedly the wailing wall of death hypocrites will make an appearance at the memorial service. Honestly that is one of the things I find intolerable about death and funerals: the hypocrites and the lookee lous.

Anyway just marking this moment in time.