1.
Chachi Bette was up before the sun this morning, sitting at the table in the dining room eating yogurt for breakfast as she read the news on her laptop. It was 5:15am. It was dark outside. But she was dressed and packed, her suitcases standing by the front door waiting for Ben to arrive to take her to the airport.
“Do you want some eggs?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I have yogurt.”
Some breakfast, I thought. Just like those big lunches consisting of a piece of bread with some cheese.
We all talked for a half hour or so, the last relaxed (?) minutes of her vacation (!?) in Texas.
2.
She was my caretaker. When I was in Houston going in for radiation therapy every day, she was there. She shopped for groceries. She walked Miss Izzy. She researched recipes in continual search for some kind of food that might taste good as my taste buds stopped functioning or that might go down easily as my throat got progressively more sore. She brought me water as I sat working on my laptop, reminding me that the nurses had told me to drink a lot of water. She mades lists of when I had taken my medicine last and when I was to take it next (tiny lists on narrow slivers of paper so as not to waste a single sheet of it needlessly).
She was my companion. She walked with me in the evenings. She rode with me sometimes to the hospital. Her giggling laughter filled that apartment on South Main Street. She went for walks with Ben when he was there and helped him strategize on his resumé. She listened to the Skype conversations I had at work and asked about the people I was talking to.
She made that time in Houston seem like a home away from home instead of a lonely room.
3.
And when we returned to Austin after the treatment was done, she worked like a wile woman around the house.
She washed the windows. She swept the back patio every day. She watered the Apple trees. She weeded the lawn. She pulled up wild onions coming up in places where even we don’t want them. She trimmed and cut back dead stuff as this year’s early spring pushed out new green growth ahead of schedule. She collected fallen leaves and piled them up in the leaf pile in back. She tirelessly spread a yard of hardwood mulch in the more civilized beds, refraining from questioning those wilder parts of the yard where anyone else would have said something like, “Why are going to do to clean that up!?” She cut the roses. She watered the vegetables. She walked the dogs. She helped us hang and rehang our artwork, something we would have let slip for months without her tenacious encouragement.
4.
And now she has flown home, leaving the 82 degree temperatures of yesterday for snow on the ground and obscenely cold temperatures in New York.
Goodbye, Chachi Bette. This will be a silent place for a while. And there will be no smiling face at the door when we get home.
Thank you for all of everything you did. We will miss you. The dogs will miss you. It’s too quiet, already.