Goodbye friend...

I know this lady, one of my former mother in-law's cousins, and she has always been pretty cool.
I have always been one who will go to visit friends and family in my adulthood because they might have busy or hectic lives and not find the time to visit me and I don't want to let those important to me forget how I feel about them. I must say that with this comes a certain amount of guilt from not visiting enough, but I try.
I learned this habit from the example set by my former mother in-law and one of her cousins, Edna, when I was a teenager hanging out at my girlfriend's house. One or the other of them was always popping in on the other and catching up over a cup of tea or coffee or a snack of some sort and it was the most natural thing in the world. My parents didn't do this as much (my step dad did, but only with his parents and siblings), I didn't even meet some of my grandfather's sisters until his funeral, and they lived within 10 miles of each other.
I moved away from my home town for 18 years while I traveled the world and would bump into Edna once in a great while on return visits and always enjoyed our catching up. When I heard she was fighting a bad case of ecoli I called her in the hospital to check up and wish her well and I could tell that she was going to be fine by the way she saw that sickness as merely an annoyance.
This past summer she had a bad spell and I visited her in the short term care center, and it wasn't looking good, I barely recognized her because she was so weak and didn't look anything like the last time I had seen her. She wasn't given very good odds at that time, but let me tell you what a fighter Edna was, she just decided that it wasn't her time and she rallied and, moving back home, regained her strength a bit. It has been a hard road, and she has put up with a lot of discomfort. I thought over the past week she was maintaining pretty good but she took a downturn this past weekend with her daughters at her side. Her granddaughter, with whom she had a special relationship, left Virginia this morning fearing the worst and started driving to Maine abandoning her flight later this week.

I saw Edna this morning, but she was asleep.
It's all over now.
I send my heartfelt condolences to the family.
I have other friends and family who have passed that I keep fresh in my memory, Grammy, Peg, Emma. I still like to visit and keep them up to date, and I learned part of that from Edna.

Be at peace Edna, I'll talk to you later...