Marshall Lake, Northern Arizona
Randy’s mother died of COVID-19 in April 2020. She never got to say goodbye, we attended the funeral through a Zoom meeting listening to sirens wailing past the New Jersey cemetery everyone spaced apart behind their mask. Randy felt lost and saddened. She found a group called Mon Ami online that connected people to the lonely elderly. This is how we met Pat.
Pat lived in an indigent apartment in Palo Alto, California with a couple of cats. She had been in a car crash that injured her spine and she lost her sight and the ability to walk. Her husband died and left her destitute with gambling debts, she had no children, no living relatives, and her only brother had died. This said she was the brightest happiest person and Randy and her became great friends talking every week. Randy became her advocate, a little pit bull ripping away at the California bureaucracy. There is a big Amazon headquarters next to Pat’s apartment and Randy called them and tore them one for having a neighbor so in need and doing nothing. Bezos never got back.
Pat was a dancer. She grew up in New Orleans and worked for twenty years on the Hopi Res. She told Randy that the tribe had adopted her and that when she died she had arranged to be cremated and asked if could we take her ashes to Hopi. It was all arranged in her will.
Late last year Pat disappeared for a few weeks and when she got back she said “They sent me someplace to die.” She was in a hospice. Randy continued to advocate getting her a better bed and we sent her clothes. In July her caregiver called, Pat had gone to sleep and wouldn’t wake up. She died a few days later.
Well, they couldn’t find Pat’s will so the state seized her bank account. Then we were told that to cremate her would cost $1200. Randy called the Hopi Res but they never heard of her and wouldn’t pay for the cremation of anyone, not Hopi. We never heard what happened to Pat’s body but I heard a creepy rumor that they sell them to “science.”
We can’t find anything about Pat and have no picture of what she looked like younger. She sent us a picture of herself now but it was so sad and horrific that we deleted it. I guess if you are dying they don’t bother to wash your hair. Her caregiver sent us some of her clothes.
We took her clothes to a dry lake near Flagstaff and I burned them in a pail. We said words and spread her ashes at a beautiful place. Goodbye Pat, you didn’t deserve to be treated the way you were. We will not forget how you touched our lives.
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