Gone... and I Did Not Get to Say Goodbye

I just learned my sister has died. It was yesterday. She was in hospice in Ft Lauderdale when she passed and had been there only a day. She had a number of problems, including Rheumatoid Arthritis, but what killed her was pneumonia. She was relatively young, just a month short of turning 73 (trust me, that is young in this town). Since her husband, the "colonel", died  a few months ago (no, I did not mention it at the time) I expected she would not last long but not this soon.

My sister had been married 8 times. You could say she had a full and interesting life. She was a model in her younger years, mostly swimwear, in the years after her graduation from high school and after her first marriage came apart. A very pretty woman, you could say. Although I never thought of her as especially pretty. Familiarity breeds contempt, they say. I can say it tends to blur the vision too.

The last few years of her life were full of problems. The Rheumatoid Arthritis cased a lot of the pain, she suffered some TIAs (transient ischemic attacks) a couple of years ago which affected her mind. Always a bit of a flake, she became incoherent at times and even combative. It took some time before she was properly diagnosed and, therefore, could be treated correctly. She also suffered from a variety of infections. The RA did not help because it is an auto-immune disease, making infection treatment a problem. It did not help that she developed some fungal infections which were misdiagnosed as bacterial.

I had no idea she had breathing problems too but she did.

Some might say she's in a better place. In any case, she suffers no longer.