My feet feel heavy, weighted with a strange reluctance as I join the stream of people heading toward Sondra’s house. The air is soft, full of the scent of spring blossoms—a tender, almost mocking contrast to the hollow quiet of her home. The place, once brimming with quilts and vivid tchotchkes, now stands nearly empty, cleared for sale. It feels like a shell, a body without its soul.
I clutch a bunch of sunflowers, their bright faces turned upward as if still seeking light. They were her flower—sunny, open, stubbornly cheerful, much like Sondra herself. A Leo through and through, she carried warmth wherever she went, even on days when her own light felt dim. In her younger years, she had a lioness’s mane, thick brown hair streaked with gold. But not everyone knew how far she had come from the thin soil of her beginnings, how much shadow lay behind all that brightness.
People pour into the house with smiles and stories, praising Sondra’s selfless soul. She was the one you could count on—for a hand up, a strong word, a moment of clarity in the middle of someone else’s chaos. She saw the messy parts of life with unflinching honesty, a skill honed by raising children, teaching in struggling schools, and navigating her own twisty family history. She had a laser eye for what she’d call mishegas—the delightful Yiddish word for craziness—but her heart always won out in the end.
Yet beneath the warmth of shared memories, a colder current runs through me. I can’t shake the loose, unsettling fragments of the story I’ve been told: one night last fall, a stomach ache; the next morning, her son finding her gone, her stomach bled out. She was a master swimmer, tough in ways the rest of us only pretended to be. How could something so quiet, so ordinary, have taken her?
The questions hang unspoken in the spring air. Did she suffer? Was she afraid? Why was she alone when it happened? My skin feels jumpy, restless until I know more—though some truths, once uncovered, offer no comfort.
Grief is like that. It asks questions that have no answers, sits with mysteries that may never unravel. And in moments like these, surrounded by the artifacts of a life now passed, all we can do is hold our sunflowers a little tighter and hope that love, like light, lingers even when its source is gone.
Sunshine and Shadows
The memorial gathering feels both familiar and alien. People move through Sondra’s emptied home with that particular blend of sorrow and social obligation that follows unexpected death. The house itself seems confused by its own emptiness—where once every surface burst with colorful quilts, folk art, and what Sondra called her “happy tchotchkes,” now only pale rectangles on the walls mark where life used to be.
I watch faces I don’t recognize share stories with people who clearly knew different versions of my friend. There’s the school principal speaking with tight control about Sondra’s dedication to her students. There are former pupils, now grown, who speak of the teacher who refused to let them fail. And there are neighbors who knew her as the generous woman who always had time to listen.
We each carried our own piece of Sondra, and today we’re trying to assemble the complete picture from fragments.
My own fragment includes the memory of her housekeeper arriving at her door in tears because her daughter was sick and they had no insurance. Without hesitation, Sondra went to her purse and handed over everything she had—which happened to be several thousand dollars, fresh from the bank. That was her way: seeing immediate need and responding without calculation.
Her teaching reflected the same philosophy. In poorer school districts where she chose to work, she treated reading failure as a personal insult. “Nobody leaves my classroom without reading above grade level,” she’d say, and she made it happen through sheer force of will. Her students didn’t just learn to read; they learned to love stories, to find themselves in books, to see reading as liberation rather than obligation.
Between conversations, I catch snippets of Yiddish—that language of emotional precision that Sondra wielded with such delight. She loved teaching me phrases, laughing at my hopeless goyishe accent while secretly pleased I wanted to learn. The words described states of being that English barely acknowledged: tsuris for that particular flavor of sorrow, mishegas for the crazy-making behavior she observed with such clarity, nachas for the pride she felt in her son’s accomplishments.
That son moves through the room now, accepting condolences with a dignity that breaks my heart. I remember him as a bright-eyed child trailing after his mother at school events, then as a young man struggling with health issues, and now as this composed adult whose world has just collapsed. They were each other’s best company, these two—a team against whatever challenges came their way.
Someone mentions Sondra’s recent weight loss—sixty pounds gone under her son’s nutritious cooking regimen. She’d been so proud of that accomplishment, showing off clothes she hadn’t worn in years, talking about having energy she thought was gone forever. We all assumed those reclaimed pounds of pep would carry her into a vigorous old age.
The conversation turns to her shoulder surgery, and I feel that familiar prickle of unease. Her body had carried damage since a teenage accident—a negligent surgeon left her with chronic discomfort and a pin that occasionally threatened to work its way out. When she fell on school stairs and the whole thing collapsed, she described her X-ray as looking like “two halves of a broken bridge.”
Yet even then, she was thrilled about the repair. After fifty years of discomfort, she told me, she was finally going to reinhabit the body she remembered. The one that carried her through miles of ocean swimming, that gardened with abandon, that hugged with genuine warmth.
Between conversations, I find myself listening for her voice—that particular blend of warmth and wisdom that could cut through any nonsense. She had clarity about human behavior born from raising “mobs of little children” both at home and in her classroom. She spotted pretense instantly and had no patience for it, but her heart always won over her judgment.
As the afternoon light slants through the windows, I notice how the remaining furniture pushes against the walls makes the room feel both crowded and empty. My sunflowers stand where her favorite chair once sat, their bright faces turned toward the gathering like miniature suns. They’re sturdy flowers, these sunflowers—a little homely on their thick stalks, but unapologetically cheerful.
Sondra would have appreciated that. She loved things that were real over things that were perfect.
The room grows quiet as her son prepares to speak. In that silence, I feel the shadow of all the things we’re not saying—the questions about why a woman so tough, so resilient, could be taken by something as ordinary as a stomach ache. The wondering about whether this death connects to that earlier hospital stay after she collapsed in a parking lot from painkiller complications. The medical questions that feel both urgent and disrespectful to ask.
Her brother isn’t here to answer them. When I emailed him to ask about possible connections between the two medical events, there was no response. Some truths, it seems, remain in shadow.
What remains in light is the woman herself: her generosity, her clarity, her unwavering belief that most things could be cured by finding the funny side, and that kvetching took care of the rest. The problem is, now that she’s gone, I’m not sure who’s supposed to do the curing—or who will listen to the kvetching.
As her son begins to speak, I notice how the sunlight catches the dust motes dancing in the air, making them look like tiny stars falling slowly toward the floor. It’s the kind of detail Sondra would have pointed out, finding beauty even in empty spaces.
The Broken Bridge
The first time death brushed against Sondra’s shoulder, it came disguised as routine pain management. After a foot operation, she’d been navigating recovery with her characteristic determination until that moment in the Park ‘n Shop parking lot. Her body simply shut down mid-step, collapsing onto the sun-warmed asphalt like a marionette with severed strings.
They hospitalized her for weeks treating anemia and stomach bleeding—direct consequences of the prescribed NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) she’d been taking. These common painkillers, used by millions daily, carry a rarely discussed risk: they can erode the stomach lining and cause catastrophic bleeding, particularly in older adults or those with previous gastrointestinal issues. Sondra’s brother, a health practitioner, had warned her about this danger, but when the medical establishment hands you pills in a labeled bottle, trust often overrides caution.
That incident should have been the warning flare—the unmistakable signal that her body responded differently to these medications. Yet like so many of us, she likely filed it away as an anomaly, a random medical mishap in a life already crowded with physical challenges.
Her body had been a landscape of repaired injuries since her teens, when a negligent surgeon left her in lifelong discomfort. I remember how she held her shoulders with a particular stiffness, as if permanently bracing against some invisible pressure. The old pin migrated through tissue over decades, a tiny metal wanderer that recently threatened to pierce through skin that had contained it for half a century.
Then came the fall on school stairs—that final insult to a frame already compromised. She described her bones on the x-ray as “two halves of a broken bridge,” an image that stays with me for its perfect melancholy. Yet even then, her focus wasn’t on the damage but the potential repair. She was genuinely thrilled that the surgical intervention finally felt right, eagerly anticipating reinhabiting a body that had been a source of discomfort for fifty years.
This makes the final night so difficult to reconcile. That evening, she complained of stomach pain but dismissed her son’s concerns with what would become her final words: “I don’t want to go to emergency. I am tired and just want to go to sleep.”
We’ve all said some version of this—preferring our own beds to sterile emergency rooms, trusting that morning will bring improvement. Most times we’re right. But when NSAIDs have already demonstrated their capacity for harm, when there’s history of bleeding, this calculation changes dramatically. The emergency room isn’t overcaution; it becomes necessary triage.
Her son found her the next morning. Even knowing she was gone, his hands performed CPR with desperate, breaking force—seventeen ribs fracturing under the pressure of love and denial. There’s something particularly heartbreaking about this detail: the violence of attempted salvation, the body already beyond saving yet subjected to one final trauma. Those broken ribs become metaphor for everything about loss—how our attempts to hold onto what’s leaving often causes additional damage, how love sometimes manifests as destruction.
Medical professionals will tell you that rib fractures during CPR are common, especially on elderly patients with fragile bones. The technique requires compressing the chest by at least two inches, and ribs must give way to allow this. We rarely see this reality in medical dramas—the messy, brutal physicality of trying to force life back into a body that has completed its journey.
I can’t help but circle back to the what-ifs. Her son didn’t drive—Sondra didn’t allow him to—but I live mere blocks away. A phone call, a quick drive, an intervention that might have changed everything. The proximity of potential help that never was requested haunts the edges of my grief, these parallel universes where the story ends differently.
The particular cruelty of NSAID-related bleeding is its stealth. Patients can lose significant blood internally without dramatic external symptoms until collapse occurs. By the time pain becomes severe, damage may already be substantial. This isn’t to assign blame—to her for not going to the hospital, to her son for not insisting, to doctors for prescribing common medications—but to sit with the awful randomness of how things unfold. Sometimes the most dangerous things come labeled as harmless; sometimes the body’s cries for help sound exactly like its ordinary complaints.
Her death certificate likely lists gastrointestinal hemorrhage as the cause, but the fuller truth encompasses more: a medical system that often underestimates common drugs’ risks, a culture that encourages enduring discomfort rather than seeking help, the accumulated weight of a lifetime of physical challenges that perhaps made one more trip to the emergency room feel like one burden too many.
That broken bridge metaphor lingers. We think of bridges as connections—between places, people, phases of life. Her bones failed to reconnect, and then her body failed in its basic continuity. But there’s another kind of bridging that happens after death—the way memories span the chasm between presence and absence, the way love becomes the structure that continues to connect us to those who have crossed over to whatever comes next.
The Unfinished Conversation
The phone call plays on a loop in that peculiar space between memory and nightmare. Her voice had been so present, so characteristically Sondra—frustrated by the confinement of recovery but animated by the prospect of returning to her classroom. We had spoken of mundane things: the dull throb in her shoulder, the mind-numbing quality of daytime television, the sheer luxury of a pain-free night’s sleep. The conversation was a snapshot of ordinary life, a bridge between two friends sharing a moment of minor tribulation.
Then came the sound of her doorbell, a cheerful chime cutting through our talk. “Ah, the take-out salvation has arrived!” she announced, her tone lifting with genuine delight. The surgery’s one permitted indulgence, she called it, a nightly parade of cuisines she normally wouldn’t have time for. There was laughter in her voice, the sound of someone making the best of a bad situation. We said our goodbyes with the usual affection, a casual “Talk soon” that held the unshakable assumption of a tomorrow.
The sheer normality of that final exchange now feels like a brutal joke. The arrival of a meal, the planning for a return to work, the discussion of physical discomfort—all the building blocks of a continuing life. To have it followed by silence, and then by the news of her death, creates a cognitive dissonance that is difficult to reconcile. The mundane does not prepare you for the monumental. It’s the ultimate unfinished conversation, leaving a chorus of unasked questions and unsaid things hanging in the air.
This abrupt ending makes me cling tighter to the story of our beginning, a memory that now feels like a protective charm. We met at a crowded community meeting, two faces in a sea of mild irritation. During a lull, we discovered a shared origin point, a small Southern California town that seemed an unlikely birthplace for both of us. The connection was instant and deep. She had known my older sister in high school, and with her first wicked, knowing grin, she proceeded to dismantle my sister’s carefully constructed image of perfection with tales of skipped gym classes and clandestine smoke breaks behind the bleachers.
In that minute, a pact was formed. We recognized in each other a similar language, not just of place, but of spirit. We held a space for airing our tsuris—a Yiddish word for troubles or sorrows that she taught me, one that carries more weight and warmth than its English equivalent. Our friendship became a sanctuary for the unfiltered truth. She had a preternatural ability to pour love on sore spots and chart a path toward a solution, often by first finding the funny, absurd side of any predicament. For everything else, there was kvetching—the art of the good-natured complaint that acknowledges a problem without being defeated by it. It was a perfect system. Now, the machinery of our friendship is silent, and I am left with this overwhelming, solitary tsuris, wondering what the heck I’m supposed to do with it all by myself.
This question—”Now what?”—is the quiet, desperate core of grief. It’s not just about the loss of the person, but the loss of the role they played in your life’s ecosystem. Sondra was my chief translator of chaos, my most reliable source of unwavering support. The prospect of navigating future stumbles without her counsel, her laughter, her unique brand of clear-eyed compassion, feels like setting sail without a compass. The need for a new form of emotional first aid, for a way to process this loss without the very person who would have known how to guide me through it, is the most pressing and lonely reality.
The last words she spoke to her son echo this finality. “I am tired and just want to go to sleep.” It is a statement that haunts but also, in a way, clarifies. It speaks to a weariness that transcends physical pain, a desire for rest that the world could no longer provide. In hearing them, I feel the profound weight of her exhaustion, and some part of my own frantic need for answers begins to settle. It doesn’t erase the pain or the unanswered medical questions, but it adds a layer of understanding, a heartbreaking context for her letting go. It’s the closest thing to an ending our unfinished conversation will ever get, and it forces me to begin the difficult work of finding my own way through.
Angel Over the Bay
The memorial feels less like a gathering and more like a stage where everyone is performing a version of Sondra they think they knew. I stand near the wall, holding a cup of lukewarm tea I have no intention of drinking. The room is a murmur of low voices, a sea of faces both familiar and strange. I am steeped in her stories, so I know the neighbor speaking softly by the fireplace is the one she called ‘the well-meaning but utterly clueless meshuggeneh,’ and the woman dabbing her eyes near the empty bookcase was the one Sondra helped through a bitter divorce. I feel her presence then, a sharp, almost tangible pressure at my elbow, and I have to stop myself from turning to whisper, ‘Is that her? The one who kept borrowing sugar and never returning it?’
The air in the room is thick with unspoken words and the cloying scent of lilies. Her son moves through the crowd with a dignified grace that breaks my heart. He has pushed all the furniture against the walls, creating a hollow space in the center that feels both ceremonial and achingly empty. My sunflowers, a little homely on their stiff brown stalks, stand guard at the front. They are the only thing in the room that doesn’t seem to be trying too hard. We are all waiting for something—for her brother to arrive, for the food to be delivered, for the right words to be found. The delay is its own kind of agony, a prolonged suspension in the moment before the final truth is acknowledged.
When her son finally steps into the center of that empty space, the room falls into a silence so complete you can hear the hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen. He is holding a crumpled piece of paper, but he doesn’t look at it. His voice, when it comes, is choked but clear. He tells us about that last night. The stomach pain she dismissed, the weariness in her eyes he couldn’t soothe. Her final words to him, ‘I am tired and just want to go to sleep,’ hang in the air, a simple, devastating sentence that explains everything and nothing at all. He tells us about the CPR, the terrible cracking sound of her ribs breaking under his hands, the desperate, useless hope of it. The raw grief in the room is a physical force. This is not the peaceful passing we all want for our loved ones; this is the messy, brutal reality of sudden death, and it leaves us all gasping for air.
That night, long after I’ve returned to my own quiet house, I dream of her. The dream is so vivid it feels more like a memory than a fantasy. Night is falling, and the air is cool and salty. Her son is driving us down to the edge of the bay, the headlights cutting a path through the dimness. The city across the water, San Francisco, is a glittering tapestry of lights, both near and impossibly far. We get out and walk to the water’s edge, the pebbles crunching under our feet. There are no words between us, only a shared, heavy silence.
Then, it happens. A streak of light fractures the darkening sky. It is not a shooting star; it is too deliberate, too purposeful. It is a figure, a being of pure, radiant energy, moving faster than thought. She is dressed in flowing light, like a cloud caught in the last rays of the sun, a celestial being on an urgent journey. Yet, as she arcs across the expanse above us, I know with absolute certainty that she sees us. I feel her recognition, a warm, familiar pulse in the dream-air. It is Sondra, but Sondra unburdened, Sondra released, streaming across the heavens like a comet, her essence finally free from the body that had caused her a lifetime of discomfort.
‘Look!’ I say, or perhaps I just think it, my hand lifting to point at the magnificent sight. ‘There’s your mom!’
Her son looks up, his face tilted toward the sky. In the dream-light, I can see the tracks of tears on his cheeks, but his expression is not one of sorrow. It is one of awe. Together, we stand on that shore, two small figures in the vastness of the night, and watch her pass. We watch until the last trace of her light is absorbed by the distant glitter of the city, until she is gone from our sight but permanently etched into our sense of what is possible. The grief is still there, a leaden weight in my chest, but it is now accompanied by something else—a fragile, bewildering sense of peace. It is the kind of peace that doesn’t come from having answers, but from accepting that some journeys are beyond our understanding, and that love, in its purest form, might just be a kind of light that never truly goes out.
End
The angel dissolved into starlight, leaving behind only the faintest shimmer against the deepening indigo of the evening sky. Across the bay, the lights of San Francisco began to prick through the dusk, a distant galaxy answering the one she had just joined. The water below us was still, holding its breath. Her son lowered his gaze from the empty heavens, his face a landscape of quiet awe amidst the raw grief. We stood there in the shared silence, on the edge of the known world, and for a moment, the chasm between loss and peace felt navigable.
Back in her emptied house, the party had dissolved into a lingering stillness. The towering bouquets on the table seemed to lean in, listening. My sunflowers, a little homely on their stiff brown stalks, continued their silent vigil by the wall. They were the only thing in the room that still seemed entirely, stubbornly hers—sunny and warm, turning a bright face toward the void. The chairs were pushed back against the walls, the echoes of laughter and murmured condolences soaked into the floors. The house was cleared for sale, but it held her. It would always hold her. The absence was not an emptiness, but a presence of a different kind.
The questions that had made my skin feel jumpy—Did she pass peacefully? Why was she alone?—had not been answered with facts, but they had settled. I knew the ending of that night now. I knew her tiredness, the weight of a world that had gotten too much to hold up any longer. The medical sleuthing, the desperate what-ifs about emergency rooms and phone calls that never came, made my heart sicker than the raw truth. Sometimes the bravest thing is to simply stop. Her final words were not a surrender, but a choice. A quiet, considered exit, handled as considerately as she had handled everything.
Grief is not a problem to be solved, but a landscape to be inhabited. The loss is ordinary and chasmic, a permanent seam in the fabric of the everyday. I still don’t know what to do with all the tsuris, the sorrows we used to air between us. Kvetching feels hollow without her wicked little grin on the other end of the line. But the space we held for each other remains. It is simply turned now, facing a different direction.
I will miss her Yiddish, the endless descriptive delight of it. I will miss the clarity she had for the mishegas, the madness, and how her heart always won. She saw the messy parts of people with a laser eye and loved them anyway. That is the lesson, I suppose, woven into the grief. To see clearly, and to love anyway.
The light across the water continues to shift. The city glitters, a promise of life ongoing. The angel is gone, but the memory of its passage is a kind of keeping. It is a matter of perspective, of choosing where to fix your gaze—on the empty space in the sky, or on the enduring glow it left behind. The sunflowers will wilt in a few days, but the stubborn brown stalks will stand strong long after, a testament to the light they carried. The presence of light, after all, depends entirely on where you decide to look.
