More sad news. (Seriously, this has been a hell of a summer and fall).

My friend Dorothy - she was 87 or 88 - had fallen and hurt (some said broken) her back. She had gone into a nursing home - this was just last week - and the pastor said that he thought she "wasn't going to be leaving."

But by that, I had assumed he meant she'd be there for months to years, the rest of her life.

She passed away late last night. I just got the e-mail message from the church secretary notifying me.

The really sad thing is that I had plans to go out and visit her this afternoon as soon as my office hours ended today. I had even put aside a couple recent issues of "Arizona Highways" (a magazine I get - one of the few ones that would be an "overlap," interests-wise, for us) to take to her to give her something to look at.

I'm really pretty torn up. It's different in a way than my aunt dying (earlier this summer) because I knew my aunt was in a bad way, I'd not seen her for a few years, and I knew she had been in pain. Dorothy, I had been driving places (she didn't drive any more) just a few weeks ago.

That's one of the things I hate about deaths. How you have to suddenly reconfigure the world to remind yourself that a certain person isn't in it any more.

Dorothy was...well, as my secretary (who knew her well) put it, was a "character." She could be very opinionated and even rather short with people who didn't live up to her standards. But she was also highly intelligent and had a strong respect for education. And I got on very well with her, in part because in the ways I just described, she reminded me of my Grandma Rushford...the same opinionated quality, the same tendency to speak her mind, but still with that strong and recognizable undercurrent of LOVE and RESPECT for the other person...she wasn't "gushy" but you knew she cared about you.

I have a number of books she gave me. (Some of which - oh, gosh, they were loans. Well. I guess I keep them now, unless her kids specifically ask for them back). My lovely hardback copy of "A Sand County Almanac" (one of the early editions of it) was a book she had given me when she learned it was one of my favorite books and that I only had a cheap paperback copy. And my copies of Thoreau's works came from her as well - she claimed she "mistakenly" ordered two sets from Daedalus but I suspect she may have ordered the one set with me in mind.

She was one of the first people to welcome me when I moved down here. One of the first people to talk to me, to open up the closed circle that sometimes exists in smaller towns and seeing to it that I was let in.

She had, at times, a pretty wicked sense of humor. And she was the most cutthroat Scrabble player I've ever met.

I guess the two perhaps-not-AS-sad things out of this are that she was mentally sharp and with-it up to the end; there was no "long forgetting" as there is with some people. And also, she didn't spend months lingering in the nursing home, hating it because she couldn't go out and do the things she did.

She's going to leave a huge hole. She was not only active in the church we both belonged to (she was, for years, the Sunday School superintendent), but she was active in AAUW, and in some conservation-related groups.

I really have nothing else to say, other than the standard saying about spending time with the people who matter to you NOW. (Oh, if only I'd pushed myself to go visit her on Sunday...). Send them flowers NOW. If someone you care about can't drive any more, and you can drive them, do it. (I will never, ever regret the times I drove her to AAUW or CWF meetings, or picked her up at the grocery when the town bus service pooped out on her. It was a small thing on my part but she always seemed to appreciate it).

I'm kind of in shock right now; she was that kind of person that you sort of imagined would go on forever.