Easy Dead

 

The bird lady glided into easy death yesterday.

I heard it from one of her neighbors this morning.  She'd heard it from one of her neighbors who received an email from the bird lady's daughter.

At the very end, of the video above, you see her, and I say Smile.  That was at her beloved Night Out party last August.  

Nobody knows exactly what went on.  The neighbor who called was also of the opinion she wanted to die and made it happen by not eating.   She didn't like her life once it got restricted to just existing in her house.  But for all I know she had something else go wrong.  I'll probably never know and its not important.

Her cats are being cared for by a neighbor and her daughter, who loves cats, says they'll stay living at her house because that is their home.  She says a relative will move in and care for them.   Evelyn would like that.

I don't know how many cats we rounded up from that neighborhood over the years.  Lots, that's for sure.  Many came from a house on the corner of the block and across the street.  Bad tenants, got cats, never fixed them, never cared for them and left most of them when they moved out.   Thankfully the little house was then fixed up and a nice man lives there now and keeps it up.   

Then there was a lady living behind her and one or two over who would get cats and not fix them, and she finally vanished, leaving young relatives living there.  Evelyn said the rumors were she was wanted for scamming older folks, or something like that and beat it out of here for the east coast.  Anyhow, there were three or four cats left behind eventually.  I got them fixed and finally Evelyn and her daughter took them to the local shelter, to be adopted out.  

This sort of thing we repeated over and over and over again, getting two dozen maybe more fixed in her small neighborhood.    She took in a beautiful kitty I caught behind Grocery Outlet, who was running with a kitten I knew, whom I'd gotten fixed up in Waterloo.  How that poor kitten ended up in an Albany parking lot I don't know.  The Waterloo people likely gave it to someone in the area who dumped her out then.  Evelyn took the gorgeous long hair torti after she was fixed and I marched away with the already fixed kitten.  

She hosted the National Night Out party every August for her neighborhood.  Our neighborhood doesn't have one, so Evelyn would invite me to their party there.   I always went.   Fun times.

Evelyn gave me a ride in March of 2021 to the Linn County Fairgrounds for me to get my first Covid shot.  I'd hurt my back and couldn't drive.   That was a historical event, to be part of that.  I told the medical student that who gave me the injection, that she was now part of history.  She said she knew she'd likely be telling her grandkids about it.

The Bird Lady is gone.  Her neighborhood became a kinder place because of her.

We all die in the end.  Every single one of us.