Kitty

Our contribution to Kitty's wake was a Dutch apple pie, with the crumbly crust. Kitty's dead now a week from an overwhelming onslaught of cancer, in her brain her lungs everywhere. She was around 70 years of age. Just about that number of fans attended "church in the barn" today, Sunday, to hear her grown children play sad Handel and friends talk about her aloud to the congregation: how smart she was, how self-sacrificing, how determined, how involved, how insistent an atheist. The minister brought that up. She had lived in Switzerland, attended elite schools, just about won her Ph.D. in philosophy when her third child came along, proved autistic and absorbed her for decades. People were jammed in tight as the layers of an onion on concentric rows of folding chairs. The little barn was 20 degrees at the start and 80 degrees at the end. There was afterward a feast of potluck bringings. A fair number stood outside in the apple-ripening crisp air and on frozen mud, talking comfortably to strangers and sipping hot coffee. To my wake bring Jameson's and cider for my teetotaling wife.