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“I almost got up and said something on behalf of the neighbors,” Jimmy said to me after the service, as we surveyed the assembled group, which included one very elderly brother, the last of five siblings, and a college-age granddaughter who had only surfaced a few years earlier in Missouri. Jimmy and Michelle had lived next door to Cordie for the last 11 years and kept an eye on her. They had been essentially the first-response team, the first to notice from their living room window that an EMS or fire truck — whichever it was that Cordie had called when she was having difficulty breathing — had turned off its siren in front of her house. Within minutes, a quorum of neighbors would fan into Cordie’s space in the back, crowding around her rocking chair as technicians took a gratified, if disoriented, patient’s vital signs.
But still, when the minister asked, when the nephew had finished reading his remarks, if anyone else wanted to say something, none of the neighbors stepped forward. I suspect that was because, being “just neighbors,” we felt slightly marginal. We weren’t family or friends in the conventional sense, after all; our relationship to Cordie felt somehow temporal — temporary — a function of place. We had simply jumped in, each in our own way, to fill the breech left by family and conventional friends. As Cordie used to say over and over again, “Oh, Anne, I don’t know what I’d do without my neighbors.” One thing’s for sure, and that is she would not have been able to live alone, unassisted, until her last few months.
Cordie made it clear at the outset that the only way she’d be leaving that house of hers with the faint, unbanishable gas odor was “feet first.” That stipulated, she apparently set out to assemble a support system to provide for her, in her last years, what family and institutions provided for others. For Cordie, it would only take a neighborhood. And boy, was she good: The day we moved in, there was her booming Manor twang on our answering machine, welcoming us to the neighborhood. Of course, to meet her was to be hooked by her unflappable good humor and sass, her twinkling eyes and easy, crinkly smile, despite what looked from the outside like an unbearably sad, spare life. Though she never asked, her smitten neighbors variously chauffeured her to doctors’ appointments, the grocery store, or the hairdresser, and popped in regularly for a few hands of Spite ‘n’ Malice. There were times when the Meals-on-Wheels containers would stack up, unopened — she’d even shop them around some — because she hadn’t been home for dinner in awhile or else had filled up on the goodies people brought over.
Cordie derived daily joy from whatever was blooming in her yard — or yours. In fact, it turned out that most of what was growing in mine, including those unsavory hackberries and that brace of cherry laurels along the back fence, had been planted by Cordie — before I was even born. She loved to shake the red seeds from nandinas and scatter them on neighboring yards and then, as they grew, pass judgment on the wisdom of where they were growing. I always admired that patch of purple-flowering Ruellia that she had growing in her front yard and the even larger backyard plot she’d managed to propagate from the first one. “Bring over a shovel and take some of my rubellas, ” she’d yell from her porch swing through the hackberries, whenever she saw me puttering in my yard.
And then there were Cordie’s walks. When she finally called it quits with that big American car of hers that barely fit into the garage, her walks became her grip on life. Several times a day, she’d be out there slowly making her way around the block pushing that wheeled walker with a basket and a bell that one of the neighbors bought for her. Jimmy said she’d be up and out walking at the crack of dawn, picking up newspapers and tossing them a little closer to her neighbors’ doors. “Then, sort of as payment for this little service,” he added with a chuckle, “she’d help herself to any flowers you had growing in your yard.”
I’d spot Cordie from my window scouting for pickable flowers seconds after a storm cleared or, astoundingly, as soon as she was sufficiently steady on her feet after having been passed out for who knows how long. If she could make it around the block, she figured, she was okay. The walks were how Cordie stayed connected to the neighborhood quotidian: holding court in the middle of the street, gesticulating with her cane, greeting all passers-by as if she were in a reception receiving line. And the walks were how she stayed invested in her own life, grousing with us about the neighborhood scourge — the guy who fed a perpetually reproducing population of mutant feral cats on other people’s property.
Pushing around that walker with her cane hooked over the handlebars kept her in touch with another source of pleasure: children. She loved kids and spoke often, agitatedly, as though about the recent past, of her desperate efforts to ease her only child’s affliction, and about her wish that she’d had more. “Not for lack of trying,” she’d say wistfully. “Never had a headache — or anything!” she’d add with that impish, full-jawed grin of hers. In her last bedridden weeks, when she’d stopped eating and was often unreachable and incoherent — and had no idea that the feral cats were now being fed on her own driveway — she would still rally, if briefly, when she happened to catch sight of a visitor’s child.
It turned out that Cordie was right, after all: When she was no longer able to get out for her walks, that’s when she began to slip away. Her absence from the street clued all of us, including those not in the immediate vicinity, that something was amiss. A small group of neighbors was at her bedside when she passed away, having been summoned by Antonia, her caretaker in the last months. Now that Cordie’s gone, the only activity to be observed at this suddenly inanimate green house is that initiated by whomever has inherited the property. And, of course, the wild cats.
This article appears in January 15 • 1999 and January 15 • 1999 (Cover).