lifetime

My iPod Touch is on its way out. I bought it two years ago for a trip to NYC. I can't figure out whether I want to get a new Touch or go crazy and just buy a iPad and have done with it. There's really nothing I need an iPad for. the Touch is the right size for notes, keeping my address book in some sort of order, keeping nearly all my logins in one accessible place, holding all the audiobooks I might want to listen to, and carrying too many time-wasting games. So I don't need an iPad, but man is it tempting.

I bought the Touch to go to New York because my great aunt was in the hospital again. My sister had called me and said I should come out. My great-aunt had been in and out of the hospital for the past couple of years. She'd been mainly living alone, with a woman who slept there at nights, made food, and ran errands. There had also been a woman who came in to do the cleaning on the weekends.

But when I came back two years ago, it was to watch my great-aunt die.

She did, taking five weeks for to say goodbye to a world that I think she loved to the very end. The doctor said it would take 10 days to two weeks once she came off dialysis, but she was never one to do the expected. She'd lived nearly ninety-five rich years, a beautiful woman for all of them. She lived through incredible changes in NY state and city, had two husbands and a boyfriend up to the time she was in her mid-80s. She would have left many friends behind her, but had outlived most of them. One of her oldest friends, a woman who had been a Cotton Club dancer came to see her close to the end. She held my great-aunt's hand and sang "Margie" into her nearly-unresponsive ear.

My sister and I sat on either side of the bed as she died, a tiny, dark woman in the white sheets.