In the Right

The bookstore lost a friend today. I feel not the slightest embarrassment in describing her as such. She came every day to see us, when she could, and asked only the smallest recompense for this constancy: a bite to eat, a kind word, a bit of attention -- all gladly given and accepted, admittedly, as her due. She was, to the end, rather grand in a small way, without the slightest self consciousness or change. She knew her place in the scheme of things and expected to be received accordingly. Throughout the neighborhood, for what for her proved a lifetime, she made her rounds, a working aristocrat, if you will, come daily to see to her people, and the fuss that was made was somehow perfectly natural. How else should we, and all those round about who knew and felt much the same affection for her, how should we then have behaved but as we did? We no more questioned her right than she did to go largely where she wished, see whom she pleased and leave only when she felt the need to move on. Her days were crowded, in their way, but she kept to what I don't doubt she saw as her responsibilities right up to the end.

She was meant to be dead, frankly, long since. So we'd been told months ago. The diagnosis wasn't so much wrong as it was irrelevant to the patient. She failed, gradually, but then she was older than anyone might have guessed, looking at her, and if she walked a bit slower and limped a little lately, if she dozed between stops and stopped altogether more frequently than she had before, she nevertheless seemed unlikely to ever stop entirely. All but unimaginable somehow, the idea that she might.

And yet, just today, she did.

She came in today, in the arms of her friend, to say goodbye. This was difficult for us, as one might expect. She was perfectly alert, but she did not have it in her to do more than acknowledge us, one last time. It was all perfectly in keeping with her position, perfectly dignified, very sad, but not pitiable at all. I don't think I exaggerate if I describe her as serene. She may well have been confused, and I suspect she was in more pain than might have been guessed by any but her companion, who knew her after all in a rare way, but I did not sense anything but peace between them.

And that of course is what we've had from the pair of them all these days together, that would be the example set, finally, by this last visit to the bookstore. She expected and rewarded the affection she earned, even among those as unlikely as myself. (I am not one much for dogs, but then neither was she. She tolerated them, certainly, so long as they knew their place, as she knew hers, but then hers was superior, in some important ways, to theirs as she expected no less from the rest of us.)

To modify Cowley only slightly to better suit the occasion, her faith, perhaps, in some nice tenets might be wrong; her life, I'm sure, was in the right.

True aristocrats are rare nowadays, rarer still, with what used to be called, "the common touch."

Life for us, in the rounds she kept, will be a less recognizably as it has been and should be, without her in it. But no regrets, I should think, for her or her friend. There must be satisfaction in that.

Rest in peace then, Harris. Well done, old girl.