COVID impact

Pictured, L to R: Theresa, Helena and Caroline Richards in the late 1940s.  

You can't see it in black and white, but Theresa's hair is at the intersection of light brown and blond, and Helena and Caroline both have the most brilliantly red hair.

(When my brothers and I were little, my mother would tell us the story of how often random strangers spoke to her on public transit to compliment her extraordinary hair; she was puzzled because red hair was so strong in her mother's side of the family that it didn't strike her as anything out of the ordinary.  And yes I do think I have an unexpressed red-headedness gene....)

Fourth sister Penny had not yet arrived, but there would be four Richards girls altogether. Now there are three.  

Theresa was born in London on the night Coventry Cathedral was bombed, and the Blitz and its ramifications provided the conditions for Theresa and my mother Caroline's earliest childhood (my mother was born in a town I will not name because it is the answer to a common security question on the internet but to which she has no connection other than that her mother and baby Theresa were evacuated there during the worst period of bombing). 

Theresa's health declined significantly in her seventies, partly perhaps because of her aversion to the dentist (I don't think she had any teeth left in her mouth in her final years).  About eighteen months ago she moved into an assisted living facility outside of London.  She was quite happy there, with regular visits from her son and granddaughter and an enjoyable habit of having a gin and tonic at the end of the day.  The pandemic shut down visiting and I do not imagine this past year was easy for her, with communal dining shut down and virtually no opportunity to leave her room or receive visitors.  

I still don't know the sequence of events - I'm not sure anybody does - but she went into hospital some weeks ago with heart trouble.  And whether she contracted COVID at the home beforehand or it happened during her hospital stay, she got it and it hit her hard.  They stopped treatment finally and she went into hospice and struggled to breathe for another week before she died.

She was eighty years old.  On the basis of family aging patterns, there is every reason to think she should have had five or seven or nine more years of ticking along pretty happily with family visits periodically and a reasonable quality of life.

Her funeral took place yesterday. I watched it over the internet.

COVID impact.

In memoriam redux

Wheelmen is causing my jaw to drop: much of this story, of course, I know already, but even so, the revelations about the financial improprieties & interdependency of the UCI and the US Postal team in the late 90s are pretty amazing - makes me wish I were a financial journalist, there is much potential in that field for stories of Shakespearean dimensions.

Also, IMAX Gravity completely lived up to the hype!

Coming week got thrown for a loop: B.'s old friend J. died this weekend.

(He had a bad cancer diagnosis in fall 2009, but thanks to amazing surgery and radiation he was able to run a triumphant 3:23:40 in Boston in April 2010. B. and I went to Boston to spectate on that occasion; it was a celebration of life. He had a few good years of remission, and then a scary recurrence last summer, so that his death comes more as a sorrow than a surprise.)

Funeral in Toronto on Friday, we'll fly up Thursday and then back to NYC Saturday evening so that B. can make his Sunday early-morning flight back to Cayman. Ugh, let us say fervently what dressed-up friends and I were all saying to each other on the Metro-North train to Yonkers a few weeks ago for K.'s memorial: please can't the next time we find ourselves in our best clothes traveling out of town together be for a wedding or a christening, not for a funeral?

(The need to make travel arrangements and generally contemplate ramifications, mortality, etc. also means that I am way behind on work for the week, but one way or another it will all have to get done in the next few days, so there's no point worrying about that now! On a brighter note, I had a beautiful run yesterday and finally made it to hot yoga today after too long a layoff, so that definitely has a beneficial effect on the moral and physiological equilibrium.)

Closing tabs:

Nico Muhly's career as Baroque archetype. (Also: Nico's Reddit AMA!) We're going tomorrow night, I'm really excited....

Cross-tabs

In Errol Morris's roundabout inquiry into whether his deceased brother was the co-inventor of email, this paragraph caught my eye:

The funeral was in Brookline, Mass., at the Levine Chapel. I knew that my brother had friends, but he worked unendingly, and I was worried that nobody would be there for the funeral. There was my mother, my step-father, and my two step-brothers and step-sister. And, literally, hundreds of people. It was absolutely filled. People were standing in the back. I had the picture of my brother as isolated. Julia asked me, “How did they all find out?” And I said, “They communicate with each other using computers.”