TML&D

I think it was all about justice to her. She’d been raised as a little princess and just about everything in her marriage, career, and family had gone catastrophically wrong, due to no fault of her own. Her husband turned out to be cruel and insensitive in the extreme, she was blacklisted from her chosen career because of a personal grudge, her closest relatives died from terrible diseases, and the family itself broke into factions over money– leaving her out in the cold.

At the end of her life she became focused on the injustice of it all, but generalized it to the entire world. The world was broken– and she very much saw a theological dimension in this. In all of these fictions or true crime tales, people were hurt but justice was ultimately done and the nonsensical and chaotic was given meaning and order in the end.

I’d tried to get her to watch antihero-based crime and horror movies and books (like Dexter) but she didn’t like them. They offered her nothing, because she got no pleasure in gray areas and moral ambiguities. Believing that injustice and crime could and would be solved and resolved ultimately gave her hope for herself and the world.

(A secondary factor was that she’d briefly been a police dispatcher when substitute teaching jobs had dried up for her.)

11. Dusters. Honestly, I didn’t even know what those smock-like things she wore around the house were called before she went into the hospital, but they became a kind of uniform for her for a while– at least until I started buying disposable clothing for her which was a bit more dignified, that was cheap enough to throw away for fears of contamination. (I still have boxes of unopened clothing I’d