We attended the traditional New Year’s Eve gathering in the old neighborhood. Our host made soup with black-eyed peas, spinach, and sausage. (In the Southern US and in Northeast Seattle, eating black-eyed peas and greens foretell a good year.) Julian brought herring, which he considers a good luck food for the New Year. (Personally, I think this superstition was promoted by the North Sea Herring-Fishers’ Association.) The party broke up before midnight, as this farm girl and several others ran out of wakefulness. I did stay awake long enough to watch the fireworks from the Space Needle on TV at home. We also had some fireworks in the neighborhood.
While every new year is a beginning, it can also be an end. Just after we left the party, one of the revelers got the call that her husband had died. He was in hospice care due to dementia and aspiration pneumonia. We took fixings for Rachel sandwiches (rye bread, pastrami, Jarlsberg cheese, sauerkraut, and homemade Russian dressing) over to her house for dinner. Her husband passed peacefully. His children and one grandchild had visited earlier in the day. He was in a warm and comfortable room at an adult family home in Kent, south of Seattle. We swapped memories about him, including the time he rolled his recumbent bike and broke some ribs on the Burke-Gilman Trail. The only reason she knew about the injury was that he somehow rode back to his Jeep, but couldn’t lift the bike in to drive home and had to call her for help.
Our friend’s death will probably not be the last end in 2019. I can only hope that other endings are happier.
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