Dependency

On Sunday night one of our elderly neighbors passed away. Only a few days before we had learned that Frank had been admitted to the hospital with pneumonia, which he had contracted after being weakened by chemotherapy for liver cancer. Frank was one of the long-time residents of the streets, a stooped, thin man who always had a greeting and a kind word for the boys when he saw us. We'll miss him.

Since there were no calling hours last night, Tab went to the funeral this morning. This is the first funeral he's attended in the past two years for which he hasn't had to serve as pallbearer.

He told me when he got back that Johanna, Frank's wife, held up well until about mid-way through the service when she broke down in sobs. When Tab greeted her and conveyed our condolences, she grasped him by the arms and said, "What am I going to do without him? I don't even know what trash goes in which bucket." Tab assured her that we would help her figure out which buckets to use for glass and cans, for paper, and for ordinary garbage.

Tab expects that eventually Johanna will sell the house and move in with her daughter. "And probably relatives of Martin will buy the house and we'll have even more cars and fewer parking places on this street," he concluded gloomily.

Martin, who lives next door to Frank and Johanna, is a Guatemalan man whose three bedroom house is packed with extended family and lodgers. They are good neighbors, but we've noticed that for every house owned by a Guatemalan family, there are at least four additional cars on the block. This is a potential problem in a city neighborhood in which less than half the houses have driveways or garages. The neighborhood is slowly changing as the old Polish folks like Frank and Johanna die or move away and their homes are bought by Central Americans.

Moving in with her daughter would probably be the best thing for Frank's widow. Fortunately, Johanna, unlike many women of her generation, can at least drive. When Tab's Uncle Louie died twelve years ago, his Aunt Sophie was utterly helpless. She didn't drive, didn't know anything about their finances, did not even know how to write out a check. She had been completely dependent on Louie for everything; when he died, she had to rely on her sisters and nieces and nephews until her son in California brought her out to live with him.

I can't imagine being that dependent on someone else. Did Sophie ever chafe at her dependency, or was she complacent (and complicit)? Did she ever think of asking Louie where the fuse box was or how to pay a bill? And if she had asked, would he have shown her or did he prefer to control everything? By the time I met her, early in her widowhood, Sophie struck me as very childlike. I suppose that begs a chicken-and-egg question: did fifty years of dependency on her husband leave her without any initiative or was Uncle Louie able to retain that control over her only because she lacked gumption in the first place?

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