Georgette Dione Boucher, 1921 - 2018

Around 3 a.m. on Thursday, January 25, Georgette Dione Boucher died at age 96. I never met ‘Georgie’, but my friend, Diane, was her next-door neighbor and took care of her for many years. Diane loves to say that she was on her trike the first time she met Georgie, when the Bouchers moved in. It was a close-knit neighborhood, where Georgie and Diane’s parents and the other adults kept an eye out for all the children as they played outside with a freedom that's a rarity today.

Georgie never had children and her husband died many years ago. Diane took care of her like a daughter. All of Georgie’s needs: the headaches of house and yard maintenance, the complications of home health care, the intricacies of financial planning and organization, fell on Diane, who willingly served her. Diane did more for Georgie than many daughters ever need do for their own mothers.

After Georgie died, I met Diane at the Keefe Funeral Home to help her make arrangements. Unfortunately, I know about funeral arrangements. I planned the Funeral Mass and my friend, Amy, and I interviewed Diane and one of Georgie’s Canadian nieces for the obituary. I organized a women’s a cappella quintet to sing the closing hymn at the Mass at St. Agnes Church in Arlington Center

For five days I worked on the myriad of details that seem to pop up between the death and the funeral. I was grateful for the chance to help my friend, but it was exhausting. I looked forward to January 31, when the funeral would be over and I could relax.

What I didn’t anticipate was the emotional reaction when it was all over. The funeral was on Wednesday, January 31. On Friday, I saw my friend, Jen, at a craft store. Jen asked me how it went. As I told her about my week, I was amazed, incredulous that the funeral had only been 50 hours previous. It felt like a month ago. More accurately, it felt like it had taken a month out of my life.

I’d gladly volunteer for the job in an instant; I'm grateful I had the expertise and time to help my friend.

The emotional exhaustion was due to the personal subtext: my mother's, my father's, and David’s deaths, funerals and burials, the grief for all of these losses, a grief I still feel, and most poignantly for David, who died so young.

As I move onward in my life, I now experience what I couldn’t imagine at all: what it’s like to have a son who’s been dead for nearly 30 months. There’s a symmetry in that: he would have been 30 in October, and now it’s been 30 months. A month dead for each year alive.

I suppose it will always be a strange thing. How can my son’s body, once strong, vibrant, and alive, now be lying in the cold frozen ground of New England?