A Small Return

Originally Posted Sunday, September 15, 2013

Here is a story too good not to be retold.  It is the story of a woman who died two years ago at the age of 104, once married briefly, but the marriage was annulled for "abandonment."  She was the daughter of a copper baron who grew up as American royalty.  She lived the last twenty years of her life as a paying guest at the Beth Israel Medical Center on the upper East Side of Manhattan.  She had no children. 

She was worth over $300,000,000. 

Surely Vanity Fair has done a story on her, but issues of the magazine have piled up in my house unopened for the past couple of years (people comment when they see them in their wrappers). 

I read about her in today's N.Y. Times online (source).  Go there for the blow by blow.  At stake, of course, is the money.  She left two wills drawn six months apart, one dividing the money up among the nineteen members of her half family that she has not seen in nearly a lifetime, and another leaving almost everything to charity.  God, I love a good story. 

Me?  I've been bad.  I may tell you about it all when I have energy for it.  There are many good tales to tell (like watching a tragedy, it will make you feel better about your own lives), and some that are just pathetic.  But human demise that is not public is no demise at all but simply a disintegration like the disappearance of a fallen leaf or the drying of a raindrop.  There is still much for me to work out, though, and I truly have had neither the time nor the health to sit at the computer and write it.  Sad that confession. 

I am realizing, though, that leaving no record is the worst thing to do.  And besides, Qgets lonely being the only lunatic savant on the internet.