Who was Ms. K?

The day was just beginning in New York. Like usual, I had brewed my morning coffee and was scrolling through the news when my mother called.

'Ms. K passed away today.'

I set down my coffee and made polite inquiries about the funeral before hanging up. I stared out the window at the familiar, jagged skyline, but my mind was already thousands of miles away.

Who was Ms. K? To the adults, she was a set of symptoms and a source of pity. They spoke about her 'condition' in hushed tones, using that cruel, blunt word to explain why she stayed home, why she never married, why she worked the way she did, and why her sister’s face was so often etched with a weary, tired patience. They saw the epilepsy as a curse and her intellectual disability as a wall.

I guess intellectual disabilities don’t mean much to three- or five-year-olds, because my sister and I got along with Ms. K perfectly. Children meet people where they are; it is only adults who learn to categorize, to reduce entire lives to single, convenient words. We were allowed to leave our grounds and explore as far as her sister’s house—where Ms. K often became the warden to our notorious experiments with leaves of all kinds. And sand, too. Even after repeated entreaties from my grandmother not to dirty Ms. K’s untiled stone veranda with our sandcastle games, my sister and I paid no heed. Ms. K didn’t mind. As long as we were happy, she was happy.

I sat there in my room, remembering the blue tarpaulin roof of her veranda and the wood-and-brick oven Ms. K’s sister would occasionally allow her to use. I think her sister loved her, but she grew tired as age took hold and the exhaustion was only compounded by the weight of her own personal tragedies. Ms. K needed help with many things—a dependency that often left her sister with little room to be kind or to show her love.

I remembered the stories my mother told—how Ms. K, the beautiful young woman with long hair, was once a master at braiding hair and ironing clothes, how people sometimes trusted only her to get the job done right. I remembered her sitting on our veranda, keeping my great-grandmother company as her dementia worsened. It seems apt in hindsight: one fading mind keeping watch over another.

There is a tragedy in being loved as a responsibility rather than as a person. I sometimes think about the many quiet lives that are loved and cared for, but never really understood. I wonder if, in her final years, anyone sat with Ms. K the way she had once sat with us, and later with my great-grandmother.

Weirdly enough, I found myself unable to take my mind off that untiled veranda floor where we spent entire summers making sandcastles—the same floor where Ms. K must now be lying before her funeral, as is the norm. I hoped people turned up to the funeral because they knew how great she was, and not simply out of duty. But funerals, I have learned, are often less about the dead than about the living convincing themselves they cared enough.

So who was Ms. K? She was one of my oldest friends, you could say. And like so many characters from my childhood stories, she had now quietly become a bittersweet memory.

The coffee had turned cold on my desk.