The Dying Woman I Drove Past Today
Witnessing a battle for life in a strip mall parking lot
We were heading home from a graduation party along a route we’ve driven a thousand times before, past gas stations, car repair shops, a supermarket with its satellite storefronts ranged around a yawning parking lot.
On the opposite corner is a drugstore, a deli, and a barbershop, their smaller parking lot separated from the street by a low berm planted with sparse grass and a few struggling shrubs.
It’s the kind of scenery you drive past without consciously registering it, a commercial landscape that remains invisible until you need to pop in to pick up a prescription. God willing, we’ll drive past it another thousand times.
But I’ll see it now. With today’s image forever superimposed on it.
Sometimes life reminds you that it’s playing for keeps
“So I could make that pasta with the roasted tomatoes,” I was saying to my husband, as I slowed in response to the brake lights blooming red in front of me. “Or we could do tacos again. Uh-oh.”
There were other red lights coming into view, flashing scarlet and blue from atop a firetruck. My lane was moving again, slowly, and as we drew alongside the drugstore I…
