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Last spring, a few months after I moved into this senior apartment house, I met my next-door neighbor, June, an 82-year-old widow from Bullhead City, Arizona. We laughed because I had moved here from Lake Havasu City, just down the road from Bullhead City, but we never met until we ended up here in the "Widows' Club."
June was a feisty lady, a WWII Army veteran, and she loved gambling—petty stuff like keno, video poker, and bingo. She used to drive to Senior Centers all over Alameda County to play bingo several days a week. She got me hooked on playing bingo on Wednesdays at our Senior Center across the parking lot. If you've never played, don't believe all that scoffing you hear. Shuffleboard is boring; bingo is fun, especially when you win. I've won 5 times so far—not much, but enough to break even, including lunch. And I've made some new friends.
(I've always refused to learn to play bridge or chess because I figured any game so complicated that someone could write a daily newspaper column about it was too complicated for me.)
Like me, June had asthma and high blood pressure, but neither was well controlled. For some reason, this feisty lady never complained to her doctor when the inhalers she used didn't work very well, or when her blood pressure medicine made her cough.
On Saturday, Dec. 2, June had a bad asthma attack and was taken to the hospital, where she developed pneumonia. She died a week later.
I'm still in shock. I miss my bingo buddy. I knew her less than a year, but I feel a great sense of loss, like an epilogue to the death of my husband in 2005.
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