The Death of an Indispensable Person
What do you call a person who’s central—indispensable—to the happy functioning of your family, yet is in no way tied to it by blood? And how do you describe the grief when that person is gone?
Carmen Ayala was that indispensable person to us. For 24 years, she took care of my aunt, Adele Halperin, who could not take care of herself. My aunt died on May 7, just as I was completing a long feature about her for this magazine. And on July 19—a scant two days after the issue had been shipped off to the printer, a mere 10 weeks since Adele had passed away—Carmen died too.
To my astonishment, I was more distraught over Carmen’s death than I was over my own aunt’s. Here was a woman who had loved Adele as if she were her own, coaxing her out of the by her heart.
