Bereaved

MY OLD FRIEND, who I always called "Lucky", died suddenly a week ago yesterday. She was so thin and undernourished, when I stayed with her for four days after some Jamaicans bashed into her home and robbed her a few years back, I only ever saw her eat a crisps (American: "chips") sandwich at midday and that was ALL she touched in 24 hours. The rest of her calories came from alcohol, though she would never have admitted she had a habit on that. She was so tiny and thin by the end that she looked like a fledgling bird. She was a heroin addict and sometime smalltime dealer (a fact I could never have mentioned while she was alive). I called her "Lucky" because she funded this habit every day without ever going out shoplifting, or even getting arrested for years on end. Her home, however, was little more than a glorified crackhouse at times. The understanding being that if you used at her place, you paid her a little out of it, and that's how she kept going. She was somewhere between 55-60 years old, had two grown-up kids, a 35 year++ habit on heroin plus daily pipes on the crack. It would have been the latter that contributed to her death. (Heroin, remember, or pharmaceutical "diamorphine" as it's called in British hospitals is given TO the dying to make their last hours more comfortable. So, unless she'd overdosed, which she did not, that would hardly be the thing that bumped her off.)... Unfortunately it seem's Lucky's luck ran out. I feel depressed and sick and her old best friend looked 100 years old and grey as he recounted the details of a 50-minute fight for life with two teams of paramedics. In the end her fragile, tiny body just gave way.

But I'm illustrating this post with a wire-fox terrier, just like one I saw "parked" outside Lucky's favourite offlicence/bottleshop at the weekend. It looked so cute I wanted to take it home...