On July 9, 2019, Noreen McCauley nee Hoffman passed away, and with her passing, a page turned on a major chapter of my family history. She'd outlived
my grandfather by a solid six years, but in the end, she caught up with him, and so that marked the end of my maternal grandparents. Her contribution to the story was over, and so the responsibility--the burden--passed fully to the rest of us left on this small corner of this tiny blue orb hurtling through time and space with no regard for, well, anything. Certainly that great, old bitch Mother Earth wouldn't pause her cosmic dance for a second for the loss of a politician or a philosopher or a celebrity or even an entire tribe, so it certainly wouldn't hesitate for the final curtain call of a random woman in a random room in a small town painfully similar to so many other small towns around the world that you wouldn't be able to pick out of a police lineup.
