Connie Martell was a powerful woman, her son Mitchell called her a “spitfire,” and that was true.

Whenever I asked Connie what I could do for her, she suggested someone else for me to do something for. This one wasn’t feeling good and could use a visit from Red, that one was a reader who had no books, this one could use a sweatshirt or a jacket for her walks outside.

Every time I visited, she tried to tell me what I could and couldn’t write, and I kept telling her I would write what I wished. It  wasn’t really an argument with her, but a way we had of communicating. Maria would sit down and the two would yak until somebody broke it up.

Connie and I had our own way of talking. She told everyone she knew how grateful she was for me and Red and the Army Of Good, but she would never tell me and I would have squirmed if she did.

I had this firm rule for my therapy work – I only visited people inside of the institutions where they were it was not a good idea for me to visit nursing homes and hospitals, I had my own work to do and that would fill up my idea and turn my work into an endless round of driving, it would turn me from a volunteer into a social worker.

I didn’t want that, I was a  writer, and a busy one, I didn’t want to diminish my own work, and I was aware of the emotional pitfalls of trying to be Mother Teresa.  That was not me, or who I wished to be.

Connie seemed to break all of my rules and upend all of my boundaries. We were very different, she and I, but also similar. We had the same dry sense of humor, the same emotional awkwardness, we were both a lot softer and mushier than we like to let on.

But I had not met anyone like Connie before.

She had no real independence but was fiercely independent. She was in great need of help, but never asked for help, or really got comfortable with it. She seemed gruff and blunt, but had a huge heart and sensitive soul. Although she could barely get up out of her chair, she was quite aware of the world, and reached far beyond her own small space. She insisted on her rights, but had fewer rights every day.

A former nurse who had worked all of her life, she was very conscious of the work of the Mansion staff, and appreciative of it, and they loved her back for that. A person in constant paint, she never complained about it. A knitter who claimed she didn’t know much about knitting, she cranked out countless gifts for the people in her universe, and many beyond.

An elderly person nearly crippled with arthritis and bone problems, she made all kinds of things for months.

I rarely attended funeral services for the people Izzy or Lenore or Red and I saw. I didn’t have to time for it, and I didn’t want to keep draining myself in that way. I wanted to focus on what I could do well and I didn’t wish to burn out.

And I worried about the dogs. Of all the things my therapy dogs and I have done, funerals are the most confusing and difficult things for them. They are not sure what to do, or what the work is, or where their people are, yet they always seem to sense the presence of the people they knew. Izzy used to lie next to the caskets of the hospice patients we had visited. Lenore was utterly confused.

Red, an exquisitely sensitive dog, went to one funeral and went right to the grieving family and sat with them. He soaks up sadness and loss, he is wired into the souls of people.

Tonight Maria and Red and I are all going to a memorial service in Connie’s hometown, an  hour away. I am not grieving over Connie, I am grateful to be able to talk about her, she  deserves to be remembered.

I am not sad because Connie is precisely where she wanted to be. As she told me more than once, “I’ve had my turn, now it’s time to give somebody else a turn.”

And that was not just chatter. She believed it, she said again and again that she was ready to go when God called for her, and that was that. There was no wailing, brooding or deep reflection. She hated drama as much as I do. She lived minute-by-minute, but saw the future clearly.

When it was time, it was time. There was nothing much more to say.

Tomorrow, I am also speaking at another memorial service for Connie, the one at the Mansion in the morning. I think that will be a  hard one for the residents, Red will be busy. He is very good at comforting and consoling. Me, not so much.

I feel it is important for me to write about my time with Connie – in another world, it would have made a great book. I don’t want to forget her and she deserves to be remembered.

I am grateful to be at both services, it is where I belong this time, and very happy to speak about what Connie meant to us and to so many others. The Army Of Good came through for here time after time.

There are lots of remarkable people at the Mansion that I have come to know and love. Tomorrow, time to move on and get back within the boundaries that have worked so well for me this far.

Connie was a boundary breaker, in death as in love. She was a powerful symbol of the drama of aging. As her body began to wither, her soul just seemed to get bigger.