There’s a handwritten sign on the door of the Gallery of Arts and Culture across H Street from the Post Office. Though the message it conveys is simple — a straight-forward designation of a future event’s time and place — if you peer through the glass, as I did, at the Gallery’s blank walls and empty shelves, the wastes of open cardboard boxes and bare track lighting, then the piece of yellow lined paper taped to the inside of the door tells an entire story. The note informs any interested passerby that the family of Barbara Burke will be holding an estate sale this weekend. 

Barbara passed away this past spring after a brief illness. “A brief illness” is obituary-speak for that final series of events that brings a person’s time on Earth to a close, and, as phrases go, it’s about as loaded as they come. For Barbara, it meant a growing sense of confusion, followed by a car accident serious enough to require hospitalization and rehab. While in the hospital, doctors found a pancreatic mass, which she decided — at age 84 — not to treat.

The last time I saw Barbara, she was sitting in a chair in the hallway outside her room in the assisted nursing facility. I’d been visiting someone else, and was in no way prepared to see Barbara’s swoop of preternaturally jet black hair in the institutionally gray hall. I stopped, wide-eyed. “Barbara?” At the sound of her name, Barbara looked up at me, and my heart broke a little.