My mother broke her hip.

It wasn’t because she was aged and it gave out, but because the former MD, an anesthesiologist, an eightysomething woman, forgot to put her car in park and it rolled back and hit my mother’s walker and my mother fell and…

When I got the news I went numb.  My mother could barely walk to begin with.  And I’d just seen her in Palm Springs.  She’s so feisty, but since my dad died she doesn’t handle the traumas so well and could she make it through this?

And she’s the world’s worst patient.  But maybe that’s good.  Because she checked herself out of rehab early, insisting she wanted to be home, which shows will and determination.  But she’s so frustrated, once the shock wears off you’re confronted with the reality, but my sister’s there right now and the report was my mother had turned the corner.

And ever since my dad died, which was a long time ago, almost twenty years, my mother has called less.  She doesn’t need us.  She’s got her friends.  As they said about Reggie Jackson when he played in New York, my mother is the straw that stirs the drink.  People rally around her.  Because she’s funny, yet acerbic, yet caring and is always coming up with things to do.  She’s a culture vulture who wanted to go on a cruise on a river in Russia until my sister put her foot down, insisting if she did so, went on this barge with no elevator, she’d go to court to get a conservatorship.

Which is why it’s so hard for my mother to be incapacitated.  She’s a doer.

But she’s had some dark moments in the wake of this accident, and I’ve been calling every day.  To let her blow off steam.  To share what we have in common, like golf.  My mother can’t stand that she can’t play.  But she still watches.  She loves sports.

Unlike my dad, who threw like a girl and couldn’t care less.  But he took me to the game.

But the person who was my surrogate dad, the gentleman who was athletic and cool in ways my father was not, was Harry Sheketoff.

I always wondered why my mother wasn’t married to Harry instead of Moe.  I was too young to know that opposites attract, and that my father was perfect for my mother the same way Selma was perfect for Harry, they complemented each other.

But even though Harry had trouble first, needing bypass surgery in his sixties, he was the man who survived.  My father was beaten by cancer when he was seventy.  But despite failing kidneys and further heart surgery, Harry soldiered on, he had nine lives.

Until today.

Calling my mother for the routine check-up, she told me she had terrible news.  Her voice was quiet.  I assumed it had to do with her health, that she’d fallen again.

"Harry Sheketoff died."

Just like that.  Judy, his sister, had called from St. Vincent’s Hospital.  They’d picked him up in an ambulance and…

Selma was just in the apartment.  Everybody still alive moved from Fairfield to these towers in Bridgeport, it’s like summer camp.  Not assisted living, everybody’s independent, but they organize bridge games and parties and go to each other’s for dinner…they look out for one another.

But nobody lives forever.

Not Harry, not Muggs, not me.

And that’s completely weird.

Because if Harry can die, so can my mother, the aforementioned Muggs.  And someday I’ll be gone too.  Yup, that day will come when they start dropping like flies around me.  I can see it with my mother’s friends.

And Ginny’s friend.  The famous singer married to the famous dancer.  He’s in his nineties now.  He’s outlived not only his wife, but all his buddies.  He’s waiting to die.

Makes me realize you don’t want to live forever.  That that would be terrible, a sentence

And someday Felice’s mother Ginny is gonna be gone too, she’s older than Muggs, albeit in perfect health.  But unlike Harry, sometimes you’re healthy and the next day you’re gone.

Then what?

What am I gonna do when my mother’s gone?  When that generation is wiped out?

And who goes next?  Me or one of my two sisters?

And at some point in time we’ll all just be pictures in a frame, unknown, like my mother’s mother’s mother, in that black and white shot in Russia that used to hang in the hall of the three family home in Peabody…