The Death and Life of Shirley Hill

Shirley Hill died January 12th, 2014 at the age of 77 in her home in Glen Ellyn in her sleep. Her death was one of the first things I saw in my recent journey back across the history of the residence I now inhabit. Shirley was new to me then, an old woman in a house I was just coming to know and make my own. I have seen many deaths and at first this one meant very little to me. It was a peaceful one and her death was just the part of the process that put the house on the market that I would buy less than a year later.

Peering back through time is like unwinding a ball of string. You don't get to start at the center, the distant past, unless you have a shortcut, a temporal connection to draw on. Instead you have to pluck at what is readily available and slowly spool it all out in reverse. That was the beginning of the four score and two years I spent during May of 2015.

Shirley Hill lived in this home alone in 2014. Her husband, George Francis Hill, had died in January of 2007 at the age of 80. He died in a hospital and so I was not privy to it. It was a slow death of cancer. Shirley was away from the house at the hospital most days around then. She came home at night, most nights. Already I had seen the mourning that followed George's passing, so seeing Shirley struggle through the last year with him away, getting glimpses of her when she was home was disorienting. I watched grief roll back to resignation roll back to hope when she thought it was treatable.

Eventually, George himself entered the picture early in 2006. He was already diagnosed and had some treatment of course. He hadn't been entirely hospitalized yet, the year that I had just experienced. The two argued like old an old couple who were afraid. That's what they were. Another year rolled back and eventually came the diagnosis. That pivotal moment in their lives, though they had yet to realize what it would be like. Watching it in reverse, I knew what was coming for the two of them and it was then that I think I fell in love with their life.

I will age, however slowly and however many years fall I experience between now and those twilight years. Who will I have then, as those two had each other in those final years of George's life?

Before the diagnosis, Shirley had volunteered at the local library part time. It was a way to connect with old friends and enjoy discussion over a good book or two. George was ten years older than his wife and his mobility was limited. At home she helped him out a great deal, so getting out of the house was a little bit of escape. At least that's the way she talked about it on the phone with her friend Ruth...

Watching a house and inhabitants for years, you get to know the place and the people. I always prided myself on my ability to disconnect and disassociate from others. It was a mechanism I learned early because of how much disappointment was heaped on me and then the expectations of the staff of the psychiatric facility. They wanted me to deny my experiences, experiences I never understood at the time. So I learned to disconnect myself, my true self, from others and from the world. I learned to wear a mask. How thin that becomes in the course of years... decades, watching people live their lives. They are dead and gone in the present, but here I was the ghost watching as they moved from old age back to younger times.

George retired from working at Glenbard West High School in 1994. He was vice principal at the time, but at the age of 68 the School District pushed him out. There wasn't a mandate or anything, but the message was clear and consistent and George was ready for it after a bad spot of pneumonia that two winters running. (The pneumonia only occurred once again for George, in 1999. "Less stress," he explained when the topic came up.)

Shirley was working part time at the local library in the early 1990s. (The transition between volunteering part time and working part time happened in 1998). I'd eventually learn that she started in 1987 after her own retirement. Before then she worked as the bookkeeper for an independent movie theater in the town. It got bought up and turned into one of the chain theaters in 1987 though and after that they didn't need a local bookkeeper. Shirley was 51 at the time.

I had seen Mark and Debra over the years of course, coming back to visit their parents. Occasionally I had seen Debra's two daughters as well when they were brought over by their mother to see George and Shirley. (Mark never had children.) There was a cluster of family activity around holidays and birthdays. Eventually in 1979 I reached the year that Debra left home. She was 18 and off to college back East. As time continued to unwind from my perspective she was a teenager at home with all that future ahead of her. Mark moved out in 1976 at the age of 19 when he got a good paying job at a factory in Detroit.

Teenage years are awkward. By the middle of the 1970s, both Mark and Debra were in those painful years and Shirley and George had a lot to put up with. Mark ran with what passed for a rough crowd a the time. Debra was boy-crazed. George, for all that he was then a teacher at Glenbard West High School, couldn't handle his own kids for the life of him. Shirley managed though.

With four people living in that house it was a bustle of activity. Every day, almost every hour, was something new. The frenetic energy of youth distorts the apparent passage of time. Eventually Mark and Debra were just children. Then came Debra's birth in 1961. Then Mark's in 1957.

The house was built in 1955 as a wedding gift for a newlywed couple. George Francis Hill, aged 29 had married Shirley Hill (née Brooks) moved in in the Fall of 1955. It was a large two-story house, just right for the family that would follow in the years ahead.

George was so young at 29 and Shirley even younger at 19. That old woman I had seen die nearly 60 years (actually less than a month) earlier was so filled with joy when her husband carried her across the threshold into their new home. The two were filled with potential and amazement and the confusion of youth. So very much awaited them.

Since I have disconnected from this the unraveling ball of thread that was the history of this house I can't look at it the same way. I hear George's chair (long gone now) squeaking in the study (now a guest room). I hear children running down the stairs on a summer morning, ready to bike out to the lake. But mostly I hear Shirley's voice, young and reading her children a story or old and on the phone with Ruth talking about the way things were.

And, of course, Shirley's death last year, a few weeks ago, and more than eighty years ago.