She was 67.

She fell.

She lived alone.

The medications she took made her dizzy.

She suffered from schizoaffective disorder.

Her property manager called to let me know. The residents in the building had seen her with less regularity in the last week. She would take daily walks. She promptly brought her packages inside. In her last week, she was not around as often. Packages collected outside her door.

Her IHSS provider called the police to do a welfare check the morning of. It was already too late. They didn’t come, anyway.

Her property manager entered the apartment to check on her in the afternoon. She called me, the emergency contact, at 3:30 pm. The maintenance man called an ambulance.

I arrived with my husband at 4:30 pm. The paramedics had come and gone. They determined her expiration ordinary, and left the body in the apartment. I had to decide what to do with it.

I did not understand where she was when I walked in. Her apartment was clean, quiet, empty.

The bathroom door was closed.

Her body was in the bathroom, behind the closed door.

My husband went into the bathroom before I did. I can’t remember exactly what he said after he saw her. I braced myself and slowly opened the bathroom door.

She lay face-down on the laminate floor. One of her feet was purple. The rest of her just looked like her. She was wearing olive green joggers and a long-sleeved cotton shirt.

I touched her cropped hair. It felt coarser than I expected. When was the last time I touched it?

There was nothing of note around her really. She fell and landed face-first.

I shut the bathroom door behind me. We called a local funeral home to come pick her up. We would have to wait an hour and a half for the driver to arrive.

There were a lot of prescription pills in orange bottles on her kitchen counter. There were more inside one of her cabinets. More in her medicine cabinet.

She kept a calendar on a small writing desk near her kitchen. She had labs drawn earlier in the month. Her IHSS provider had last come in January. She had an upcoming appointment with her doctor on Thursday.

Her phone was on the counter next to her prescription bottles and her emergency contact sheet. She didn’t have a passcode so the phone just let me in. I checked her WhatsApp. The message I wrote her late the night before was unread. “Hi mom :). We miss you. Do you want to come visit sometime in March?”

I will be writing about her for the rest of my life.