Ms. Jenny died today

I made up the name.  She had a different name which I am not posting here because I guess I want to protect her family's privacy should they ever be surfing the internet and find her name attached to my blog. Since they didn't give me permission and since I have an ethical code to which I am supposed to adhere in my professional capacity (a topic for another day). So anyway, Ms. Jenny died today. You'd think that since I am a hospice social worker that this wouldn't be noteworthy.  Not using the word blogworthy because my sense is that blogworthy is nothing as blogs contain very mundane observations.  You'd think that since the criteria for showing up on my caseload includes the likelihood that you will die in the next six months that I wouldn't be surprised when one of my patient dies.  It seems odd to me that I would find myself saying today after I received the page that Ms. Jenny had died, "that was unexpected."
When I first started this job, the nearness to death of my patients was very much in front of my awareness.  Now that I have been doing this job for 2+ years, I suspect that I have begun to count on my ability to anticipate someone's death, to have some sense of when they are "getting close." But I don't have this ability. And I am occasionally surprised when a patient dies, even though I often lose patients every day.
I liked Ms. Jenny.  She was fiercely independent and insisted on living alone in spite of the fact that she was likely going to die from hitting her head on the corner of a piece of furniture as she was falling.  I visited with her three times.  I like listening to her stories.  She liked to talk about her childhood.  She grew up in a family of nine.  She had buried her husband and her daughter and all of her siblings. She didn't like to eat much but she did love hard boiled eggs.
Tomorrow I'm going to try to keep in mind that when I say goodbye to my patients as I'm leaving their house that I might be saying goodbye for the last time.

Goodbye Ms. Jenny.