Dec. 18 will mark one year since I lost my dearest friend and fellow Street Sense Media vendor, Alice Carter.
I’m dreading the coming holidays without her. The last time I saw her alive was Dec. 11, just a week before she passed, two weeks before Christmas. We shared a cigarette and firmed up logistics for Christmas Eve and Day. I wanted to take her to the latest Star Wars movie on Christmas Day.
I still see her real and alive as can be in my dreams. I’m still looking for the closure that I fear will never come. I have yet to accept that she is gone and I will not see her again. At least not on this earthly plane.
Maybe it’s because she was so young. She would have been just 36 the day after this past Christmas. We were supposed to spend the holiday and her birthday together.
Maybe it’s because it was so unexpected. Alice did live a dangerous life and even though she was 20 some years younger than I, I knew there was a better than average chance she would die before I did.
She didn’t die the violent death I feared and she didn’t die alone. But she died without me at her side. We didn’t get the opportunity to say goodbye to each other as I had hoped. Most people don’t know that Alice had a tumor in her rectum that needed to be removed. It was the HPV that I had thought would take her.
According to sources on the scene, Alice came out of the McDonald’s at 17th and Corcoran and collapsed early in the evening of Dec. 17. First responders found her not breathing, yet were able to resuscitate her and get her to Howard University Hospital. Unfortunately, she went into cardiac arrest the next morning and she was gone.
Autopsy results would later show that Alice had died due a combination of pneumonia and extreme alcohol intoxication. Apparently she had been seen at another of D.C.’s many hospitals earlier that day, though it’s not clear which one.
Alice had been in and out of most every ER in the city for similar circumstances. Why was this time different? Was it just a little too much alcohol this time? Was it the combination? She had a long history of substance abuse and had had bouts of pneumonia before. Was it a matter of negligence on the part of Howard Hospital? Or another hospital?
Maybe some sense of closure still eludes me because I’m still angry and looking to blame anyone other than Alice for her own death.
Or maybe it’s because she was cremated. I understood the necessity of it under the circumstances, but I really wanted to lay my eyes on her beautiful face one last time. It was not to be.
At times it seems everything around me reminds me of her: food, pop culture, all the places in the city Alice frequented.
All I know is I can’t shake this feeling like she really never died and I’m going to see her again at some magical moment. I’ve never been one to spend much time thinking about seeing loved ones in the hereafter, but now it’s all I seem to have.
I miss you so much, Alice. I hope you’re having fun up there in glory. Hope to see you again, my precious baby.
Jeff Taylor is an artist and vendor with Street Sense.
