The art of being a neighbor is being lost.
I know this as both participant and recipient.

I was over at Bill’s delivering groceries when he delivered this -
They buried my neighbor today.
She died?
Yes, last week.
What happened?
She was 80, he shrugged.

I never met his neighbor but she was one of the only fragments of his past. They had lived across the street from each other for decades, had known each other before they were widowed and before age and malady robbed them of the ability to do yard work or walk around the block.

She had called when I had delivered groceries recently, called on the landline just to catch up.
Thanks for calling, call again, he said as he signed off.
She was gone now.

While I sat in Bill’s living room chatting about this and that, his neighbor’s three daughters made the pilgrimage across the street to bring Bill a grocery sack of funeral leftovers, little bits of sandwich platters and fried chicken and odds and ends, the kinds that church people had brought to Bill when his wife had died in 2021.
Bill was good to our mother, one said.
He helped with her yard and trimmed her shrubs.

Bill can’t walk around a grocery store, much less do yard work these days.
He is on the receiving end of neighboring now.
I felt crushed by the loss of this woman I didn’t even know.

When all the people who know you die, who are you left to be?