She’s pushing 78 years old, but she doesn’t care to know that at the moment. The arthritis in her hands makes it hard for her to snap the cap off her beer bottle. She likes her beer to come in bottles. Ever since her husband died 32 years ago, she swore off drinking from cans.

“It tastes like the can,” she had argued with him when he brought home a six-pack of Miller. She pours the beer from the bottle into a glass she still owns when gas stations gave them away for free. She takes a sip and it cools her parched throat from the cigarette she’s been smoking. She knows that her brain won’t be numb until the fourth glass.

She looks out the window at that tree where her little boy used to play football, throwing it to himself and falling to the ground when he pretended to be tackled. She turns her eyes away from the tree and takes a long swallow of the beer to chase away the memory.

The flare-up of pain in her wrists makes her wince. She looks at the newspaper headlines and wonders why human beings get born only to have to struggle to survive. She lifts the page and sees a photograph of a man holding a baby after a drive-by shooting had killed the child’s mother.

“You poor kid,” she says to the picture. “You don’t know nothing about nothing yet, but you’re gonna learn that bad people are screwing up the world you have to grow up in.”

She thinks of her son again, back to the night he was killed when a Mack truck kicked his car into a concrete barrier when he wasn’t yet old enough to have a drink with his mother. The suffering got so bad the only friend she had was looking up at her from the bottom of her beer glass.

She took another sip and couldn’t remember if Eddie, the Meals on Wheels guy, the self-appointed beer deliveryman was due to bring her dinners for the next seven days. Eddie once surprised her at Christmas with a gift of a singing canary that he said would help cheer her up.

“I don’t want no bird,” she told him.

Two weeks later, he made another delivery and found her sitting at the table, slumped at the shoulders with her hands folded together between two empty bottles. The canary was sitting on its perch in the cage, still as death, silent as stone.

“What did you do to the bird?” Eddie asked.

“I didn’t do nothing to that bird. The damn thing stopped singing right after you brought it here and I haven’t heard a peep since.” He took the bird out of the house and as soon as he placed the cage on the back seat of the car, it began to sing again.

The next time Eddie arrived, she didn’t answer the door. He used the key she had given him just in case she wasn’t home that day. He walked toward her bedroom and he could tell before he got there. She had died in her sleep.

There would be no funeral. The police allowed Eddie to remove her personal belongings from the house. Later that afternoon, he sat down at the kitchen table where she drank her beer and smoked her cigarettes for the past 40 years and wrote a eulogy that he was going to have published in the newspaper the next day. His title would simply be, “She.”

“Do not judge this woman,” he wrote. “Her American dream to get married and raise a family in the house with the yard and the picket fence was a nightmare beginning with her husband’s death after his eight years of sickness. Then there was too much alcohol, and not enough welfare checks after she lost her only child that stopped the boy from giving half his money to his mom.

“Do not judge her. She never gave up on living. She crocheted a pink baby blanket she had left in the closet. She had a paint by number picture of the Last Supper and the only thing she had colored in was the face of Jesus.

“She was halfway done with a letter to her childhood friend who still lived where they grew up together. She wrote, ‘We’ve been saying nothing to each other for 30 years now and I can hardly wait to get your next letter.’

“Do not judge this woman. Yes, she was drunk and depressed, but she was so much more than that. She was a blanket maker, a face painter and a letter writer. She loved babies and Jesus and a childhood friend she knew she would never see again.

“Of course, she has a name, but to the world outside her home she was nameless, nameless like so many other nameless women. There’s one in Everytown, USA. She’s the old lady who sits on her front porch and watches the cars go by in Brodheadsville, Pennsylvania. She’s the woman with those cats in that apartment in Chicago, Illinois. She’s the spinster in Spring Lake, New Jersey, you see on her knees weeding the garden on a summer morning.

“She’s a nobody to everybody and no one ever comes to hear the stories she has to tell. She waits for a ring from her phone, for a knock on the door. She waits to hear a voice that will lift her up and take her back to the days when she was a somebody at a time in her life when she never could have imagined that she’d live to an old age and everything would end like this.

“I hope that when she gets to heaven,” Eddie wrote at the end of his eulogy, “an angel welcomes her home with a bottle of beer.”

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.