Lingering Opportunities
I’m thinking of a memorial I attended several years ago. It was for Betty, a woman who had just died in her 90’s, and also for her husband, Bob, who had died forty years earlier, when he was probably not yet 60. The people who had gathered were invited to stand up and say something that they remembered about them. Most of the attendees were unknown to me, other than Bob and Betty’s two surviving children. The one other person I knew was my ex-wife, Helene, whom I have scarcely seen since we divorced in the mid-1980’s. Her presence there must have thrown me back into the four years when Bob and Betty were important people in our married life together.
When their son Alan, holding the microphone, asked me if I would like to say anything, I just politely shook my head. Now I can think of plenty of things I could have said about both Bob and Betty, but that would have required me to open up to a period of my life in the presence of the woman with whom I had shared it.
For instance, I could have shared how appreciative I still was that Betty and Bob had organized an Easter egg hunt for my two young nieces when my sister visited me in Albuquerque from Canada. Their welcome of my Canadian family made me feel more at home in this country where I still live.
Speaking of foreign lands, I don’t want to lose those four years of my life just because the relationship that brought me to this country disappeared in the mid 1980’s–as if it had never existed. I don’t have the resentment that sometimes clings, like a shroud, over relationships after they end; and so I don’t need to abandon ship on that part of my life.
I want to keep friendly access to those four years, even though another character in my journey through those days jumped ship. During those years, I developed interests and engagements that were dormant when I left Montreal in the mid-1970’s. I have started my own family, co-founded a non-profit, made friends (now most lamentably old or gone), discovered a spiritual path that nourishes me, and—after publishing a few short stories in Montreal—returned to writing in a way that has become central in my life.
This is not the start of a new memoir or even a recovery mission to recapture lost time. I began with the simple wish to remember a few moments in my life, including times I spent with Bob and Betty Sinescu. Since I have lost the chance to say anything at a memorial where people met to say goodbye, I would have liked to share that Bob and I used to hike and play bridge together. When he developed throat cancer and couldn’t swallow much of anything, I made a thermos of vichyssoise and Betty said he had a few sips in his hospital room and pronounced it good. We were hiking at the top of Piedra Lisa trail when a deafening crack of thunder and simultaneous flash of lightening landed a few yards away. Racing to get off the elevated crest, I saw that the tree beside which I had been sitting moments before was now shards of firewood around a short smoldering trunk. The Angel of Death decided to let me stick around for another 40 years. Bob was not so lucky. Betty and I continued to meet and she would tell me what she thought of my books. Her openness to others was an ongoing Easter Egg hunt for many of us.
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