Sooner

As Nokie and I took our daily constitutional this late afternoon, we ran into Nancy, whose house is right on the road we walk every day. Sometimes we run into her and her dog, Sooner, who is so named because she rather eat "sooner than later." Sooner, a sweet pit bull terrier, was wearing her black flannel coat and, as usual, displayed her zest for life. She began playing with a lettuce-head-sized ball of snow ice, rolling it around, pushing it down the snowy embankment and then racing after it. I always enjoy running into them and chatting with Nancy. I used to pass her often as she gardened or weeded in front of her house. We would always wave to one another, but I didn't start talking to her, really, until after her husband passed away.

One late summer day a year and a half ago, Paul and I were walking down the road. It was that time of year when the road is neither muddy, icy, snowy or dusty, but a softly compacted dirt that feels springy underfoot. Just as we passed Nancy's the house of her son and his girlfriend, who live in a house across a field from her, we saw Peter, Nancy's husband, lying by the side of road, with his head near another neighbor's driveway and his feet sticking out in the road. We saw the neighbor bending over him, looking distressed. We realized something was terribly wrong and offered to go for help. The neighbor said he'd called 911 and so we offered to try and find Nancy and perhaps see if Tim, a local doctor who lives in the neighborhood, happened to be home. I remember the ashen color of Peter's face and the sense I had, and I think Paul did too, that he was already gone. Apparently, he'd been talking to his neighbor and suddenly collapsed.

Paul and I raced to Nancy's circular driveway and went up and knocked on the door and rang the bell. No one answered. We walked home as quickly as we could and called Deb, Tim's wife, and she said he was busy at the clinic. We thought we could hear the ambulance approaching Baker Brook Road. As it turned out, Peter had died, immediately, from heart failure. He was in his late fifties and he and Nancy had been together since high school. She wasn't at home, she later told me, because she had been walking the loop, less than a half mile away from where he collapsed.

It's impossible, of course, to know how Nancy feels, grief is so private, particularly between partners. A very good friend of mine, J., died of a brain aneurysm the day before his wedding. Other than hearing the news of his death, I didn't speak to his fiancee until recently--seventeen years later. I ran into her and her young son in a cafe in Western Massachusetts. It was a strained, strange, but eventually, poignant and revealing meeting. Clearly her life since J.'s death had been shaped and formed by it nonetheless. She was still trying to break free from the shadow it cast on her life. She told me her son, born fifteen years after her J.'s death--and whose father is a man to whom she now has a co-parenting relationship with, but not a romantic one--was conceived on J.'s birthday.

J. was a dear friend and not the first person I would know to die suddenly. This is why I feel a particular compassion for Nancy, although none of my friends were my lovers or husbands of many decades as Peter was for her. But still, I do understand the sudden yanking away of someone--much sooner than could have been imagined--who is integral not just to your life, but to the sense of who you are in that life, and how it is a distinct and certainly transforming experience.