On Tuesday, I was up and out of bed earlier than usual. Raising a shade and looking out a window, I saw that it was not yet fully light outside. I was preparing coffee when I heard a soft knocking at my back door, which startled me. Because of the early hour, I asked suspiciously, “who’s there?”
It was my upstairs neighbor and friend, who has been living in my building for twenty years or more. However, at this early hour I knew something had to be wrong. With slight trepidation I opened my back door. I could not make out much in the darkness that still filled the back stairwell. I turned on one of the lights inside my kitchen.
“Mike’s gone,” he said. I could see that my friend was wiping away tears. It took a moment for me to register the name “Mike.” I then recalled that Mike is my friend’s brother-in-law. I remembered he lived somewhere in Florida.
Mike and my friend’s sister had briefly stopped to see me and Lee once or twice while in town visiting their daughter and my friend. Having seen our city garden, they thoughtfully had sent me a tall and handsome native plant after Lee died, one that I was certain Lee happily would have incorporated had she been around and able to plant it. I’m not a gardener. I gave the plant to our friends Tom and Sherry, so I still get to admire it whenever I visit them.
However, these events occurred before my friend introduced me to Tim, my urban gardener. As things have turned out, this commemorative plant gave me the impetus to maintain, even enhance, Lee’s splendid garden here, and the several additional gardens that she patiently and lovingly had developed in our years at Deer Tick Manor.
***
My friend loves his sister, of course, but he was also quite fond and proud of Mike. He told me the other morning they have been married for many years. According to my friend, Mike was a smart and creative “IT” professional. Now, in his early sixties, he was a multi-millionaire by dint of his boundless energy and fine analytical mind.
Recently, in fact the same day that Robyn and I returned home from Hawaii, my friend traveled to Florida for a semiannual visit with his mom and dad. On this visit he stayed with his sister and Mike, who live in the same general area as their folks. My friend told me previously that his sister and Mike had built a large and expensive multi-level house on a piece of beachfront property. Whenever my friend would return here following one of these family reunions, he invariably would remind me that his sister and Mike even had an elevator inside their house and enjoyed other expensive material trappings only the richest people can afford. On his recent visit, my friend learned that they had just acquired an adjacent piece of undeveloped beachfront property, which Mike, acting on the recommendation of one of his high-priced advisors, planned to develop as a turtle sanctuary for its tax advantages. However, according to my friend, Mike also seemingly did enjoy the company of his sea turtles.
My friend also said that whenever he and Mike relaxed on the beach, Mike liked to smoke a hand-rolled Cuban from a cigar collection he acquired while making regular forays to that island with his wife. Though not intended as criticism, my friend thought it ironic that Mike was pecunious. Indeed, he told me that on the last visit to Cuba, Mike got irritated when he caught his wife slipping extra cash to locals behind his back.
***
After my neighbor and friend knocked on my door early this morning to tell me that “Mike’s gone,” I invited him inside to talk. When he stepped inside, he immediately started sobbing again, so I gave him a reassuring hug and told him to sit down. Next, I mostly quietly listened as he revisited the awful events of the past few hours, interrupting his own narrative occasionally with tearful exclamations that he could not believe Mike was gone.
I found myself touched deeply. From personal experience I was well familiar with the awful empty feeling produced by sheer disbelief. A mere matter of moments after Lee took her last breath, I can recall rushing upstairs to my friend’s apartment to announce that she was gone. Looking back, I think in that moment I simply had needed to confirm this harsh reality. For me, it was like gasping for a breath after holding air inside my lungs until I thought I would burst. Maybe that’s what I was witnessing on this Tuesday morning.
***
I will spare you the details, but to hear my friend’s description, Mike’s death was the result of a grisly and bizarre accident. Mike died alone. When my friend’s sister went outside to fetch him back into the house, she had discovered his dead body.
***
While my friend wondered aloud how such a thing could happen to someone like Mike, who by any objective measure seemed to be perched on top of the world, I thought about Lee’s last moments. Lee had been out of it for the better part of the previous 24 hours due to the deadening effects of the morphine that I had to administer regularly in a holding action to temporarily reduce the gripping, unbearable pain of her cancer.
After what seemed to me like many hours, Lee at last opened her large, soft eyes. She was looking directly into mine. She did not say a word. Then, in an instant, her pain was gone. I am so glad that I was with Lee at the exact moment she left this world.
***
For long months before this end, the cancer had slowly been eating away at Lee’s body. Despite her great inner strength and amazing resilience, I believe there came a tipping point when even Lee could no longer ignore that her personal circumstances were becoming dire. Lee experienced prolonged suffering, which I witnessed firsthand, yet she made the utmost of the opportunity to make her own peace and to share happy and loving goodbyes with family and friends.
***
It is so easy to overlook that our grief is insular and idiosyncratic. Listening to my friend vent about the odd circumstances of Mike’s death and what this death will now mean for him, his sister, his whole family, in the days and weeks ahead, it suddenly occurred to me that my personal grief had been blinding me to this truth.
