Died Friday

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Another person I knew died last week. I opened the paper and there was his face. “Died Friday,” the notice said, the picture of him alive and smiling incongruous next to the words.

He wasn’t a close friend. In fact he wasn’t a friend at all. I never confided in him. I never said, “Let’s have lunch sometime.”

We were just two acquaintances who knew the same people, who found ourselves in the same place every now and then. I would see him from across a room and wave and he would smile and wave back. Sometimes, at a party, if we found ourselves next to each other we would talk for a while and then move on.

“Good to see you.”

“Good to see you, too,” we always said.

I never knew where he lived or how many children he had or if he even had children. I just knew his name and where he worked. And he didn’t know much more about me.

And yet if someone had told me that he was getting on a plane and leaving for parts unknown and not planning to come back, ever, I’d have felt a tug of sadness. I liked our chance meetings. I liked him. And if he had heard that I was going away and not coming back, I suspect he would have been a little sad, too.

Going away and not coming back. That’s what death is. One day a person is right where he’s always been, living in the house down the street, working at the mall, jogging past your front door. And then one day you read the paper and there’s his name and he’s gone.

People die. It happens to everyone. And yet every time we come across a name we know and a face we recognize under the word deceased we are surprised.

Why is that? People are temporary. So why are we never prepared when people leave us, even the people who are only on the periphery of our lives?

Sylvia Gerhard brought me pussy willows once. She rang my bell and handed me a bunch. She was a librarian. That’s how I knew her. We met on the street and she was carrying pussy willows and I said, “Where’d did you get them?” And she said she’d picked them, that she knew a place. And a few days later she was at my door.

I looked for her after that. I’d see her walking and we’d wave and smile. That was it. She’s been gone for months, now, and there’s no reason to think of her. No reason to miss her. No reason at all. And yet I do. I used to see her sometimes from my office window. And I would smile even when she didn’t see me. I used to see Stan Mataloff, too, striding by and Mr. Durkee with his dog and Father John who shuffled more than walked.

I think of all these people. I see them in the places I used to see them, except these places exist only in my mind now. I picture Ray Redican in his little house in Dracut and I could believe that he is still there, sitting at his kitchen table reading the newspaper his son Robert brought every day, if his letters hadn’t stopped. His letters were our connection. I go to the mailbox and they’re not there. And I think of him.

We share the earth with billions of people, but we know so few. Most are strangers, except for our family and friends and the acquaintances we wave to and say, “How’s it going?”

The mailman. The guy at the gas station. The librarian. All the kids you grew up with. All the kids your children grew up with. Your friends. Your kid’s friends. Your parent’s friends. All the teachers you and your children ever had. The people from down the street and across town and from the next town, from work, from church, from clubs, from the gym, the hairdresser, the supermarket. All these people are witness to our lives, as we are witnesses to theirs.

I think of Mr. Bernazzani when I walk my dog. And Mr. Bright every time I pass his house. And Kevin Sexton who used to own the corner store and Nellie a woman who worked there 38 years ago.

“Our lives touch so many other lives,” Clarence told George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

It’s wonderful that they do.

I used to chide my aunt about reading the obituary pages before she even glanced at the front page. I never understood why she did this. I never understood why she took the deaths of people she hardly knew personally.

What she never told me is that the death of every person you know even casually is personal. That every time someone you know dies, you not only lose that person, you lose a little of yourself. You lose the instant recognition in that someone’s eyes, the “Hi! It’s so good to see you.” You lose shared history, even if the history is brief. And you lose a fellow traveler who walked the road with you and stood beside you and made life a little better, with something as simple as a smile.