Life is unpredictable. There are always the statistics. You do better if you exercise and don't drink to excess. You get education and you have more possibilities for employment. You drive at the speed limit. You do what you can.
But essentially, it's unpredictable. You just don't know.
Thursday night I had dinner at the house of an old friend and his wife. She is recovering. From what? Two years ago she got a call that her 53 year old son, in perfect health and with excellent life habits, was at the table when his face fell onto his plate and he was dead. My friend's wife was struck, she was just struck. Her son, her pride, a father and husband and son, just up and died. I went out to dinner with her husband, my old friend, shortly afterwards and he didn't know what to do for her. He would have done anything, but it seemed like the only thing he could do was hang in there with her, which he did. His concern must have helped. At dinner Thursday night she was doing awfully well. She is quite a good cook and a lovely woman. She told me that her younger son told her that she had to survive and do well, for the benefit of the rest of them. That was very helpful to her. She looked at me and said, you either go up or you go down, and I'm going up, I have to.
On Friday I went on a walk and then to lunch with a lady who sits with me on a board, whom I've know for maybe 15 or 20 years, but not well. She picked me up in her Ford SUV with her cute little 11 year old dog Jack and we drove out to the Lafayette Reservoir for a three mile walk around it. It was a nice, cool, sunny day and we walked easily around the lake. It was nice to have the little dog trailing right behind us with his quick little legs and big brown eyes and interest in every other dog he met.
Afterwards we went to my favorite restaurant in Lafayette, Millie's American Kitchen, a 10 table restaurant in a little house it seems like, where I know the two owners well, Victor and Aimee. I sat there with my friend, very satisfied to introduce her to the restaurant. She said, even before the food was served, that she will come back to this restaurant. A restaurant is place, people, and food, and you know when you like it. I hadn't known all her story, but we were feeling close and it was easy for her to tell it. She grew up blue collar and became a nurse and escaped from her collegiate nursing school at Binghamton to the Bay Area maybe 40 or 50 years ago. She and her husband were in tech early, in the 80's, and they did very well. They had three daughters and they arrived at their place in Tahoe one night. As they usually did, she took the kids to bed while her husband went out to the street to turn on the water. Most people turn off the water right at the house but he did it at the street. He didn't come in for a while and my friend went to look for him. It was actually a neighbor who found him, she said. He had had to dig out some snow to get to the faucet and when he did the snow bank fell on him and he suffocated. He was airlifted to Reno but it was no use.
She got married again and had another child but this marriage was a mistake and they got divorced.
Her mother lived in Florida. She had lost her second husband six months previously when my friend visited her. They went out to eat. As they usually did, they went out to eat at an Italian restaurant. Uncharacteristically, her mother ordered a Bloody Mary. Also uncharacteristically, she ordered osso bucco, which she never did. Something was different about her mother, ordering like that. The osso bucco was too much for her. She lost her breath and my friend, a nurse, went behind her and tried to do the Heimlich maneuver, but old bones are brittle, and she was unsuccessful and her mother died. My friend called her sister to tell her, and her sister said, That is just like the bitch to do that. They hadn't had a good relationship.
This sister had had trouble all her life. She was bipolar and had a very difficult life, very unhappy. She barely survived. Then she got the initial symptoms of Alzheimer's. She started being cooped up at home because she would get lost when she went out. Her life was unbearable – it has always been unbearable, but now it was more so. So finally my friend took her to just outside Basle, Switzerland, and they assisted her suicide. They made it as beautiful as they could, with a beautiful vase for her ashes, and friends.
I think people feel freer now to tell me these things since I lost my wife to Alzheimer's. Somehow, maybe they think I'll understand. Or maybe I can be there with them as a member of the club. I don't know. I really don't.
But one thing I do know. Life is just unpredictable.
My brother called me at about the same time., I think in between these two events. He's got a tough life right now, and he was unhappy when he called me. He has a fair amount to be unhappy about, I won't go into it, but I'm amazed he keeps it up, with all he has to put up with. I think it helped for us just to talk. We've known each other for 80 years.
So today is Saturday. It was nice out, but I just stayed home all day and finished the first draft of a book review that my neighbor David and I are writing together. It's a nice challenge, a new book about the presidential power of the pardon. David and I wrote a paper on that subject a few years ago, so this is the second time we've been asked to review a book on the subject. I finished the draft and passed it back to him, so I'll be able to turn back to my French assignments for this week.
We are all survivors. Not in the colloquial sense of having gone through a challenge and come out the other end intact after a challenge, congratulating ourselves for acts of will. We're just the ones left behind alive, for a while.
I had some pasta for dinner. It was pretty good.
Budd Shenkin
