Maggie was my trainer when I volunteered for a crisis hotline in 1977. Although she was 30 years older than I, we became close friends and colleagues. Maggie and her husband, Peter, came to my wedding. Whenever Maggie and I went out to lunch, I’d say hello to Peter. But I didn’t know him at all outside of these brief encounters and Maggie’s stories about their life together, first in war-torn England, then fleeing the Soviets in Prague, then in America.
When Maggie was stricken with Alzheimer’s, my interactions with Peter became a little like the change in shift between the live-in caretaker and the respite help. “How is she doing today? Will she be able to order off a menu? Does she still know who I am? Have there been any repeats of the time she tried to get out of a moving car? How are you doing?”
“Oh, fine, thanks,” Peter would reply, always the stoic and dignified immigrant. Occasionally I would hear frustration in Peter’s voice as he persuaded Maggie to put on her socks. Or maybe he just spoke louder because Maggie was losing her hearing as well as her mind.
Whenever I would return from my brief outings with Maggie, Peter would say, “She always seems in better spirits after she sees you. Thank you.”
Maggie died seven years ago today, but I have kept up my visits. Every few weeks, Peter welcomes me into the home he and Maggie shared. He is as heartbroken today as he was when she died.
“I’m ready to die, too,” my new 94-year-old friend tells me. “But Maggie wouldn’t want me to be the kind of person who stops getting dressed, stops washing, sits around doing nothing all day. So in the meantime, I’m keeping busy.”
And in the meantime, we talk—about his life in Prague as a multilingual intellectual and journalist before the Nazis came, about his service in the British Royal Air Force, where he met Maggie when stationed in her home town. We talk about Maggie, about politics, about his children and grandchildren, about my work and family.
What a priceless inheritance Maggie has left me.
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What unexpected treasures have you inherited?
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I watched my mother’s three-pack-a-day habit rob her bit by bit over the years. Shortness of breath. Not being able to walk more than a block or two. Coughing fits that sounded like being strangled. Oxygen tubing snaking through the house. Gasping for air. Then, mercifully, considering the death by slow suffocation possibly in store for her, my mother succumbed suddenly at home when her heart gave out.
That was nineteen years ago. My mother was 71. Just this week, my brother Dave died in much the same way at age 65. He was a good man, generous, funny, with the proverbial heart of gold.
My eldest brother and I spoke the day after about a lot of things. At some point, I asked him if he was still smoking. Yes, came the answer. My brother said he had two cigarettes left before he had to buy another pack, and he wasn’t yet sure what he was going to do. I jotted down this little thing, somewhere between a poem and a plea, and sent it to him.
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