There are people who have crossed our paths, marked where they stood in our minds and who return from time to time. They are not physically present. They’re not ghosts. They are those who imprinted on our lives.
Born in Cuba and educated at the Sorbonne, this gentle person sometimes forgot which language he was to use and was famous for occasionally beginning class in French. The confusion reflected on our faces brought him back to English, although if a student asked a good question or gave the correct answer, he answered, “Bonne!” repeated three times.
The word was that Castro had forced him to leave, but, he never mentioned it and no one asked.
He loved being out of doors and when the weather was mild, he would take his classes outside to sit on the grass, under a tree, while he lectured.
My personal memory of him came from a day when I sat in a carrel in the library reading. The professor walked by and stopped to ask what I was reading. “The Congressional Record,” I answered. “Susan, do you have trouble sleeping?” I smiled and laughed just a little.
We met when both of us were members of the local Unitarian-Universalist church. Her husband, who had worked in the visual arts, was a cancer patient. At first, our talks were the sort of casual exchanges between mothers. Her daughter was 8 and my children were 11, 9 and 3.
Soon, she told me her story. Not long after she learned she had become pregnant, her husband underwent spinal surgery. He survived this difficult procedure, but, as she had been too busy to drive while he recovered, her car battery died. He pulled the battery out and a disc slipped again.
His surgeon was concerned about the slowness of his patient’s healing and referred my friend’s husband to an oncologist who detected cancer and gave him three months to live.
The couple panicked. Would he live long enough to see his child? He lived for eight years and continued to work as a designer for six of those years. After he retired, she became the family’s financial support, as well as mother and wife. Twenty months later, when he picked her up at the commuter rail station, she was alarmed to see one lens was missing from his prescription sunglasses. He was unaware. His license was revoked and he went into a sharp decline. Exhausted and afraid, my friend lost weight and aged. His decline was steep. His last eight days were spent in hospice.
Over the next weeks, she recovered. Her beauty returned and her life with her daughter was reshaped. She told me, “If our love hadn’t been so strong, I never would have made it through.”
I became aware of him when I was very young. Perhaps when I was just 15. He was behind me in the Communion line and his folded hands were just over my left shoulder. I stopped on my way back to my seat, thinking the hands were those of an elderly man who was unsteady on his feet. Instead, there was a tall boy about my own age.
I watched him follow his parents into church every Sunday. I learned his name because his picture was often in our local paper, for his victories in track and field, and, later, because he was a National Merit scholar. As he was bound for college,in California, I felt we would never meet.
But, we did meet. We did become a couple, despite his then being a student in Ann Arbor while I went to college in Detroit. I was never able to tell him of my feelings. As the relationship grew, his parents asked to meet me. His parents approved, but, my parents’ objection to him increased. They won and we lost.
In 2011, as his 66th birthday approached, I became anxious about the day. I wanted not to be home. I spent that day volunteering. When I returned home, I wondered whether his birthday was happy and how he celebrated. I sat down at my computer and began typing his name, although I knew the internet would not reveal how his day was. I hit return. In less than a minute, his obituary appeared. He had died two weeks earlier. I never stopped missing him.
Susan Wozniak has been a caseworker, a college professor and journalist. She is a mother and grandmother.