Someone dies quite suddenly. Things happen. He wasn’t young, but he was fit. A sudden physical event. You have trouble with words as a result. All you want to do is paint, draw and sleep.

Words seem paltry. He wasn’t even a close friend. But as has been pointed out this morning by my friend who has been a coach, and who has been coached by some of the great ones, coaching is intimate. With swimming you are close to naked. You can’t conceal the ways you are too anything — fat, skinny, hairy, smooth, spider-veined, slow, uncoordinated.

We use the middle school before it opens for the students. He always got to the pool early to set up the lane markers and talk to the early birds, who would be stretching. I never made it there early. Always just on the edge of late. Once in a while solidly on time, with a moment or two to mix it up on the pool deck. You get changed into your suit, go into the pool area with your pull buoy and water bottle, cap and goggles. Some of the strongest, fastest swimmers (Lanes 6, 5, 4) bring fins and hand paddles for special drills. You sign in and get over to your lane but stay on deck. I have been in lane 2 since sometime in autumn of 2018.

Our coach is Kim Bierwet. I just can’t say was quite yet.

Kim rhymes with swim. He wanted us to learn, push ourselves, get faster and stronger, but also have fun doing it, and be kind to the others. And learn their names. In the pool, there’s really no need to know names. But he wanted us to know the names of everyone in all lanes. Sometimes, he’d break our routine to get us to do an activity that would help us remember names.

I still think of Lane 1 as the East Coast and Lane 6 as the West Coast. You don’t really interact much with the people in other parts of the country. You’ve got plenty going on in your own lane counting laps, working on drills, avoiding banging into other people — so of the 36 people in the class, I know faces and bodies, but mostly not names.

To start the class, he’d announce the warm-up and then, our cue to get in, “The water awaits your presence.”

All bodies of water await our presence. All the time. Now I even think that phrase as I step into the shower. I am grateful, ever so grateful, to have had seven years of lessons with this person. Other people will teach me. But they won’t be Kim. Now it will not ever again be Kim. I’m sorry that I missed the class on Oct. 15. I’m sorry I didn’t start taking classes sooner — like many years ago.

I just never thought about him dying. Sometimes I did think about him retiring. After finishing his 40-plus year career as a coach to elite athletes, he would have to at some point also stop working for the city recreation department — for almost no pay, and getting up at the crack of dawn to pace around the pool’s edge.

He was handsome. He was funny. He was excellent at the kind of math you must master to organize workouts for different levels of swimmers who won’t swim at the same speeds but need to start and finish at the same time. But none of that was the main thing. His attention to each of us was persisting. While attention can never be evenly distributed, and some of us angled for it and others of us did not, he lavishly awarded it to all — his observations, advice, enthusiasm, encouragement.

Good work. Good job. That was excellent. That was excellent today. Great job.

Most of us didn’t know much about the rest of his life. I didn’t. I had occasionally seen him around town with his beautiful family. I knew he owned a boat. I knew he sometimes traveled and liked to scuba dive. But that wasn’t ours. Ours was Tuesdays and Thursdays for a little over an hour, in which the world was aquamarine and our turf of troubles narrow as a single lane, with nothing at all to think about but focus on the hand entering the water at the start of the pull, and becoming that fish, finding streamline, finding the rhythm of pulling, kicking, experimenting with lengthening or shortening this, slowing or quickening this, taking the breath.

Taking the breath without breaking that streamline. And feeling his eyes, wherever he was looking, feeling his eyes on us. Great job today.

Carol Edelstein lives in Northampton.