Funny how sometimes an executive decision such as yesterday’s to finish cleaning off the driveway in foresight of a storm, and despite the fact it was a wrong one (the driveway is a sheet of ice) it still leads back to memories warm enough to melt the ice if memories had substance.
January 9th, 1999, 9:00 a.m.: A phone call while I’m in the shower starts off a day that ends with the death of a much loved neighbor. A heart attack, I rush next door and desperately blow life and pound his heart to make it work again, until the ambulance arrives and I look up to see my husband crying in their kitchen. His wife and I go with the state trooper behind the racing ambulance; and in my heart I know I’ve done no good. I’d heard Andy chipping ice away all morning in his driveway, and once I heard his truck pull into ours.
Within an hour in the ER we know he’s gone. And we survivors stare at each other in disbelief. I make the phone calls to his daughter and his sister and his son, and then I go to see him one last time to say I tried.
We don’t get home till after noon, and when I finally make the treacherous walk across the hard icy shell of our lawns, I stop outside our own garage doors and start to cry. A bucket of sand is sitting there that Andy left us just before he’d gone inside to die.
And Andy wouldn’t have wanted this, but two weeks and another ice storm later at his service, two hundred people moving in slow baby steps up the pure gleam of icy parking lots to reach the church just to say goodbye.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
I am sorry{again}. Me-thinks you have had your fill.