TRIP AND SHOCK
I left with Todd and Susie from Marshall at about 9 a.m. for the 600 mile ride to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. We were going to the every other year reunion of the Mahy family, Todd and his three sisters, Sara, Lisa and Mary. The four siblings meet weekly every Sunday at 11 a.m. on ZOOM, which they have been doing since ZOOM became popular during the pandemic. Sara lives in Washington, D.C. a couple of hours away, Mary lives outside Geneva, Switzerland in the French village of Gex, Lisa lives on the other side of the United States in Bellingham, Washington.
Our ride was uneventful on a grey, cold, windy day until 4 in the afternoon. Interstate 40 and then 95 were enclosed by straight pine forests all the way across Virginia. When we left the Interstate for gas every strip mall was the same series of chain restaurants and banal buildings looking as if they had been placed there overnight and would vanish the next day, simply flimsy boxes with fake fronts and bright signs put there to sell stuff, the American way.
But at 4 p.m. as we were sailing along I got an email about my friend, Dean Kahl, one of my Friday old man’s coffee group. He had just died a few minutes before. It was a sudden shock which has stayed with me all week.
Three weeks ago he had been with us at McDonalds and had told us about a project he was going to right after our meeting. He was going to visit a Mormon data bank in Asheville to learn about some Kentucky ancestors. He was upbeat and cheerful. Two weeks ago he wasn’t with us because of a medical appointment but this Friday, yesterday, we didn’t know why he wasn’t there. Don Collins promised to call him and to find out how he was doing and then to let us know. Now, a day later Don was contacting us. Dean had had a fall and somehow went straight to Care Partners Hospice and now, one day later, was dead. Don and Vickie, who both taught Chemistry at Warren Wilson College with Dean for 40 years went to see him a couple of hours before he died. His eyes were open and he was waiting to die. Then they were off to a long planned trip to visit relatives.
It seemed impossible to me that Dean could be fine one day, in hospice the next day and dead the next. It seemed impossible that he could be smiling one day, and for no good reason be gone the next. Of course, I don’t know the whole story, what did finally end his life. All of us in the old man’s group are in our 80’s. We often mention death and wonder that we are still here and very likely death was a passing subject on the last Friday that Dean was with us. But even with our acceptance of death, Dean’s sudden passing was a shock. All the rest of the drive until we got to Rehoboth Beach at 10 p.m. and were welcomed by Todd’s sisters and their families who got there just ahead of us, I was caught in the emptiness caused by his death and the mortality of the rest of us who will meet at the Cornerstone restaurant a week from this coming Friday and face his death together.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 