Dragging home from Chicago, the shoulder strap of my overnight bag digs deeper into my shoulder than it did when I left Portland. The funeral program I’d slipped into my computer case can’t account for the extra weight. Must be the thought of having just buried my closest high school friend.
I unpack my dress shoes. A clump of cemetery mud clings to a nook between the right shoe’s heel and arch. Mud from the graveside earth that later covered my friend. I scrape it off. Can’t scape off the reality that I’m much closer to merging with the mud than I was 10 years ago. I’ve reached the age where my peers are starting to die — and I don’t like it.
Fifty-four years ago, a stocky and awkward guy named Bob cracked my wariness of strangers with a simple introduction in our high school study hall. Over the years, he tamed my rancor and curbed my top-10 hate lists by hearing them, then challenging me to flip them into gratitude lists. So much of what I perceived thereafter to be good fortune sprung from his seeker’s outlook. Arguments awakened chances to strike common ground. Loss signaled invitations to healthy risks (my wife and I adopted Lilly after re-homing our first dog). Bob could, as we Jews might say, stir shit into Shinola.
Now, Bob is gone. And I struggle to hold my gratitude. Especially as my wife’s and my doggie daughter inches closer to the rainbow bridge. Four months ago, Bob was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Metastases claimed him quicker than expected. Two months ago, our Lilly, the Boston terrier, was diagnosed with grade 3 locally aggressive sarcoma. The kind that wraps its cancerous tendrils around nearby tissue. As of today, Lilly’s end looms on a hazy horizon. We’re not sure whether it’s the next town or some city beyond the hill.
Were he alive today, Bob would encourage me to hold Lilly closer. Closer to the knowledge that loving and aliveness can magnify as physical life slips away. Be present, he would say. Love harder and listen with more than your ears.
Two weeks out from her second electrochemotherapy, Lilly’s not worse for the wear. Minimal treatment side effects: red patches and edema on her right elbow. Nothing that gabapentin and silver sulfadiazine compound can’t soothe. She slathers me with kisses and throws her furry chicken in my lap. Pick it up, daddy! I oblige, trying not to imagine the day she stops asking to play.
Bob rallied following palliative radiation to treat metastasis to his eye. My wife and I had planned to visit him during the first week in June. The news of his death punched my gut and drove my fists into the nearest pillow. My old, bitter ways and top-10 hate lists tempted. Bob would not want that. At Bob’s gravesite, I read a testament to the first man who revealed to me the honor of affection between men. I vowed not to seethe in bitterness over the last day we could not share and revel in the thousand days we did.
My wife and I have shared 4,703 days — and counting — with Lilly. We will love her however many days she has left. Then, we’ll love the memories of her and how she further opened us to the risks and joys of love.
I crumple the dried clump of cemetery mud I scraped off my shoe into our Japanese elm’s planter. That’s where Bob’s love will grow.
In loving memory of Robert Isaac Marovitz 1953-2025. You were, are, and will always be a blessing.