Mrs. Something before the 'R'

Mrs. Something before the 'R'

There was a man I knew when I was twenty four and when he died, it did not matter all that much.

I read about it in a newspaper, the way I would about a politician's tax evasions or the supposed weather of the day. It was nothing remarkable – myocardial infarction following a life of stress and a terrible diet, not that it showed –the lucky man. I know because I saw a photograph of him the year he died - in a grey suit, on the way to a meeting in that highfalutin Manhattan skyscraper of his.

The headline claimed that he had been written out of his own company – the journalists were being polite; he had been kicked to the kerb. He was old, he was rich and he had hired the city's best young high flyers to look after his business.

And now, they no longer needed him.

My husband had clucked sympathetically at the news– a second's apathy at the sorry state of the old and rich. He had nothing to worry about – he was an average doctor at an average practice in an area with few decent healthcare facilities. He had a comfortable life ahead of himself.

I had always known that the man in the photograph would become another city suit. When I was twenty four, he had been twenty seven and he had never played Frisbee in his life. I had called him a bore and he had replied with his own retort but never once did the man protest against my conclusion.

He didn't mind being a bore, he told me once. His father had died young, leaving him a business and a dream. If fulfilling that dream meant being just another corporate yawn to the young, spirited woman he was sharing a table with, then so be it.

I think that was the first time I fell in love with him. In those days, I was a writer and I had travelled enough of the world through yellow paper pages to know that it could have just been another line to pull at my heart. So I ignored him and bought myself another cup of coffee.

But over time, I fell in love with him over and over again. Once, when he came with me to visit my ailing mother in an ugly, broken house that was far beneath what he was accustomed to; he spent the night looking after her even after I was called away to work and my mother told him she would manage alone somehow.

I fell in love with him once more when he made me terrible coffee on a rainy day and listened wordlessly as I listed all the reasons why I should not have been fired.

But all of this meant nothing. Falling in love was different to loving him. There is no falling when you love someone. No dizzying rush, no surge of overwhelming emotion. Loving someone is quieter, far quieter, and all the more difficult to understand.

I did not love him until the day he apologised and said that he was leaving. That his father's dream was bigger than his own desires. That there was no other way.

Much as his eyes had implored mine, he had made no promise to return; I did not wait for him either.

I passed the rest of my days without that man. Not with bitterness, nor with any regret. He had died from my life, after all, long before his own demise and he had lived on within me long after he had left.

So when I read the news of his death, I only paused for a brief moment.

It was one o'clock and I was meeting my daughter for lunch. I closed the newspaper and shouldered my bag, calling out to my husband to water the plants before leaving.