Yesterday, I went to the wake for a friend.

That doesn’t quite capture it.

Yesterday I joined a wake of friends…

and family…

and colleagues and others who loved and/or liked and/or respected a very good guy.

It was an honor to be in their company.

This man left a lot of great people in his wake.

For the sake of this piece, I’ll call him David (mostly because that is his name).

David was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, a few years back. It is a cruel disease, taking nearly everything from a person but leaving their mind alone… which meant that David was David until his body couldn’t support his Self anymore.

And, according to everyone I met, and listened to, and talked with yesterday, that self was himself until he had to go.

I heard, ‘He did it his way’ more times than I could count.

I left the island at about 1:00, figuring it would take me three hours or so to get back to my old stomping grounds, where the service was being held.

I thought, getting there right at 4:00 would allow me to get in and visit for a bit, with zero time pressure to get back on the road.

Noting it was pretty cold, I grabbed a coat and tossed it in the car, figuring I wouldn’t really need it as I’d just be walking from the warm car into the heated building and then back to the car again.

As I was driving down, my truck’s outside temperature reading was not ticking up.  In fact, several times it ticked down… 20… 19… 18… 17…

It never got above 20, it never dropped below 16.

Again, no worries. I wouldn’t be outside for long.

But.

After a few hours, the GPS guided me off the highway, down the backroads, toward the beautiful, old building that houses the funeral home and…

Holy moly.

There were a lot of cars parked at the funeral home.

There were a lot of cars parked… everywhere.

Along the main street, up and down the side streets…

And then I saw the people.

A line, four and five and six people deep, stretching from the entrance, around the corner, down the driveway, and into the street.

Easily hundreds of people… already.

And so I cried.

No, not because it was freaking freezing.

Because they all came.

I looked down at my car’s clock.

It was 4:10.

The doors had opened at 4:00.

The work day wasn’t even over.

And all these people were already there.

I found a parking spot, down the main road, and took a deep breath as I put my not-even-remotely-appropriate-for-this-cold coat on and opened the door.

I walked up the street, cursing my naked (is ‘unsocked’ a word?) feet, which were trying to look respectable in my girl shoes. Luckily, my pants were long and wide and covered them, but they were going to get cold fast.

The line was more massive up close than it looked when I drove by.

As I walked past the people, to a spot at the end, I ran into a dear friend and we hugged. He was one of David’s best friends, growing up in the same small community, and was helping out with the service. He smiled when I expressed awe and joy at the turn out. I couldn’t tell if he’d expected it, but he certainly appreciated it.

I moved on down, to my ‘spot’, zipped my coat all the way up, put my hands in my pockets, settled in…

And began to listen.

Do you remember when…

Oh my God, and then he…

He was helping me with…

In my kitchen, and his mom was laughing at…

Hundreds of people out in the cold.

With stories of David keeping them warm.

At one point, one of the funeral home employees walked by and was letting us know our estimated ‘time to the door’.

Ours was two hours.

Two hours, in 19 degrees (according to one of my fellow Wakers).

No one even budged.

We nodded and turned back to each other and talked, and listened.

We all made our way slowly forward, people letting older folks, or folks with canes, or women who wore dresses and had naked legs (much tougher on them then my naked feet were on me), go on ahead.

And the line forming behind where I was standing continued to grow.

When we (those in the immediate proximity became ‘our group’) made it inside, it was not only warm with heat, it was warm with people.

It was also loud… with laughter.

Laughter in general… laughter through tears… laughter through stories.

David was one of those people who maintained friendships from his childhood and teen years, and formed new ones all the time.

His (and his wife, Noreen’s) ability to bring people together and make everyone feel included – whether in a conversation, at a gathering, or their home – was (and is) not only wonderful, it is aspirational.

It’s that old Maya Angelou quote isn’t it… ‘… people will never forget how you made them feel.”

I first met David when he and his crew poured the foundation for our house in Dunstable, the first with an apartment attached for Granny and Grampa.

If you know anything about small New England towns, you know that being ‘from New England’ (which John and I both are), and being ‘from this town in New England’ (which we are not (and it didn’t count that John grew up in the town next door)) are two very different things.

We were ‘blow ins’ (in Maine we are ‘from away’) and that was that.

But David owned the foundation company, and he was local. He smiled as we talked and noted how great it was that we were going to have three generations in one house (he wished us luck). He also said we’d picked a pretty great town for raising our kids.

The Old Yankee Man even took a liking to David (and Old Yankee Men tend to peg people right).

And so our time in our small town began, David and his family woven into the fabric of our new existence.

Our youngest, Gabe, went to ‘Miss Laurie’s Daycare’ a few mornings a week with two of David’s kids.

We were also blessed to make mutual friends in the community, and would see David and his family at various back yard barbecues, parties, and celebrations over the course of more than 25 years.

More recently, after we moved to Maine full time, the wedding of mutual friends’ beautiful daughter found us sitting with David and his wife at the reception. By that time, David had been diagnosed (finally (it often takes a while)).

I remember two things, when it came to David, about that night. One was a one-on-one conversation I had with him, where he could not say enough about how special the bride was, how amazing. He had no idea why he was so important to her, but she wanted him there and he was not going to miss her wedding.

I believe my response to him was something akin to “Are you kidding me?!” I  knew the bride (who is amazing) considered David an uncle, and that he was absolutely central – as was his family – in her life. I was gobsmacked that he honestly didn’t know how he’d become so loved by her, and deeply touched that he felt so lucky to be in her orbit.

And the second thing I remember was that he was never alone that night. There were people all around him, wanting to be with him. As long as I’d known him this was true, and it never changed.

His humility was matched by his humanity. It really was.

There’s a comedian out there that makes fun of the ideas of ‘nice’ versus ‘kind’, using Los Angeles and New England for examples.

The bit goes something like this:

In Los Angeles, they are very nice. They drive by you, broken down on the side of the road, in the general vicinity of mountain lions. They don’t stop, but they do smile and wave.

Nice.

In New England, they’ll stop. Curse at you for being broken down (Jesus Cah-ryst what the hell happened?!), curse at your choices in cars (Serves you right, buying a f*ckin’ Hi-yun-day), all while jacking up your car, replacing your tire, and waving off your gratitude as they send you on your way.

Kind.

Somehow David managed to be both.

Sure, sometimes with laugh-out loud commentary, but we are in New England. 

Along life’s highways and byways, we meet people in all sorts of different ways and, sometimes, we are lucky to trip into – rather than over – the lives of some really great ones.

Doesn’t matter whether you see them daily or weekly or even regularly… they make an impression.

My heart breaks that David is no longer here, in person, on this planet.

It breaks that he went through what he did, and that his family went through it with him.

Caregiving is exhausting, pre-grieving crushing.

I hate that those who existed in the everydays of his orbit don’t get to have him in theirs.

The loss of each person is a great one.

Some just feel… planetary.

If grief is indeed love with no place to go, then there’s a lot of love bouncing around in the atmosphere today.

I hope we all feel it.

❤️

Thanks for readin’

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