We've a long history together. About 70 years-worth. Although we live in different cities now, we were once high school friends. Still living in Toronto are other friends we had in common and until recently she kept in fairly close touch with them. She hasn't had an easy life. In her first marriage that resulted in three children, her husband, a man I had never liked, chose to leave her in favour of the baby sitter they employed, a 'mature' teen.

Her second husband was, she said, a good man. I'd never met him, never knew him. In her later years, when she was in her late 70s, she had a third male companion, though they never lived together; he in his own apartment she in hers. But they did accompany one another every winter to Florida to escape Canada's cruelly cold winter. He was in his early 90s years ago, a concentration-camp survivor who experienced the Holocaust first-hand. A man of exceptional vigour for his age.

 

She hasn't mentioned him lately and I haven't asked. Too painful. It reminds me of my late mother's late-in-life romance with a man when she was in her 70s, too. They shared social outings together, each of them owned a cottage at a popular 'resort', but they too wouldn't live together because my mother wouldn't have it. He was older than she was, and she recalled what it was like looking after my father decades earlier when he was suffering end-stage cancer.

 

My friend has just been informed by a heart specialist that she needs angioplasty. That was a month ago. She was informed she would be given a date for surgery. At least now the procedure isn't what it was just a few years ago. Now it can be done through micro-surgery; less invasive, so less bleeding, faster recovery. Which is what I told her, hoping to hearten her. But given the situation in Toronto right now with soaring COVID cases and hospitals barely coping, it's not likely surgery will be scheduled for her for quite some time.

 

She emails me that she hasn't been out of her apartment really for the past nine months. I had been telling her that this is really unhealthy for her, to get out and get some fresh air and exercise, and she did venture out in the summer months on occasion to walk around her building. And lately she informed me she has graduated to a walker. She had sold her car a few years ago, and isn't very mobile now. I saw her last about six years ago, and at that time she was moving pretty carefully. 

She sees one of her daughters only briefly, when she drops groceries off for her mother. I had suggested that she go shopping with her daughter and son-in-law, just to get out and about, see other people, engage in some measure of normal life. But she took her own advice and her daughter still does her grocery shopping, as she does as well for her mother-in-law. How her daughter cannot see that this is an unhealthy situation for her elderly mother to be left alone and lonely is beyond me.

 

 

Today she wrote she has asthma and mask-wearing impedes her breathing, and she hasn't been outside in months. Her only human contact is local telephone conversations. Her entertainment is going on the Internet, looking at social media sites, sending emails. And I feel so badly for the poor woman. How many more are there like her? Legions.

And knowing that I know how fortunate I am. Though I hardly need that to remind me. Married for the past 65 years to an intelligent, warm, amusing, talented man whom I knew as a boy at a time when we were both 14 years old and had already become fast companions. We share everything, care about one another, look after the welfare of two little dogs, embark on mutually pleasing adventures. And now when COVID has closed down normalcy for everyone we cope together. Our daily forays into the forest nearby our home with our little dogs has been a life-saver.