It's been a quietly pensive, moody day in this household. Disturbing news tends to do that to anyone. In one sense it wasn't unexpected, even while it was. A week ago an old school chum had emailed me that our mutual friend of such long standing -- a lifetime ago to the present -- had suddenly been taken to hospital; it appeared she was in renal failure. Placed on dialysis, my friend Surely said she was unable to get any more information about our friend Edith's condition.

Irving and I spent a lot of our leisure time with those two old school chums of mine and their boyfriends/husbands. Not together in a group, come to think of it, but just two couples at a time. We went places together that teenagers tend to gravitate to, and our relationship encompassed a time in our lives when we were all shaping up to be adults. We all of us married young; for us it was age 18 and by that time we had already been together for four years, Irving and I.

We had lost contact with them over the years, as they and we raised our families. They remained in Toronto and we moved to Ottawa fifty years ago. Life keeps one busy, there are so many distracting elements in life along with the imperatives. Then the oddest thing happened about ten years ago when my sister in a telephone conversation mentioned she met an old friend of ours. They both were involved in community staging of dancing events.

I gave my sister my email address (my sister is legally blind and has never used a computer) to give to Surely and in a day's time we began exchanging email messages. And then I was given Edith's address and then another mutual friend's email address. There was a lot of 'catching-up' to do. Edith's husband Alvin had passed away years earlier, and her oldest child at age eight had died in a traffic accident. She was a widow and so was my friend Surely whose husband Allan had left her with their young children while he went off with their baby-sitter never to return. Surely had married again, but by the time we re-connected she too was a widow.

Surely, Rita and Edith

A few years ago when we last went to Toronto to help settle our granddaughter living in residence at University of Toronto, we made arrangements to meet. Complicated by the fact that our meeting had to take place out of doors since we had our little elderly toy poodle with us and neither of their apartments permitted entry to pets. We four had a happy, interesting reunion. At one point Edith whispered to me she was concerned that Surely was no longer as mobile as she once was, and was preparing to shed her car.

Who might have imagined that it was Edith, the more robust of the two who would succumb first to the inevitable? My sister, younger than me by four years, commiserated with my gloomy attitude after we discovered that Edith had died several days ago. During COVID her funeral, which was yesterday, cannot have been attended by many. 

Surely, our age coeval, hasn't been out of her apartment in the last eleven months. Her daughter shops for her and just leaves the groceries at the door. My sister and her husband also live in Toronto but they venture out themselves to do the shopping weekly, as we do here. Living in tight little apartments in a city the size of metropolitan Toronto with its population size of over six million people and its relatively high incidence of COVID-19 leaves much to be desired in quality of life.

There are parks and green spaces, wooded ravines that run through the city, but access in a city of that size can be difficult and since the stay-at-home orders were promulgated on top of the lock-down a month ago, the quality of life has been even further diminished. We are quite aware of how fortunate we are to be domiciled in a smaller city of a million people, with much more green space accessible, and for us, available quite directly, giving us a much more generous quality of life; eroded somewhat with the presence of the pandemic, but tolerable.

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.