A dear friend gone
We didn't know the
Doughtys very long. They moved across the street from us in 2016 and we moved
to a different part of the community in 2017.
But
during that brief time, we had become fast friends. They were closer to
Howard's age than mine, but we somehow clicked, as different as we were.
Terry is the definition of creative. She quickly made the
former home of our friends Avis and John Anderson into her own showcase. Room
by room, wall by wall, table by table. Terry can look at a blank room and
visualize the most stunning finishes. She sews her own accessories, sees colors
in rooms most of us wouldn't and has done wonders with a sloping back yard no
one I know would dare tackle.
From the onset, Bill
loved it when I called him an "old curmudgeon." His public face often
was one of displeasure, a frown more common than a smile. That facade never
succeeded in hiding a good heart belonging to someone who knew how to care for
people, who cherished friends old and new.
In
the younger years when we didn't know him, Bill was a master electrician, a
craftsman who could build anything with just his hands and imagination.
Howard and I loved
spending time with the Doughtys. We graduated to Sunday wine and dessert at
their home when it became too difficult for Bill to navigate the garage steps
into ours for dinner. We usually went to their house promising ourselves we
wouldn't stay long. Never happened. We would walk in, spot Bill in his favorite
chair down the hall in the family room and hear his happy voice shout out, “The
Smiths are here!” Conversation never slowed. From politics, which Bill loved to
discuss, to local sports, to weather, to construction, to family...the topics
kept flowing.
Years of fighting
diabetes and its debilitating health problems made Bill weaker and more
unsteady. When he was forced to go into a dialysis program, everything he knew
about living was altered.
Sometimes, I'd be
surprised during the day with my phone ID lighting up with Bill's name when he
simply had to get something off his chest, usually something political. We
agreed avidly on matters politics, so it was a meeting of the minds that always
gave each of us an opportunity to vent our spleens about a current issue about
which we felt strongly.
Terry and Bill
raised a son and a daughter and were blessed with four grandchildren, two boys
and two girls. When we first met the Doughtys, they were still able to travel
to New York to visit Billy and his family or to Pennsylvania to spend time with
Terri and hers. In recent years, the family had to come to them.
Bill had talked with
me, a fellow diabetic, often about how long he would be able to endure
dialysis. It's a brutal regimen, three days a week, at least three hours in a
chair having toxins removed from the blood. It's exhausting and weakening, and
many dialysis patients run out of the willingness to subject themselves to it
after a number of years. Bill wondered how long he’d last.
My father's baby
brother, in his late 80s, spent five years in dialysis but finally succumbed to
heart disease instead of the scourge of the dialysis sessions. But I knew
enough about the process to understand what Bill was talking about.
Bill gradually gave
up most of what he loved to do...he spent hours navigating his spacious home
using a walker, often with Terry's aid. When getting into the car to go to
dialysis became too much of an ordeal, when he couldn’t enjoy the beautiful
lower level of the home he and Terry spent so much time planning and
decorating, when simply living lost its beauty, he did what so many others have
done. He quit.
Not because he
wasn't courageous or didn't have the will to live. Just the opposite. Bill
stayed committed to seeing his 58th wedding anniversary with Terry and to being
with her as long as he could. But his health didn't give him that grace. In the
end, he drifted away from everything he loved, peacefully and finally.
Knowing he wouldn't
be with us much longer didn't make his passing any easier to accept. Only the
Sunday before he left us, Howard and I spent a couple of hours at his bedside.
He dozed a bit, then awoke and entered right into the conversation where it had
been headed. When we made a move to leave, we heard, “Don't go yet,” he said,
just as he always had done every time we were together.
We were blessed with
Bill's friendship. We were blessed to be able to support Terry whenever she
called on us. We intend to keep doing that as long as the need is there. And we
are blessed with Bill's memory.
Every time we stop
in to visit Terry, we'll look back toward the family room and hear, “The Smiths
are here!” It's a gift that will keep giving.
