Saying Goodbye to Al

The Boston Globe

He loved her and she loved him. It is that simple. It was love at first sight and love at every sight for nearly nine years. A fairy tale. A legend. Too good to be true, but it was true.

Al wasn’t her grandfather, but you don’t have to be a grandfather to love and be loved like one. Al wasn’t even Lucy’s uncle, or a long distance cousin. He was simply Al – neighbor, friend, lender of extension cords and hedge clippers, and anything else a person might need. He was a good, kind, generous man who from the get-go cherished our granddaughter, Lucy.

Her Down syndrome didn’t exist for him. He never saw it. He saw Lucy, a pretty baby who first smiled up at him with her eyes. A child who toddled to him in patent leather shoes every Sunday on her way home from church. A four-, six-, and eight-year-old who would accept his wife’s cookies and say, “Thank you, Katherine,” but who always, always, cookie in hand, then beelined it to Al.

She raced to him at every one of her birthday parties, at every cookout, at every holiday, at every celebration.

Just like in the movies, these two loomed for each other. Lucy would see Al and Al would see Lucy and he would smile and open his arms she would run into them. And the whole rest of the world would fade.

All that was missing was music.

Lucy said his name before she said so many others. She always asked for him. “Al?” she would say on Sunday afternoons, everyone gathered, the table set, dinner almost ready, Al and Katherine still across the street waiting for a pie or a cake to cool.

And when they arrived? No matter where she was, in the family room playing in the tent with her cousins, upstairs watching The Wizard of Oz, on her father’s lap reading a book, she would bolt to the door and hold up her arms and Al would bend down and cry, “Lucy!” And they would embrace, Katherine with her pie or her cake, for the moment, totally ignored.

Some days after school, Lucy and her mom would stop and visit Al. He did a lot of sitting in his last few years. On sunny days he’d rest in his lawn chair in the shade of his garage and just watch the world go by.

Neighbors stopped to talk to him – people walking dogs, women with babies, young people, old people – all kinds of people. 

But it was only Lucy who got a whoop out of Al, who got him to almost leap out of his chair. 

She visited him in his house this winter, when it was too cold to sit outside and he was too tired to take the few steps to get there. And though his hello was more subdued, and he didn’t leap up anymore, he still had his smile and his big, booming, “Lucy!”

And she still ran to him. And they still embraced. 

She visited him at the hospital a few times, too. She knew he was sick. She knew he was seeing a doctor. But this is all she knew.

No one told Lucy the day Al died, or the day after or the day after that. No one knew how. Death is not a part of her world, a concept, not something concrete you can point to and say, “See, Lucy. This is where Al is now. He’s with God.” How could we explain? What would we say? What words would we use when she asked, “Where is Al?” 

The day of his funeral, the whole family went to the church. Lucy held her parents hands and led the way to the pew. The organ played. The soloist sang.

And then, before Katherine walked down the aisle with her daughter and granddaughter beside her, before mourners filed in, before mass began, Lucy said, “I miss Al.” 

She had her head bent when she said it, as if she were talking to herself and not to us. As if she were reconciling his absence with her memory of him.

This is how powerful love is and how eternal and how it really is stronger than death. No one had to tell Lucy about Al. Lucy knew, Lucy knows.

She knows that she misses him but that she’ll see him again, someday. And he’ll have his arms outstretched and a big smile on his face, and he’ll yell “Lucy!” and she will run to him. Straight to him.

And there will be joy without end.