Now It's Too Late

The Boston Herald

I didn't notice when the letters stopped. Why didn't I? That's what I wonder now. They arrived regularly for four, five, maybe six years. They were funny and earnest and filled with wisdom and advice. I looked forward to them. They made me smile. In the beginning I answered every one, though not fast enough for Chuck. He called me a terrible pen pal so I got to calling every now and then because it was easier this way. It took less time. He wrote. I phoned. That's how we kept in touch.

I always told him that someday I'd visit. And he always said that would be nice. But I never did. He lived more than an hour away and though I passed the exit to his town many summer weekends, I never bothered to stop. I was always in a hurry to get where I was going. I always reasoned that next time I'd have more time. Next time I'd stop for sure. Next time I would make time to meet him. 

But I didn't and now it's too late. That's what always happens. You run out of time. I know this. I know that nothing is forever, that people aren't objects you can put on a shelf until you need them or until you have time for them. And yet that's exactly what I did once again.

I knew Chuck had leukemia. I knew he went into the hospital for transfusions regularly. I knew he'd been doing this for close to 10 years. So what made me think he would be sitting in his trailer writing me funny little letters, sending me stories and clippings, forever?

Chuck Heger died on April 10, a week after his 75th birthday. He had been in and out of the hospital for months. He had been so sick that he had to go into a nursing home. His 14-year-old cat Lola, whom he loved, whom he always wrote about, whom he photographed constantly, died last winter. And I didn't know. I didn't know about Lola or about Chuck's hospitalization or about the nursing home. I didn't know any of this.

I have an envelope postmarked July 7, 1993, with my name -- and address in his familiar printing all capitals in an even but shaky hand. But there is no letter inside. Where is the letter? Was this the last time he wrote to me?

My daughter says he sent a Christmas card. She's sure of this. But I am not. I don't remember.

And so I look through last year's cards and sure enough I find his. 'Season's greetings, Love Lola and Chuck.' He signed everything this way.

The Christmas card is a photograph. Chuck is sitting in a wing chair in a bathrobe with Lola on his lap, newspapers, telephone books, stationery and video tapes surrounding him. He looks well. His cane is beside him. A pillow is propped up behind him. He looks like he has looked in every picture he has sent, like a happy man who can't get enough of life.

And yet his life was never easy. He dropped a few bread crumbs now and then, and I followed the trail into his past. He grew up poor, in foster care. He lost a lot of people he loved. When he was 7, the Salvation Army paid for him to attend a summer camp in Sharon. Someone pushed him off a raft and he almost drowned. When he was an altar boy a priest called him a dumbbell and a crybaby.

'That day burnt me forever,' he wrote. He stopped going to church when he was 18 and never went back. 'But I still pray and talk to God.’

'I have great faith in the Lord,' he wrote when my daughter's dog Molly was hit by a car, 'Tonight I will pray for Molly, Bev, Lauren, Lola and Chuck.’

I never prayed for him at the end when he needed my prayers because I didn't know he was dying; and I didn't know because he didn't tell me, at least not in words.

But he told me without words. His letters, which meant so much, stopped coming.

This said everything. I should have known. But I didn't notice. I didn't know that this wise, funny, kind, loving old man who brightened up so many of my days, had died until a stranger told me. 

Now all I can do is pray. The time for visiting is over. I put off doing something that I should have done, that I could easily have done, that I will wish I had done for a long, long time.