When words fail, offering comfort to an old friend

The Boston Globe

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Bob and Diane Gass celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary. Bob served the Randolph community for more than 40 years as a Town Meeting member and 25 years as a School Committee member. He died on June 28.

She counts among the people I could call at three in the morning, a surprising fact even to me, because I don’t call her, not even at three in the afternoon. We haven’t talked in five, maybe 10 years.

And yet.

Friendships forged in childhood don’t require conversation. They exist in a universe that is separate from us but are part of us, too. Diane remembers my mother and father. And I remember hers. We have a shared history. We are each other’s foundations and each other’s witnesses.

We met in sixth grade. She was the new girl at Tower Hill School. She lived in a new house on a new road that used to be all woods. She had a garbage disposal. It was the first garbage disposal I’d ever seen.

One Friday night we went to a sixth-grade dance. Her mother convinced my mother that I was old enough to go. I have pictures my father took, both of us wearing so many crinolines that our skirts didn’t sway as much as swat us as we stepped gingerly through the grass to pose on my front lawn. I remember feeling so grown up that night, giggling in the gym of the old Devine School, girls on one side of the room, boys on the other.

Norman Fine kissed me in Diane’s basement, either at the end of eighth grade or the beginning of ninth. There was a party going on and I think someone dared him. So it was a kiss that didn’t count. But it counted to me because it was my first kiss. I remember walking home and singing in my head a new song at the time, “Norman, ooh, ooh, ooh, Norman, my love.”

It was in ninth grade that Diane met Bobby. I know this not because I remember the day but because she remembers. Every December 2nd, she writes on Facebook about meeting the love of her life. My rock. My love. My darling. She calls him these things. She celebrates meeting him. And he celebrates, too. I know because every year she posts pictures of the flowers he sends.

Diane and I went to different high schools, so we didn’t see each other much. But when we did, we talked mostly about boys. For me the names were always changing. I liked Eddie one week, and then I liked Tom and then it was Chuck and then John.

But for Diane it was always Bobby.

They got married July 1, 1969. They had three boys. They lived and raised their boys in the town where they met, maybe 5 miles from where my husband and I live and where we raised our children.

We saw each other over the years, but infrequently. I remember one time going to their house for lunch. Our kids were grown, all of them. Diane was retired. Maybe Bobby was, too, We had cold cuts and American cheese and potato salad and some other salad and potato chips. Bobby was there, helping Diane set the table, take the cheese out of the wrapper, pour the drinks. And I remember watching them and thinking about the old Perry Como song, “You can tell when there’s love in a home” because it was so obvious how much love was there.

Bobby died two weeks ago, surrounded by his family. He was buried on July 6th. “Today is the saddest day in my life,” Diane wrote on Facebook.

“You have loved him your whole life. You grew up together. I have no words,” I texted.

I have no words now, either. But I have an image. And a memory.

The night my mother died, I was with her. I held her hand. I told her she had been a wonderful mother. I kissed her goodbye. And she left. Whatever had animated her vanished. I witnessed this.

Later that night I woke up and my bedroom was full of light. It was orange and it was coming through the slats of a closet door. The light comforted me. In the morning it was gone.

I think of that light now. I think that the grave is all we see but that there is more, that a hole in the ground can be a tunnel, too.

I think of the light that people who have come close to death insist they have seen.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” These words, written by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and philosopher, are what I believe. And yet, even believing, I cry when people die, not just for them but mostly for the people who loved them, people like my childhood friend Diane, who are left behind.