In January I got a brief note from someone letting me know a woman I met in my travels had just died. I believe it was from her daughter.
I had met this woman during one of my sailboat adventures and to put it in a nutshell we had a several day fling of some sort. There was quite a spark between us but there were just too many differences between us for it to go anywhere. Still, over the years we sort of stayed in touch with a rare quick note or something several years apart.
The note from the daughter said she had mentioned me a couple of times over the years as the man that taught her to sail. In her address book there was the word 'sailor' under my address.
I was and still am humbled.
A few weeks ago I had a mental alarm that told me to get on touch with my ex-wife. I chased her phone number down and gave her a call. Her son answered and told me she was in very bad health and not expected to live much longer and would pass my greetings on to her.
Three days later her son called me and told me she had passed and then handed the phone over to his father, her husband. He told me that she had always spoken highly of me and never said a bad word about me. He said she was glad to hear from me before she passed.
I briefly considered going out to help bury her but they are going the cremation route.
Between the two of these events I got a call from a man in his very early fifties. When he identified himself I recognized him instantly. The last time I had seen him he was just turning five. He asked me if it was OK for his mother to call me. It was and shortly after she called.
It's scary getting a call from one's past, especially from a woman. The mental questions are scary. Do I have a child out there I was unaware of? Am I getting hit for back child support? WTF is going on?
Nope. It was strictly a curiosity call. She was simply wondering what I had done over the past half century. We had a nice talk. I told her about fishing, sailing, meeting my wife and my career at sea.
I had an odd and interesting relationship with this woman. I actually met her at a K-Mart and after we chatted I simply asked her out to a movie and we wound up back at her place.
I had just arrived in town and was looking for a place that rented by the month. When I told her that she simply said, "Stay here until you find something." It turned into about four months.
I was up front with my status from the beginning. When I got the word I was going to head back to Alaska without warning. I would simply go and she could expect a call or a letter inside a month or two. My life was that unstable at that time.
Sure enough, she wound up coming home to my stuff missing and a note on the kitchen table. Later I called her a couple of times and for the next year or two we exchanged very occasional letters. We lost touch.
About a month later I got a quick call from her son. She had passed and I had managed to catch her during a brief period of coherence. She's seven years older than I am which puts her in her 80s.
Funny how things work. She never held it against me that I left without warning. I had been up front and made it clear. She simply said she was glad I fixed the cabinet before I left. She also thanked me for being good to her son. Go figure.
What's next? It's only the middle of April.
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I think that after I vacuum the living room I am going to go through a box of old letters and shred some of them.
While there is nothing incriminating in them whatsoever, I just don't want to leave any 'what's that all abouts' behind.
I will leave behind all correspondence (what little of it there is) with my ex-wife. My sisters remember her fondly because she was good to them when they were little and I think they would like to know that we got along well after we divorced.
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