Daughter of the Old Dominion

I’d like to share a letter I sent to a dear friend a few weeks ago. First, a little background.

The recipient, “Mildred,” was known to me for much of the past 35 years as “Mrs Pope.” She was the mother of my college classmate John Pope. When I first met her in 1977 or ’78 at John’s family home in Falls Church, Virginia, she’d already been widowed for several years. She had the kind of formal gentility and Southern grace that perfectly suited her loyalty to the Old Dominion, Virginia’s sepia-toned nickname. She was a collection of charming contradictions: forthright and self-effacing, elegant yet clumsy, both old-school and incredibly open. Our relationship had been friendly but hardly close until one sunny afternoon sometime in the mid-1990s.

John and his brother Jim, whose name you’ll see referenced in the letter, held an annual summer cookout at Jim’s house in Arlington. Just prior to that year’s event, John had had a health scare involving a severe headache and his sudden inability to remember the route to a familiar hospital. Just before Lynn and I were about to leave—we were standing in the leafy backyard while a by-then-recovered John stirred the chili indoors—Mrs Pope took my hand and, tearing up, asked me to pray for her Johnny.

Which I subsequently did over the course of the next many months, in my questionably effectual agnostic way. John nevertheless died of brain cancer in 1997. He was only 38. It was in the years after his death that Mrs Pope encouraged Lynn and me to call her Mildred, as we got together on occasion to reminisce about John and  discuss and admire the wonderful paintings and drawings he’d left behind. Eventually we moved on to develop a strong rapport and a friendship in its own right. For whatever reason, the three of us clicked, and the obvious pleasure Mildred took in our company helped lessen some of the guilt I felt over the fact that her dead son and I had never been the tight friends she seemed to imagine we’d been. I mean, I’d always liked John, but he and I had been essentially admiring acquaintances who’d shared an alma mater. I got to know him better posthumously through Mildred, and to some extent through Jim, than I’d ever known him in life.

But if my kinship with John never was quite real, Lynn’s and my friendship with Mildred deepened and grew. We visited each other’s homes and kept in touch over the years. When her health dictated that she sell her house and move into a senior-living apartment near her daughter’s home in Georgia, I continued to write her occasional letters and to sometimes phone her.

Nearly two years ago she called me up and, after characteristically thanking me effusively for a recent letter, then making some small talk, she got to the crux of the matter. She’d been diagnosed with leukemia and was going to be placed under hospice care. She was 94 at the time, and she told me she’d already been out shopping for caskets and was shocked by the prices. We laughed a lot during that call: about her practicality, the racket that is the death industry, the crazily brief time we all get on his Earth, who knows what else. I remember getting off the phone that day and, after wiping a grin off my face, thinking, "Mildred is terminally ill."

As it turned out, reports of her imminent death proved inaccurate. Mildred would outlive that six-months-and-out prognosis connoted by hospice care by more than a year. This made her family and friends very happy, of course, but made her much less so. Not because her quality of life was so greatly diminished until the very end, but because she felt she’d somehow overstayed her welcome and perhaps become a bit of a fraud—like the way Barbra Streisand keeps un-retiring until most people just wish she’d just be done with it already.

But then, finally, Jim called me at work one day late last month to tell me the end truly was near. So, I wrote Mildred one last letter, just before we left for a vacation in New England.

This past Wednesday, October 17, Jim called me at around 5 pm to report that his mother had passed away earlier that day. Her interment will come later this month. I’ll be a pallbearer, at her request. And a proud one, of course.

I’ll end this post with the letter and let it serve as my loving sendoff. But FYI, lest you might wonder as you read, I’ll first make these final notes:

I specifically mentioned Iceland because Mildred herself had toured that beautiful and strange country with her daughter in fairly recent years, after Lynn and I had raved about it and shared our pictures. I hope the reference conjured fond memories of a trip she told us she’d loved.

Clive and Karen Scorer are lovely people with whom we had a wonderful reunion on Cape Cod. I mostly was kidding about Clive’s “British eccentricity” for comic effect. (Americans hardly have room to talk, our national “eccentricities” being passions for deadly firearms and divisive religion.)

I did indeed succeed in adding Vermont and New Hampshire to my running-states list—not that you’d know it from the appalling lack of national media and social networking coverage. And the weather did cooperate, though I might have preferred a bit of seasonal chill in the air.

I always tried to limit my letters to Mildred to a single typed page, so as not to bore her to death (though she might have welcomed that as her self-reproach at her earthy lingering grew). In principle at least, I’m all for brevity. So I’ll close here and let the correspondence finish this out.

September 28, 2012

Dear Mildred,

Jim called me yesterday and told me he’d been with you on your birthday, and that he’d read to you the card Lynn and I had sent you. While I was happy to know you’d received that small token of our love, I was saddened by Jim’s use of the words “read to” and asked him if that meant you no longer can read things yourself. He confirmed that your abilities to read and write have largely been taken from you at this point. I remarked that this must be very difficult for you, given your love of reading and your skill at correspondence. But please know the Lynn and I always will cherish the letters we have received from you.

I’m writing this on a Friday. Both Lynn and have taken the day off and have been busy making preparations for our upcoming vacation trip to New England. We’re leaving Sunday for Lynn’s mother’s house in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, and during the course of the week we’ll spend nights in Falmouth, Massachusetts (on Cape Cod), Brattleboro, Vermont, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, before returning to my mother-in-law’s house and driving home from there. The main reason we’re traveling north at this particular time is to meet up with a British couple who are roughly our age, Clive and Karen Scorer, who we met during our tour of Iceland in 1999. We’ve kept in touch over the years, but we last saw them in the flesh in 2000, when they came to Washington on vacation and we had occasion to make them dinner (well, Lynn made them dinner—but I did the dishes) and play tour guide on trips to the White House and the top of the Washington monument. They will be flying to Boston this weekend to begin an organized bus tour of Massachusetts and New Hampshire that will focus on history, culture and, of course, that star of fall tourism in New England, the colorful foliage (which we hope for their sakes will oblige with a proper rainbow). Their lone unscheduled day is Wednesday on Cape Cod, so the four of us will spend the day together. We plan to drive them across the Cape to arty Provincetown, and also to indulge Clive’s request to visit a local kaleidoscope store, as he collects same.

Speaking of Clive’s hobby, which strikes me as being a very British sort of eccentricity, I’ve suggested in the past that my friend really lays on the British thing a bit thick, given that he’s already named “Clive” and lives in a town named “Biggleswade” He has not, frankly, rebutted the charge. In fact, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he and his wife were to have us scouring retail districts for tea cozies, monocles and suchlike before the day is through.

Although from everything we’ve read both Brattleboro and Portsmouth are lovely towns, the main reasons we’re visiting them is to satisfy my own eccentric pursuit and because they were among the few places we could secure lodgings at fairly reasonable prices during Leaf Season in New England. The eccentric pursuit to which I’m referring is my determination ultimately to run in all 50 states. My own idiosyncratic definition of what constitutes a run is one uninterrupted hour. (I’m writing the word “run,” but at my speed think “jog.”) I’ve been stuck on 30 states for several years now, and Vermont and New Hampshire are the only remaining East Coast states that somehow have eluded me to date. So, Lynn has graciously agreed to abet my efforts by routing our trip accordingly. I just hope for decent weather, or at least rains that are short of monsoonal. Because I’m pretty much determined to make like the Post Service and let no conditions keep me from my appointed rounds—um, runs.

This will be the first real vacation (more than a long weekend) that we’ve taken in a very long time. We’re greatly looking forward to it. But first, I must get back to the aforementioned preparations! So, our very best to you. And, of course, as always, our love.

Eric