We thank Steve Hansen for another one of his insightful posts about friendship and loss.
When I retired from my second (or was it my third, I’ve lost count!) career as a high school independent study teacher back in 2009, all of us ‘newbie’ retirees were hosted at a district office celebration with accolades, food and drink and given the ‘de rigueur’ gold watch, in its more modern incarnation, a spiffy looking desk clock. As part of the celebration, we were each asked by our Director of Personnel, Dr. H., to name a favorite song which best exemplified our teaching career and how we would like to be remembered. Without hesitation, I said, “Freddy Mercury, ‘Queen,’ ‘Another One Bites the Dust’” This got a few laughs and a rather quizzical look by Dr H. as though to say, ‘OK, Steve, whatever floats your boat!’ I don’t think Dr H. was ever that into 80’s rock bands.
Fast forward 13 years to last August 2021. Following my diagnosis of prostate cancer I had written an email to two of my oldest and dearest friends who I have remained in close touch with ever since third grade, Steve R. and Don F. I feel especially close to Steve, recalling all the times the two of us would hang out together during recess at the far end of the Lafayette School playground discussing the latest advances in rocketry and nuclear physics along with theories about extraterrestrial life. Although the fires of pubescence were raging everywhere on that schoolyard, Steve and I somehow became more fascinated with real, actual fire, teaching ourselves the ancient art of making gunpowder, and later, hydrogen filled balloons that can be sent aloft and exploded with tissue paper fuses, like miniature Hindenburg dirigibles (“Oh the humanity!”). In truth Steve and I both had similar problems with puberty manifesting as a total lack of confidence in our ability to attract, understand, communicate with, or deal effectively with girls. Although the term ‘geek’ had yet to be invented, Steve and I were certainly the archetypes of that sobriquet in early-mid 1950’s Phoenix, Arizona.
In high school, Steve became a National Merit Scholar while Don and I were just ‘also rans.’ Steve went on to attend MIT where his older brother Dave had also graduated. After somehow acing the College Board exams, I managed to ‘one up’ Steve by getting accepted to BOTH CalTech AND MIT. Of course I chose to go to CalTech, which proved to be a bad decision for both CalTech and myself, but that’s another story by itself. Meanwhile, with me moving on to Arizona State University now a year behind both Steve and Don, who had taken the more sensible route to begin with, the three of us have remained close friends ever since. Despite bifurcating geographically, despite all the various changes in our careers and families over the years, we three have remained the same inseparable ‘rat pack’ that we always were, Steve on the East coast, Don still in Arizona and me in California.
After Steve had lost his first wife to a sudden illness, he remarried Sue, and the four of us, that is including Karen and me, vacationed together touring the Columbia River, The Tillamook Valley in Oregon, followed by a trip up to Orcas Island, Washington, where we visited my daughter and her family, now including our new twin grandchildren. That was in 2009.
During the summer of 2014 most of our still surviving Lafayette fifth grade class, including the infamous rat pack along with their spouses all attended our fifth grade teacher, Ms E’s 100th birthday bash in the city of Prescott, Arizona, where I had been coincidentally born about 72 years prior.
Since then, the three of us and our families had been keeping up via email and at the very least a long newsy Christmas letter. We noticed the Roberts had not sent us a Christmas letter in 2020. I wrote to Sue separately, who explained that Steve had recently purchased a new computer and had trouble making the Outlook mail handler and some of the other applications work the way they had on his old computer, hence no Christmas mail that year. In hindsight I should have looked at that email just a little askance. Steve was the smartest (or at least close to the smartest) kid in high school, who would go on to graduate from MIT with a degree in electrical engineering. He had spent a career designing and developing computer hardware and systems.
The months rolled by in 2021, and we would hear from Steve every now and then forwarding on some web humor and MP4 movies, which was his style. At the end of June he actually wrote a short personal email asking us how we were doing with respect to the California fires. Again, I didn’t think much of this. Steve had always been one to call us or contact us by email in the event of the various natural disasters that California is so famous for, earthquakes, fires, mudslides, riots, you name it. Once again I took no particular notice of his reference to California fires, which were actually in Northern California, hundreds of miles away from us.
As we approached the fall months and after I received the unsettling news from UCLA Health that I had stage 4 prostate cancer, I immediately notified both Don and Steve as well as the committee planning our upcoming, COVID delayed 60th Camelback High School reunion in Phoenix. Having still not heard back from Steve, I forwarded my email on to Sue. A couple weeks after that Steve called me on the phone and sounded perfectly normal. He was apologetic about the delay in communicating and he acknowledged my illness somewhat obliquely, but not quite in the way I would have expected from my best friend from childhood, who might have perceived what I had reported as an existential threat not simply to myself but to the lifelong bond we had established between us. I was taken aback a little bit by that conversation, yet it all seemed perfectly normal and sensible.
Fast forward to Christmas 2021. Again no Christmas letter from Sue and Steve. I contacted Don, asking if he’d heard from Steve, and he said he hadn’t either. So Don then contacted Steve’s older brother, Dave now age 85 who informed us that his brother Steve was, and had been for the past two years, suffering the early stages of Alzheimer’s dementia.
Just as my teaching career, which had been so rewarding and left me with so many beautiful memories, had suddenly come to an end, so it would appear that my lifelong friendship with my dearest and closest friend from my childhood, would be lost to the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease.
I know about Alzheimer’s disease intimately. My mother suffered from this and died from it. My wife and I took care of her for the last 8 years of her life. Having my brilliant, best lifelong friend come down with the same thing is simply beyond my ability to understand or to cope. No further words can be spoken..