Loss

Posted by Joe Deegan (Waterville, ME, United States) on 10 September 2008 in Miscellaneous.

This is a photo of a tombstone in the old cemetery near the school.

Today, I spent most of the day with a woman I had never met before, and her son. Her name is Anna, an English teacher at a Catholic grammar school in my neighborhood. She got in touch with me about doing some volunteer teaching for their after-school programs. I got a tour of the school, and of course met her son, Lukaš, a 20-year old physical therapy student.

Over coffee we got to talking. It turns out that Anna’s husband, Jozef, died less than two months ago. Worse, today was his birthday. Jozef was a medical doctor, well known in the community. He died suddenly while Anna was at a teachers’ conference in Wales. She came home quickly enough to be with him in his last moments.

Anna and Lukaš live in a two-room flat in a building visible from my window. Anna plans on renting out their flat, on which they have a sizable mortgage, and moving in with her mother in the suburbs. After my tour of the school, Anna invited me to her mother’s home for dinner. We took their small blue Sköda into the foothills west of Martin. It turns out the house is nestled just below the mountains I watch from my window. Enormous old-growth pines surround their quiet neighborhood.

We ate Slovak pizza and drank coffee on the front porch as the sun went down behind the Mala Fatra mountians. I met Anna’s mother, a kind old woman who presided over the family’s sizable and verdant garden. I met Anna’s brother, the cook in the school’s cafeteria. Their gorgeous golden-retriever-yellow-lab Beno sat unceremoniously on my foot for the entire meal.

I had no time to take a new picture for today, but found this photo on my hard drive— an eerie coincidence. Jozef’s ashes are to be interred Saturday.

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