Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [75]
I didn’t really see them, though. I couldn’t focus on anything but the Beach Club. As we rounded the northwest corner of the lake, we passed that spot where Liz and I had stared into each other’s eyes, unaware of the photographer taking another close-up shot of us. I felt like I was looking through a window at something that had happened three years before. I saw Liz and me; I saw how happy and how in love we were. I saw how much hope we had for our future.
Then I started jogging again, moving back into the present where Liz was not. But all of these people were here with me running because they cared about my wife, about my daughter and me. I steadied myself with this thought and completed my trip around the lake.
After the run we all hung around for a while. A number of people, friends and strangers, shared their own stories with me. A woman from Florida was telling me that she had come up to see her son, Bob, who lived in Central Minnesota. His wife had died in childbirth.
“He has completely shut down,” she confided. “I don’t know what to do. He lost his job. He won’t leave the house. He doesn’t want to talk to anybody.” She reached out and gripped my arm. “Would you talk to him?” she asked.
In the past months, I’d had many requests to reach out to grieving individuals. I was comfortable giving them my phone number or my e-mail address, but I wasn’t going to knock on anybody’s door and force them to hear my point of view. I’m a guy, not a guru.
“Of course,” I told her. “Of course. I’ll give you my information and you can pass it along to him. Tell him he can call anytime.” I was curious about this man, and sympathetic. I hadn’t encountered that many widowers—there were definitely more women reaching out and getting involved, and many of them were in straits much more dire than mine. Confronting my past on this run brought me back to my own sadness, and now, hearing the stories of others who had faced similarly shitty circumstances, I felt their sadness, too.
As people began moving off toward their cars, I looked back toward the club. I could still see the faint trace of me and Liz, all dressed up for the party she had always wanted. I may have missed her birthday last year, and that was something I was never going to forget. But I had been able to give her the wedding of her dreams, and that counted for something.
Madeline and I had been back in LA for a couple of weeks, enjoying our usual routine of hanging out, when we got a call from Rachel.
“Are you ready to hear how much we made?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m ready.”
“Four thousand four hundred and ten dollars,” she said. “For you guys to use. However you want.”
As soon as Rachel told me the number, I thought of Bob. And I thought of Jackie, whose husband died on the exact same day as Liz, from the exact same thing. I thought of Kim, whose husband died and left her with two young children. I thought of Jen, whose house burned down a few months after her husband died, leaving her a homeless, single mother. Here I was, with Liz’s life insurance payout in the bank for emergencies, my own job at Yahoo! poised to start up again shortly, monthly Social Security checks coming in to help with raising Madeline, and, if worse came to worst, supportive and generous family members. I could afford food. I could afford everything Maddy needed. I could afford records and beer.
So many other people that I had encountered did not have what I did—some of them didn’t even have the basics.
When we started organizing the 5K—when we asked people to donate seven dollars—I hadn’t really thought about the fact that seven dollars times hundreds of people would become a quantifiable amount of money that could be exchanged for goods, services, or whatever else someone in need may require.
I neglected