Posted by:
Pooped
(
)
Date: August 20, 2014 12:25AM
This is a true story.
Last week I traveled a great distance to attend my high school class reunion. It was the 40 year reunion and the most recent previous reunion I had attended was the 20 year reunion. I finally realize I'm getting old!
Almost all of my classmates have attended kindergarten through high school together. We are a tight and small group from a small midwestern town. These people are the next thing to family I have.
The first person I met going into the reunion was Ted. Ted is, and always was, tall, athletic (football quarterback and basketball captain), smart, handsome, kind, humble, considerate, and a good catholic.
Ted and I talked a long time and I learned that he had fought the good fight and won against cancer three times in the past thirty years. He was divorced but had fought hard to keep his wife from leaving him and their child when she had an affair. Ted is also forgiving. As a good catholic, Ted refused to remarry the sweet young catholic girl he met and had been friends with for 14 years after his divorce. These two are both catholic and know that Ted's mother would be ashamed of her son if he committed adultery by getting remarried after a divorce. Ted and his friend date but do not sleep together or live together. They do attend church together but due to Ted's mother being disapproving, Ted sits in the front and his female friend sits in the back of the church.
Ted and I talked about our lives today and in the past. We shared funny stories and updated each other on our fellow classmates and families. Ted never gossiped but he loved to talk about his daughter.
This morning, one week after my reunion, I awoke to my phone ringing. One of my classmates was calling to let me know that Ted had died in his sleep on Sunday morning. Ted had lived most of the past 25 years without the comfort of a marital companion only because his family and religion taught him that he would be sinning and going to damnation if he remarried after his divorce. Ted could have asked to have his marriage dissolved by the church authorities but that would have required him to say that his first marriage was a mistake and he felt that his daughter was not a mistake.