Mystery Man (.pdf)
Preface to the story of The Mystery Man
Over 30 years ago, when I was fairly new to Bellingham, I invited someone I had recently met to join me for some sort of activity. She said to me, “I’m not really looking for more friends.”
At the time, these words really stung. Now, when I think about someone expressing that sentiment, I marvel. That person couldn’t be more different from me, and I am my mother’s daughter for sure.
My mother was seeking or was open to making connections in every small interaction she had until the very last week of her life when she mostly wanted to sleep. She enjoyed reconnecting with the garage door guy whenever it needed fixing, monthly reunions with the people whose reserved seats were next to hers at the Sunday afternoon symphony concerts, servers at her favorite lunch spots (she brought a new baby present to a restaurant once because she had called ahead to find out if the pregnant server she’d previously gotten to know had had her baby), the people who worked at the Food Co-op and the credit union. She looked forward to our annual May reunion with Nicole at Cafe Culinaire to celebrate my dad’s birthday and mourned the last two years it was closed due to the pandemic. A vendor at the Farmers Market became a close friend. She became close with the woman who cleaned her home, with several women who helped her with gardening, with the woman who cut her hair. She made a friend looking for a new bathmat at Fred Meyer. When at St. Francis rehab, she connected with two of the young CNA’s and talked with them about their academic plans and hoped she could continue friendships with them after discharge. She had at least two medical emergencies at her house when she was helped by the same lovely young EMT named Gabe, and in the ER she told me she hoped that somehow she could find a way to contact him and have him over for tea when she was all better. Her neighbors Steven and Maureen (some years back) and Jay and Helen (in recent years) became devoted to her, helping with troubleshooting TV and remote issues, bringing her mail to her door, stopping by for a visit and tea. For my mom, interactions weren’t just transactions, and differences in age weren’t a consideration. This resulted in Elka having diverse varied friendships. Some were short, many became deep.
In 1999, when Julia was 12, she spent time in Berlin and made two good friends who subsequently visited us some years later in Bellingham. When my mom and I made plans to go to Holland together in 2009, we both decided we wanted to push through our prejudice against Germany and travel there also (my mom had always said that she had no interest in ever going to Germany, and out of loyalty I had decided that as well). I contacted the mothers of Julia’s friends about the idea of visiting them in Berlin, and one of them invited us to stay in their home. Both women took us all over the city, having researched places we might be interested in visiting that related to Jews during World War II. My sense was that both women had taken on this mission as a sacred pilgrimage. It may have been both painful and healing for them, non-Jewish Germans with their own family histories to contend with; it was both of those for my mom and me. And each morning, I found my 80-year-old mother, the woman who had never wanted to set foot in Germany, sitting at a beautiful breakfast table with a non-Jewish German woman in her 50’s and having quiet, intimate conversations. They continued to have meaningful letter exchanges until she died.
The connectedness, the continuity over time, the way one person who was hers became a person who was also mine or had children who became mine, and the way that my people or my children’s people became hers — this was the essence of my mom. My mother collected and connected people. She valued connecting over anything else in her life until the very end. Two days before she died, she was mostly sleeping and barely speaking. But she still said “hi… hi… hi” in a very soft and loving voice when we walked into the room.
Related to this, my mom asked me to include a particular story in her obituary, the story of “The Mystery Man.” This is about something that happened a week before she died; it was one of the last wonderful dramas in Elka’s very full life.
The story of the Mystery Man
As my mom is lying in bed, she has lots of memories and musings about various people, long ago and very recent. A few days ago, she told me that she was feeling really bad about not being in touch with someone, and she asked me to contact him. “There was a man who wrote something that I really liked in a Hospice newsletter a long time ago, and I called him up and said ‘I liked what he wrote and I want to meet you’ (that’s what I like to do!), and we had lunch together. It was very special. And then soon after that I broke my hip and had weeks in rehab, and when I got home I did not get back in touch with him (I think he had left me a message). I feel bad about not responding, and I’d like him to know that I’m dying. And I wish I had had a chance to meet his wife. I would really like to be able to tell him what happened.”
She could not remember his name, but she thought his last name ended with “nk,” so she and Paul went through her address book and looked for who it might be. Paul gave me a name: “Mom is 90% sure this is the right person.” (His last name did NOT end with “nk” though it did start with “k” and end with “n”!)
With some trepidation but also committed to helping my mom with any requests, I called that number and got a voicemail. I left a message about what my mom had said. I think I did a good bit of crying in that message so I’m not sure how much he could understand.
Three days went by. Every morning when I visited my mom, she asked me whether I had heard from him yet. After that amount of time had gone by with no response, I didn’t think we were going to hear from him, and I wasn’t even sure I had called the right guy. We started to call him The Mystery Man. It felt crazy to me in some ways that my mother wanted to reconnect with someone she barely knew and that it was on her mind so much. It struck me as one of those loose ends that maybe some dying people feel like they need to put in order before they go, and my mother is all about putting things in order: she is incredibly organized, still keeping track of many many people and details. Then last night she asked me again if I had heard from him, and again it was “No,” and she told me that I needed to call him again today. I thought, “Oh my God, that is so weird for me to call this man a second time!” I decided I would do it, but I had a lot of mixed feelings about it.
Well, this morning before I called him I got this beautiful text from him:
I am filled with sadness and regret. One lunch together … how significant could that be? Well, amazingly so, actually. In those two hours, I quickly realized I was being blessed to have time with an extraordinarily wise, loving, kind, and compassionate soul. I made pathetically poor use of that gift; have been aware often since of that being the case; and STILL failed to reconnect. My spiritual life was deepened by that experience, and as I try to “do better”, I will silently know that your Mom is helping me do so🙏🏻.
In gratitude,
Then he called and we talked, and he learned that he still had time to connect with her, and then he called my mom, and tomorrow* he’s coming to visit her.
So Elka’s Mystery Man is no longer a mystery.
The moral of the story? I want to go on record as saying that I stand corrected. We joked with my mom that trying to find this man with the purpose of saying goodbye to him was like saying “Hello-Goodbye” — and what’s the point of that??? But what she is teaching me is that saying Hello-Goodbye is still very meaningful. You don’t have to save your Hello’s only for people with whom you have a long time to spend. Having a connection, sharing an experience: that person now lives in me, takes root in my heart, enriches my experience of being human. That matters. How can you not really be looking for more friends?
* Elka’s Mystery Man visited her twice. She was glowing each time she told me, “He’s going to visit today,” and after he visited she was very content. He wrote us, “My lasting memory will be of sitting at her bedside, holding her hand, with a big smile on her face.” Elka had many visitors, and she appreciated them all. The degree of focus she had on this man reflects how she was completely alive to forming new relationships up until the day she no longer wanted visitors.
Belonging
And if it’s true we are alone,
we are alone together,
the way blades of grass
are alone, but exist as a field.
Sometimes I feel it,
the green fuse that ignites us,
the wild thrum that unites us,
an inner hum that reminds us
of our shared humanity.
Just as thirty-five trillion
red blood cells join in one body
to become one blood.
Just as one hundred thirty-six thousand
notes make up one symphony.
Alone as we are, our small voices
weave into the one big conversation.
Our actions are essential
to the one infinite story of what it is
to be alive. When we feel alone,
we belong to the grand communion
of those who sometimes feel alone—
we are the dust, the dust that hopes,
a rising of dust, a thrill of dust,
the dust that dances in the light
with all other dust, the dust
that makes the world.
~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer