The Saturday of Memorial Day weekend we went to a picnic at a friend's house and ate and hung out and played wiffle ball and enjoyed a fire, smores, and some good people. It was a very nice day.
On Sunday, Joe and I got up and dressed and headed down to Stamford to go to a Memorial Day picnic at my cousin's house. Since my cousin lives next to my parents, I decided to park at their house and save room in the street for other people. I pulled in their driveway to turn around and my sister was outside waiting for us. This was weird. She told us to just stay in the driveway, mom and dad weren't home. This was also weird. She was stammering over her words (which she does frequently and which drives me up a wall...picture someone reading a teleprompter on which the words are scrolling by at half speed) so I told her to just spit out whatever it was she was trying to say. Without any sort of tact or decorum, she said, "Robert went for a jog this morning and dropped dead."
Through my head tromped the following barrage of thoughts...
Robert. Letkowski? But he's not old. Or sick. And what about Alissa and Stephanie? And Ellen? What happened? Why did you tell me like THAT? Why didn't anyone call me to tell me not to spend $30 in gas and 2+ hours in the car on a round trip to Stamford? I certainly couldn't go the picnic all puffy-eyed and crying. Robert?
I was shocked. And pissed. And sad. And pissed again. I yelled a lot at my sister. Well, more toward my sister. My family tends to leave me out of the loop a lot (ie my grandmother will spend a week in the hospital with heart problems ((HEART PROBLEMS!!)) and no one will think to call me until she's already been back home for three days) so I was really mad that they didn't have the decency to call me up right away when they heard this news. I told my sister we certainly weren't going to stick around and wait some undetermined amount of time till our folks got home. Joe and I went next door to tearfully say hi , bye, sorry we can't stay, only to find out that they already knew about Rob, because someone had called them. The initial shock had worn off and I was left with sadness for my cousins, punctuated by bursts of rage toward my immediate family. Joe had to drive us home.
My dad later called to explain that the reason they hadn't called was because they knew I was going down to Stamford and they wanted to tell me in person. But because I was supposed to be at the picnic "around 1" and didn't show up until 1:30, they had been forced to leave before I got there so they could drive up to Rob's mom's house where the rest of the family was going to be. I saw their reasoning as, at best, flawed and told my father how freaking angry I was at all of them for their inability to keep me informed of anything, ever, and for how the news did eventually get broken to me.
He was sorry. He promised to keep me more in the loop in the future. We shall see.
Anyway, it turned out that Robert (who was my mom's first cousin) had gone for a jog that morning at the high school track near their house, as he frequently did. While jogging, he collapsed. Someone called 911. The emergency personnel who responded were able to revive him briefly but by the time they got to the hospital, Robert had died. We later learned his heart failure had been caused by heart disease no one knew he had.
Robert's wake was that Wednesday, his funeral, Thursday.
Joe was a pall bearer.
Robert's wife, Ellen, and daughters, Alissa and Stephanie, showed strength and grace beyond my imagination. They recounted happy stories of Rob...rowing across a lake in a small styrofoam boat with a giant hole in it... donning a helmet and sword to track a bat that invaded their house. Even in the beautiful, old cemetery, while placing flowers on his casket, they seemed to have found peace. I truly was in awe of them.
Robert was a great guy. You would have liked him.
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