A friend is going into hospice and it brings tears

But it brings the warmth of memories, too, and a realization that friendship does not always require a lifetime of knowing someone. So it was with Don….

            PARDON ME WHILE I cry for a moment.

            It seems I am at a point in life where parts of my past depart on a regular basis.

            I opened an email this morning to learn that Don Borah is dying. 

            Don is not a long-time friend. We never lived in the same town, worked in the same places. We only saw each other once or twice a year and even at that, not every year. We met late in each other’s lives. 

            I met Don when we lived in Texas. A mutual friend, James Moody, led Sierra Club work trips to Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Big Bend National Park, both in West Texas. After a few years of James nagging me to go on a trip, Connie and I signed up for Guadalupe Mountains.

            Long story short, it was a week of hiking into mountains carrying gear, repairing trails, doing other work then hanging at an old house, The Ship of on the Desert, the park service let us use.

            That’s where I met Don. He was a few years older than me, a Marine who saw combat in Vietnam then became a high school teacher the rest of his life. He came west in his RV with his wife Susan, who once was active on these trips but after a stroke, spent her time in the RV while we worked. She would join us in evenings and days off.

            It was watching Don’s devotion to Susan and his caring for her that became a model I hoped to follow when Connie was diagnosed with dementia and began her journey toward an end that is somewhere ahead of us in the mists of decline.

            Each evening Don would make margaritas before supper. He traveled with a mixer and the drinks were an evening ritual. Don was also funny. Our exchanges, to others, might have sounded like two guys giving each other a load of abuse. They weren’t. We both liked and appreciated satire and a funny insult. He was a tireless worker, even as his joints started giving out.

            I don’t know how many trips we took to Big Bend and Guadalupe over the years. I do know that as a group we bonded in a way I’ve never experienced with any other group of friends. On one trip we put a plastic blue pumpkin in the center of our circle of chairs and tossed quarters into it and after that we called ourselves “The Blue Pumpkins.”

            OUR WORKDAYS are over now but twice a year the group gathers for reunions in Big Bend. We hike, we pay five bucks to take the rowboats across the Rio Grande to Boquillas del Carmen, we cook, share memories.

            I went back once after Connie began her decline. James Moody wasn’t doing well and I wanted to stop in Burleson, Texas and see him. Another member of the group had died and her daughter was coming to spread her ashes in Big Bend. And, Don had cancer. He said he didn’t know how many trips he had left in him.

            It was a wonderful week. As it turned out, it was Don’s last trip. Maybe mine, too.

            The email telling me he had decided to go into hospice hit me hard. But, after I misted up a bit, I smiled. Of course, Don would make that choice and I have no doubt he made it without fear and with gratitude for a life well-lived.

            These days such messages come more often. Don was 84. I will be 80 this coming year. I suppose it is time to accept the end of lives hopefully well-lived.

            I came to love Don, someone I met late in life and really did not see that often. Life is odd that way, I suppose. We come into the orbits of people we don’t see often but there is something in them that does not require a lifetime, or togetherness every day to draw us to them.

            I have been blessed to have found “The Blue Pumpkins” and to have shared time and space with them in deserts and mountains. Go in peace, Don. Thank you so much for your life well-lived, for showing others what friendship and devotion are. If others ever feel the same way about me I will considered my life rich and well-lived.

Rich Heiland is a retired journalist and semi-retired consultant, trainer and public speaker. During his journalism career he was a reporter, editor, publisher, college instructor, part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team and a National Newspaper Association Columnist of the Year honoree. He lives in West Chester, PA and can be reached at [email protected].