How well I remember when you and Alice returned to my life. You had both resigned from teaching some years earlier. Your children were living far away, beginning their own families, and shaping their working lives. Their mother's illness was something they were not ready to accept. Alice was coping with advancing Alzheimer's disease and you had asked a number of your friends to help you help her to keep living life on whatever level was appropriate for her at that moment.
I doubt, David, that you had any idea of the strain those years of caring had been for you. You both had aged far beyond your 60 years. She still smiled and retained her upper middle class manners, but she looked far away and wild. You looked old and worn out. When we met you hugged me in a desperate, lost way. I wondered then which of you was more in need of help!
I took my turn spending a month each year as a member of your family. Each time upon my return Alice had slipped further into her own world, but you, with your twelve friendly, one-month-a-year helpful family members, were slowly finding the David we all remembered.
Those bear hugs that were your hallmark slowly turned from desperation back to welcome, old friend. Your sense of humor returned. Together we kept finding new and interesting ways to reach Alice.
Then Alice was gone and you and I became a lifetime family of two. Since we were both in our sixth decade when we began, we figured we had about twelve years left before we would begin to go down hill. We promised each other that those would be good years. We had twelve years and five months. They went by much too fast, but they certainly were good.
I know that throughout our twelve years we often told each other of the joys we experienced sharing our lives together. Our recorder playing grew and introduced us to a large and interesting group of new friends. Our outdoor bathtub for four also expanded our friendships and my interest in the night sky. Even you found it wonderful to took up at your heavenly friends on winter nights while sitting up to your chin in hot water.
We built a screened-in porch so we could sleep outdoors all year and be sure to keep dry. Each morning we took an hour walk before breakfast. The dogs ran in and out of the woods coming back to the road to check on us every now and then. The cats followed at a safe distance behind. You were interested in the stories told by footprints in the snow or mud, in a field of daffodils at the forest edge, the road crew who insisted on breaking the beaver dam near the roadside, and the beavers that quickly rebuilt that same dam. I enjoyed the behaviors of all my walking pals.
Off and on throughout each day something would please you. So often you brought that pleasure to share with me. How we enjoyed smiling or even laughing over something we had seen, or read, or just imagined. Those warm times were always accompanied by a big bear hug and usually a kiss on the top of my head. I always felt small and protected in your arms. Were you so gentle and caring because you were so very tall?
I was not the only one you hugged. You were a natural hugger. You hugged everyone in greeting and saying good-bye. You held babies and little children in comfortable big arms that cradled them in tenderness. You even hugged people as you were being introduced to them. Everyone seemed to know that being hugged by you was just the right thing to happen. I loved that tenderness in you.
Each morning you were up and busy in the kitchen, before the sun came up, making yet another exotic cereal in our old and dented double boiler. Our coffee perked on another burner, and I continued to sleep deep and snug beneath our feather quilt. You always served me my cup before climbing back into bed and there, snug and together, we planned our day or perhaps worried about the distance between our moon and Jupiter by odd things like measuring the distance each traveled through the checks of our window screens over a period of a given number of minutes.
We kept learning from each other as each day passed and even deep into some nights when everyone should have been asleep. How many times did we stay up following the piano scores of Beethoven's symphonies or Wagner's operas and finish too exhilarated to even think of going to bed?
Many times while we were living it, I have thanked you for all you have given me. But I never told you that you taught me how to die in control of even this last project we will all one day complete. You left us all knowing we would hear from you again with more positive and fun-loving experiences from wherever you are now.
Soon after Alice died we both gave our bodies to Harvard Medical School for medical research. You liked to say you were going to go to Harvard. That was fine with me but although I had also applied, I'm not so sure I was sincere until a year after you had gone and I was invited to a communal service in honor of over one hundred Massachusetts citizens who had also taught at least one more person something long after others dearly departed were in their final resting place.
When I stood in the rain with that large crowd of celebrators we all looked at the forty yard long line of white plastic names tags stuck into the damp earth, not twelve inches apart, marking the final resting places of all those Massachusetts citizens who, that year, had given their bodies to science. Yours was one of very few which had two names beautifully lettered in that limited space.
Maria Gonzales on top and David Dickinson below. With an entire year between your death and this service I found and still find it very pleasing to know you will spend the rest of eternity, not cold and alone, but with your arms wrapped around a little Mexican woman.