1960

Our classmate has been gone a little more than a year, and his widow is still grieving. A few months ago, on a vacation that traced the path of an earlier trip with him, she took their three children to Hanover. She stopped to talk to his old Dartmouth baseball coach.

"It's just been an adjustment, hard every step of the way," she told me. "The other day I was reading a poem about emerging from a multitude of deaths. I feel like that. Everything I do, I remember him."

She's not working yet, she really doesn't need to financially, and the youngest child is just five. When she does, "It will be another terrible thing to adjust to, and we live so far out of town. Now, I'm the only driver."

I wanted to write a Class Note about widows. Rick Roesch wrote a letter a couple of years ago inviting them to participate in class activities and urging them to stay in touch, the way David Farfan's widow, Brenda, did when she came to our 1995 reunion.

Obviously, we all feel that way. But these are sensitive matters, and when I talked to two of the widows, I quickly found myself offering not to use their names. Otherwise, it would seem like an intrusion, since it was clear they were still hurting so much.

The second lost her husband four years ago. Their teenage daughter, especially, had a hard time adjusting.

She's back on solid ground now, making good grades at an Oregon boarding school. But, her mother says, such a loss "can really knock your socks off. It makes you really appreciate how important fathers are to daughters. "As time goes along, you do adjust,' she told me. "But there's no substitute for him. It makes me appreciate our marriage even more. We were married 28 years. This year would have been our 32nd anniversary."

But, she explained, "I probably would never go to one of the reunions, because I'd never been before. I don't know anybody. It would be an awkward situation."

Well, when we have an opportunity, we should assure the widows of our late classmates that we will work to be sure it is not awkward, and that they are always welcome.

Jay Emery, incidentally, sent me a new list of all the books purchased for Baker Library by our class in memory of classmates.

They are an eclectic group of volumes Some of the titles that interested me: Livesof the Kings and Queens of England, SaulBaernstein; The Music of Brazil, JesseeFate; European Vision and the South Pacific,Gordon Holterman; Sculpture of Verrocchio,Michael Menaker; Saskatchewan, WilderPenfield; Wolves of the High Arctic, MartinReich; The Horned Dinosaurs: A NaturalHistory, Thomas Troyer.

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