The Critical Mom's Eulogy: Thinking about the Loss of a Good Man

I met Josef at the MLA convention—a gathering of academics seeking jobs and showing off—in Chicago, in 1990. I wasn’t expecting much. My good friend, like me a graduate student hoping to score at least one job offer, had met Josef at a layover on the way to the MLA. She told me he’d flirted with her.

            “I’m married,” Susan told him, “But you should meet my friend Melissa.”

            As we entered our overpriced hotel room, our feet freezing in the sub-zero Great Lakes climate, Susan confided, “I’ve met the perfect guy for you!”

            Oh, no, I thought, but did not say. Susan, very ambitious on my behalf, had already introduced me to several “perfect guys,” all of whom did not seem anywhere near as perfect to me as they did to her.

            On one occasion at a dinner party specifically arranged for me to meet yet another absolutely husband-material-great-character-smart, kind, just for you type, Susan’s husband took a photo of me and the guy.

            “They look like an advertisement for marital counseling,” he said. Side by side, the guy and I were looking in opposite directions, our legs crossed in opposite directions.

            So I was anything but enthusiastic when Susan announced yet another perfect catch, adding that she’d already arranged for us to meet the following morning.

            “What?” I said. I was hoping she’d just hand me his phone number, which I could discreetly lose.

            Instead, she’d planned a day with him and his friends (oh, good, his friends will be there, I thought, diluting any romance) at the Chicago Art Museum. Susan and I went off to meet them on the lower level of the Chicago Hyatt.

            She spotted Josef at the bottom of the escalators and gestured for him to stay there, but as we descended, he ascended. We passed each other on those escalators moving in opposite directions, and a thrill went through me. He was definitely the handsomest man I’d ever laid eyes on—the blue eyes, the light brown curls, the gentle grin, the beret rakishly tilted to one side, the leather jacket. The voice. I fell in love on the spot. Everyone I knew asked me how this relationship could possibly work. He was a devout Bavarian Catholic and I was a New Yorker without a Catholic background. But we believed in the same things. We just labeled our beliefs differently.

            Unfortunately, we continued to move in opposite directions for the next few years—he was in California and I was in New York. The course of true love never does run smooth, but I’m so glad we finally did get together.

We had a wonderful Bavarian wedding, in which Josef, dressed as Arnold Schwarzenegger, rescued me, his bride, abducted to another building, where I sat around singing American folk songs with his cousin Anton until Josef arrived with a water pump gun, spraying Anton. I remember drinking quite a lot of champagne, dancing until a friend advised me to watch out for a being whom she referred to as “little Siegfried,” who turned out to be my oldest son, who was five months along and did just fine. As did his brother and sister.

            I’m losing my husband, my best friend, my heart. I can’t imagine a better man. Here are some of my favorite lines from Shakespeare about the loss of a loved one:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

If Josef had to die, then his last fully lived day, November ninth, was appropriate as his exit. For Josef, November 9 was the day the Berlin wall fell—and he was a man devoted to breaking down barriers and boundaries, and fostering conversations between different kinds of people. He will be sorely missed. In the midst of mourning, I can celebrate having enjoyed twenty-one years with a guy who was madly in love with me and I with him.