Getting Robbed
I had a message on my phone last night from a woman I recognized as an old college friend Rob’s ex-wife. I hadn’t spoken to her for years. I called her knowing something meaningful was up. I had spoken to Rob a few months ago and he did not sound at all well. I told a mutual friend that he sounded like he was 90 years old and feeble at that. At age 65 now, I know that friends will pass away. I suspected that she would be telling me that Rob had died. What she told me was that Rob had gotten into his car in his garage with his beloved dog and asphyxiated the two of them. Suicide may be painless according to M*A*S*H, but it is not without pain to its survivors.
I have had one other personal encounter with suicide. Twenty years ago, a member of my banking training class, a very vital young guy with a wife and three young kids drove to a Connecticut overlook on Long Island Sound and put a bullet in his brain. We all struggled to understand how a seemingly minor career and financial setback as he was encountering at the time could drive a person to such a desperate act. All we could assume was that he was deeply troubled and very unhappy with himself to the point of a profound inability to cope. It was about then that I put a picture on my office wall (it still hangs in my office) of a cowboy bending under the weight of a heavy saddle with the caption, “Some men never compromise, the cope.”
Rob’s situation was quite different. Rob was 66 years old and suffering from some sort of undiagnosable progressive nerve disease that was leaving him so debilitated that he could not enjoy the simple pleasures of riding his bicycle or swimming in his pool. He was deteriorating to the point of inability to function. He lived alone. It seems he had walked ever so slowly down to his pool and had fallen three times and had to drag his feeble body back up to his house. That made his decision to take his own life rather than deteriorate to the point of not being able to care for himself. He had been robbed of his basic pleasures and had no desire to stay calm and carry on. Rob was financially independent and retired. He led a quiet life and wanted a quiet life. His reason for deciding he could not cope was physical.
I first met Rob the first day of freshman year (1971) at Cornell. He lived at the end of my dormitory hall with a fellow Long Island pal named Henry. While everyone else was moving in, Rob, a slender and lanky guy, was walking down the hall to the bathroom every hour with a towel and plastic soap box to wash his hands and face. Rob tended towards the germophobic. He was decidedly pre-med and was practicing his pre-surgical scrubbing. We quickly learned that this quirk went well beyond soap and water. Rob kept his sweaters (a big fashion item in his wardrobe) in their original plastic bags. The rest of us normal college slobs were in awe of his tidy ways. Henry, on the other hand, grew weary of the fastidiousness. I recall one argument between them where Henry grabbed Rob’s pillow and stomped on it on the floor with his street shoes. The look of horror on Rob’s face was quite memorable.
Rob was part of the gang of seventeen from our floor that joined the same fraternity. Rob picked his friends very carefully in his own image. The two most physically similar guys in the group (David and Paul) were his go-to pals during sophomore year. I never cared if I was on the “insider friend” list, I enjoyed Rob’s sense of humor, which ran to the snarky and sarcastic, and I just hung around with him despite being a near perfect opposite to his doppelganger. What shocked most of us was that Rob was clean-cut and darkly attractive enough to get a date with most any girl on campus and yet he dated very little. The rest of us were always looking for ways to make girls ignore our bad looks or hygiene and would have killed for Rob’s female access. His dating abstinence was self-inflicted. He was either too serious about his studies or just too busy to bother. It is not inconsequential to the process that Rob was also highly selective. Female friends had to be as perfect or more so than his male inner circle.
Our last year at Cornell, six of us (Rob, Cliff, Bob, Gary, Dave and I) moved into half a house at 202 Sapsucker Woods Road. Rob got a car from his father and had the vanity plate Rob202 on it. It was that year that Rob was neurotically applying to medical schools. He had done well scholastically, and he applied to forty schools (an inordinately large number), and got forty interviews, an amazing hit rate. Stress mounted all year as rejections based on the interviews mounted. Our collective assessment was that Rob wanted it too much and so fumbled the interviews. That year he got targeted by one of upstairs girls in the house, one Miss Louise. Rob was no match for Louise. She simply overwhelmed him at his moment of weakness. She moved in and made his room one big mattress. We thought it might calm him down, but it didn’t help. He ended the year deciding to forego medical school while he attended a Texas school for a Master of Public Health.
Rob finally decided to go into dentistry and attended the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Dental School. He became a dentist with assistance from the Public Health Service. He told me the story of overcoming his germophobic squeamishness. He was serving merchant marine families in Boston and these patients were not at the high end of hygiene. Showing a partially-toothed older woman about flossing resulted in him catapulting a piece of long-ago lodged food bit onto his own face. He told me that when he did not run out of the room screaming, he knew he could be a dentist.
Rob went on to build and run a clinic for marginalized communities in the poor section of Stamford, Connecticut. He did good work for many years for people who needed his services. Along the way he married and had a son, Eric. Unfortunately, the marriage did not last for the usual array of reasons. Rob took great pride in Eric and his building list of life accomplishments, which included college and then working in the Silicon Valley tech capital at its highpoint. When I last spoke to Rob he talked of visiting Eric in Colorado and seemed saddened that he and Eric were not closer.
Rob was a loner. My wife and I tried to set him up with her friends just as we had all done off and on over the years, but Rob was a tough match and seemed basically to be a loner more than anything else. Rob chose for the most part to live alone. He became ill alone. He suffered alone. And except for his faithful dog, he seems to have died alone. Rob was robbed of his life at a relatively young age by a mysterious ailment. And the rest of use have been robbed of his friendship, as controlled as sparing as it was. The message is clear. Grab for all the gusto you can. Rob life of its marrow before life robs you.