There’s a woman on my block who lost her husband last September. A small, stocky woman, she waddles a bit as she walks up Third Street. And she  looks like the loneliest person in the world.

Her husband was much taller than she, handsome, with a full white beard. Barrel chested, he always looked so robust. I was surprised one day when I saw him coming out of a yellow cab looking so weak, she had to help him walk to their stoop. At first I thought the man might be his father. He looked exactly like her husband just much, much older.

I mentioned this to my husband and he said he knew something was wrong. He’d seen him talking to someone about selling the BMW motorcycle he kept in the front cement yard of their building. "That bike meant the world to him. I thought it was strange that he was selling it," my husband said.

We learned that he had cancer soon after from neighbors on the block. One day I saw two of his sons sitting on the bench in their yard and somehow I knew.

I never knew him at all. I only observed his comings and goings on Third Street. But I liked him: the way he looked, the way he talked to his adult children, his friendly, deep-voiced hellos, the closeness he emanated with his wife. I guessed, in that way you conjecture about neighbors,  that they were longtime Park Slopers, progressives, political-types. Through their front window, there was evidence of a former hippie life – Indian fabric, abstract paintings, stained glass. To me it brought to mind: civil rights, New York in the 1970’s, "We Shall Overcome." 

Infused with grief, his wife looks lost, aimless, sad all the time now. She still smiles at me as she walks up Third Street. But we’ve never been in the habit to stop and talk. Besides I don’t know what I’d say. Clearly, she is trying to find her bearings in this life without her bearded man. The other day I noticed a vase of dried out roses in her window.
It made me sad just to see them there.

-Louise G. Crawford