Carrie, my Bestie, dragged me to a party. I hated all parties except the ones I hosted!
A huge apartment in the CWE. We strolled through the rooms until I found the back porch. Two men were following us into the room. One of them sat next to me on the sofa.
Ron was in STL attending CORO and then off to Berkeley for law school.
And then, years later, back to Manhatten to practice.
He had lived in the East 70s for the first 18 years and then in Lower Manhatten for almost 3 decades.
My elbow was resting on the arm of the sofa. He reached over me and without touching me looked at every charm on my bracelet. His face was inches from mine. I glanced at Carrie across the room who was watching us.
SMOOTH, she mouthed to me. I smiled and my breath stirred his curls. He turned to look at me, smiled, released my bracelet.
He was so very perfect.
He sent four leaf clovers to me from the family 'farm' up north once back in NY. There were always clumsily laminated into bookmarks. He was so precious.
I loved Rob in the best way. We had a special friendship for decades, increasingly sporadic as new people and events entered our lives. And I had married my partner.
Rob lived a couple of blocks away from the World Trade Center in Lower Manhatten.
His sister wrote to me: On the evening of Feb. 11th, 2018, Rob was walking from his NYC apartment to the nearby grocery store when he collapsed with a seizure on the street. He woke up in the hospital some three hours later and learned that something had been seen in a CT scan of his brain. About a month later he had surgery to remove the mass, leading to a diagnosis of Glioblastoma, grade 4. He went through chemo and radiation and handled it really well, but the cancer returned after six months and he had a second surgery in October, 2018. That surgery left him with some mildish vision and language deficits.
Other treatments followed, and he continued to handle everything well (i.e, to meet him, you probably wouldn't have realized he was a cancer patient) until close to the end. Things started slipping beginning in January 2020, when he began to complain of numbness in his right foot, moving up his leg. He had more radiation to try to delay the inevitable. In June 2020 he became pretty much paralyzed on his right side, and ended up in the hospital. But they'd run out of treatments, and on July 1st he was sent home with hospice. He died August 2nd, 2020. Rob is considered, officially, a victim of 9-11. His brain tumor was thought to have been caused by environmental toxins from the collapse of the World Trade Center.
