The Little Things that Make All the Difference

I was on my way to NYC to fly out of JFK to Prague. To make the trip more enjoyable, my friends, David and Ray, and I were driving across country -- stopping in Albuquerque, New Orleans, and New Jersey before I was to meet my sister in Albany just days before my flight to Prague.

Whereas my arrangements had placed us with friends in New Orleans, my friend David's girlfriend Ray had arranged for our accommodations in New Jersey. It was on the Jersey shore with an old friend of Ray's mother, a woman named Pat, who met us graciously and took her into her home. She had hot pastrami sandwiches awaiting us -- and good spicy brown mustard. Her condo had rust-colored shag rug -- and 1980s furnishings -- but her view across the highway to the shore was stunning. She had prepared clean sheets on the fold-out bed for me in the living room. My friends stayed in the back room by themselves.

We were exhausted from our drive, but I had some difficulty falling asleep. Pat sat not far from me in the kitchen with the light on, smoking cigarettes and coughing, and doing a crossword puzzle. I remember thinking that she was coughing very hard. I popped half a Xanax, as was my custom to fall asleep in a strange locale, and drifted off.

That evening, I was awakened by my friends' crys to call 911. I thought I was dreaming, but it was a different kind of nightmare. Pat had coughed so hard during the night, she had burst a vein in a lung tumor. She was able to rouse my friends from the back bedroom, make the international sign of choking, before running into the bathroom and collapsing on the bathroom floor, where she bled out, entirely, through the mouth, covering the entire floor with the majority of her blood.

"Don't come in here," David yelled to me in the hallway. "You are not going to want to see this. Trust me." To this day, I owe David a debt of gratitude that I don't have that memory etched into my brain.

What I hadn't been told is that Pat was a New Jersey Police Detective who had recently retired after putting away some mobsters. When her fellow police officers arrived on the scene and saw Pat in a huge pool of blood on the bathroom floor, and three strangers in the house, it was a no- brainer to interrogate us.

We were separated by the police officers while forensic specialists examined the Pat's corpse. As the sun came up over the Jersey Shore, I was asked repeatedly about why I was in the house (just to crash, I said) and how I knew Pat (I didn't, I said), and what I did to Pat (I ate a sandwich with her and wished her good night, I said). Luckily, I was still slighly high on Xanax.

Within the hour, Pat's doctor was summoned. He told the detectives that Pat had terminal lung cancer. She knew that she could succumb to the disease at any time. She chose to take us in and give us a place to stay, taking a chance that she would be fine during the 12 hours of our stay. What she didn't know is that we would arrive just hours from her imminent death.

In many ways I'm glad I was there for Pat's death. Oddly enough, not only was it exciting to be interrogated for Murder, but I found out later that my friends were there at Pat's side, holding her hand, and easing her fear as she left this life into the great unknown.

We all had separate plane tickets, so I left David and Ray behind that morning and drove to Albany, as was our plan.

Ray naturally was depressed by all of this. When I next saw her, in Prague, she was clearly shaken by Pat's death. This, however, was my post-divorce, never-been-to-Europe trip, and so, perhaps selfishly, I resolved to leave the both of them. I arranged to meet them in Warsaw . . . and then reversed direction and instead journeyed southeast by myself through Hungary and Romania and Bulgaria into Turkey, traveling with whomever I would meet in the local pensions who were heading my direction. It turned out to be the trip of a lifetime and I met many friends from many far-flung places: Australians, Irish, Chileans, Kiwi's . . . and without Pat's death, I would never have made the decision to travel on my own. Traveling on my own became a liberating experience that has changed me profoundly to this day and given me a boost of self confidence in traveling, life in general, meeting new people, experiencing new things/places and personal relationships.

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After a seven year break in our friendship, I recently met up again with my old travel companion David. David had just exited a rehab program for heroin users -- and became employed by the Seattle needle-exchange program. After an accident left him with a broken leg, he moved back to San Diego, and found me. We met up at a local museum for a special event, had a cocktail or two, and started talking about the old days . . . our college days at Pt. Loma College, old friends, and our Eastern European trip. Ray had never quite gotten over the death of Pat, he told me. She fell into a depression that trip that caused their relationship some problems, and once they returned to Seattle, she shortly left David for another man. She got pregnant, and had a little girl with the new boyfriend, which was enough closure for David to move on.

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"Ray is dead," David told me recently. His lips tremored. "Her boyfriend shot her."

He explained that both Ray and the little girl were shot in a murder-suicide by the depressed boyfriend one rainy Seattle day.

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I have a photo of us three that I put on my website back in 1996, shortly after returning from the trip. Here's a photo of us three on a roadside stop in Baton Rouge, LA. I'm kneeling in the middle. Ray is on the right.

http://www.paulwade.com/travel/new-orleans/images/no_three.jpg

Ray had such beautiful red hair and such a wonderful singing voice.

I look at this photo now, and think about the little decisions in life that can change a lifetime: The decision to crash at Pat's place, my choice to travel through Europe alone, Ray leaving David for another man.

Those little details of life, those "sliding doors," they always make all the difference.

-- Wade Nash
(San Diego, CA. 4/21/09)