I saw him as soon as I turned towards the chairs in the physical therapy waiting room. By the time I’d found a seat, he’d moved to a corner off to my right. If I’d ever imagined A 20 years older than he was, this man would’ve been a fair representation, uncannily so. He was lanky, bald, goateed, and looking down through his glasses in a manner that suggested bifocals. I remember A doing the same. He hated wearing glasses at all, and the bifocals drove him nuts; wearing glasses was an indignity of aging he was especially displeased with. This man was thinner than A, as one would expect of a thin man who had aged two decades, though I have to admit, he had slightly more hair than my boy, mussed and wispy on a head slightly less freckled. But the overall impression was of seeing A’s denied future living and breathing before me; it was more than a little unsettling.
It hit me, hard, that A will never be an old man. I suppose by some standards, at 55 and a grandfather, he already was, but not by mine. He will never be that old man sitting in a PT waiting room. And I felt all the time and experiences that were stolen from us by his death in a single wordless blow as I looked at this man, and my heart and eyes filled with tears.
Forgetting for a moment, I tried to recall pictures of A’s father to imagine how A might’ve aged and how closely the man I was looking at matched, and then I remembered that his own father had never been an old man, either. He’d died when he was 39, just a couple years older than I am now. The pictures I’ve seen of him are of a young man.
I pretended to read my book, but I kept sneaking looks at the man, alternating them with long moments of openly staring. And while at first the inevitable ravages of the years on him shocked me as I imagined them applied to my beloved, I ultimately felt affection for this stranger as a shade of my sweetheart. And when he folded the paper he’d been reading in quarters and started working on what could only be the crossword puzzle, I was done for. A did that, too, every day.
When they called my name, I willed my lip to stop quivering, and my tears to stay put. I was mostly, but not entirely, successful.
God, do I miss that man.