That's for Life

On December 20, 2006, I woke up at around five o’clock in the morning, one hour before I typically rose, and did something I never do that early in the day. I checked my e-mail. My inbox contained a message from a woman whom I only knew casually through my best friend and former partner in the police department. Her name is Denise, and my friend Stephen hired her to work in the shop he owned. I helped at his store, fixing his computers and doing some counter work with the customers. Denise and I often talked and joked when we were there together, but our relationship was strictly professional, as we were both married and had families. Besides, she was Stephen’s friend from childhood.

I was curious to see a message from Denise, but not shocked. I gave her the address, not one that I use for personal e-mails, but an e-mail address I give to people I am iffy about. The subject line caught my attention, though.

Urgent! Please read!

It wasn’t spam, and I didn’t think she would hit me up with some sort of business scheme; but, for the life of me, I couldn’t think of a single issue where I’d need to speak to her in a hurry.

Stephen closed his shop up a few months earlier. Business in the shipping and receiving world was bad, especially since he had to compete with FedEx and UPS. Cutting his losses, he sold collectibles on eBay and enjoyed his well-deserved pension from the NYPD. Denise started a new business with her husband and by then I got a job with my current employer at the college. With that said, I had no real reason to have any contact with Denise unless Stephen was involved.

I opened the e-mail.

Mike, call me the moment you read this. It is important. Even if it is two o’clock in the morning, please call. I need to speak to you!

She included her home phone, her cell phone, and the number of the business she and her husband owned together. I wouldn’t call a woman I only knew casually at 5 AM. And not with my wife in the shower getting ready for work a few yards away in our main bathroom. I didn’t want to endure her district attorney-style grilling if she caught me calling a thirty-something woman from the secrecy of our computer room at dawn.

I waited until I got to work. My job keeps me in front of a computer all day and I can check my e-mail messages at will. I opened e-mail, navigated to my inbox, found her cell phone number, and then I called her up.

“Mike, oh my God Mike. It’s about Stephen.” She was bawling, weeping uncontrollably.

“What Denise, what happened?” My stomach tightened.

“He died. He died last night. He had a heart attack.” She said something else, but I didn’t understand it.

That old joke about someone bluntly being told, The cat died, came to mind.

There was no wind up to her delivery. She simply blurted, he died, just like that.

Your relationship with someone and how you receive bad news about them reveals much about how others perceive your connection to that person. Stephen was my friend since 1989. We worked together in a squad car for almost six years, backed each other up each other on the streets, and knew things about each other which our families were not aware of. Still, I found it odd that a woman from my part-time job was the only person who contacted me during that initial shock and mourning.

Once, only a few years ago, Stephen helped me out by giving me a job, insisting on paying me to set up his computer network. My family and I struggled because I had recently retired from the police department. I had brand new computer certifications, but no experience. One evening, when we were locking up his store, I thanked him, told him how much he was helping me, and I added I did not think I could pay him back. With a raised hand, he cut me off and said, “Hey, we rode in a sector car together. That’s for life.”

“He died?” That was all I could muster in response.

She gave me the details stating that he picked up his son, Jimmy, his only child, from the airport. Jimmy had come home from college to be with his parents for the holidays. Despite being divorced, Stephen purchased a home around the block from his ex-wife to stay close to his son and help raise him. To his credit, he maintained an amicable relationship with her for their son’s benefit. I met his former spouse, Terry, only once, since their separation many years prior. That night, he took his son home to meet his new girlfriend, a woman whom he had been dating for about two months. The three of them had plans to go out for dinner. He collapsed while preparing for a shower and could not be revived.

I hung up with Denise and ran outside my building. It was a crisp, cloudless day, and I ignored the cold. The folks in my office couldn’t help but overhear what I said to Denise, but they politely refrained from asking what was going on until I eventually told them about my friend’s passing.

For about two hours, I was in shock and denial. To make some sense of what happened, I called the county coroner’s office. A polite woman who answered the phone knew whom I was referring to off the top of her head.

“Yes, sir, they brought him in last night. His ex-wife is coming to claim his body.”

He was no longer a person, but a body.

After muttering a few polite words of thanks, I hung up. The Dean offered me the rest of the day off, and I refused. The best way to deal with his unexpected passing—a forty-eight-year-old man’s death being unexpected—was simply to put my head down and work.

After hanging up with the coroner’s office and conferring with my supervisor, I called my wife to tell her about Stephen.

“What do you mean, he died?” She asked with the same incredulity which I had when I spoke with Denise. “Isn’t he supposed to come over tomorrow?”

She was right. He was due to come by the next day for an informal visit just before Christmas, and I was looking forward to seeing him. Instead, I was going to attend his wake.

The next evening I arrived at the funeral home and was curiously pleased to see marked, New York City police cars among the clogged streets and parking lots nearby. Hundreds showed up to pay their respects. If you knew Stephen, you loved him. He was smart, funny, gregarious, and had a bit of a mischievous side to him. But he was loyal to a fault. As I wended my way through the dozens of officers congregating on the front steps of the funeral home, some I knew well, others only vaguely, I realized as good of a friend as I was to him, I was only one of many hundreds whose lives he touched. And I am ashamed to admit that I was a tad jealous.

Denise arrived with her husband and sought me out. She explained she did not know my telephone number and found my e-mail address on a scrap of paper at the bottom of her pocketbook. It was a minor miracle, considering that I gave it to her a year before. Stephen’s son, Jimmy, remarkably showed composure for a young man who had watched his father die only two nights earlier. And then I saw Terry.

A receiving line formed in front of her as she took up a spot near his casket. Terry arranged the funeral, the wake, and his burial. She even dug through his closets and found all of the items for his dress uniform, including his name plate, shield, tie, collar brass, and other insignia. She’d done well, and I was touched, as she and her son were the only family Stephen had in the world.

“Hi Terry, you don’t remember me, but I’m Michael, Stephen’s friend.” I offered my hand, and she took it and looked me in the eye.

“You’re Michael?” At first, I thought she didn’t hear me. Then she repeated herself.

“You’re Michael? Oh, my goodness. You’re all Stephen ever spoke about.”
She stepped back and looked me up and down. Then, she smiled, but not happily; but as if to confirm a suspicion.

“All these years,” she continued, “all I ever heard was ‘Mike and I did this, and ‘Mike and I did that.’ He spoke about you all the time, more than anyone in this room.” Of course, she didn’t include their son in that comparison.

It didn’t occur to me I was crying until she offered me a tissue. We talked a bit more and then I paid my respects to my buddy resting in a coffin.

Outside, I mingled with the cops, some in uniform and others in dark-colored suits, on the front steps. Most of them wore grim expressions while they talked shop and reminisced about the good old days when Stephen was alive. I couldn’t wait to get the hell away from them. The college’s more comfortable and safe environment made me realize how much my life had changed since leaving the job. The death of my friend and partner also severed one of my last ties to my past life in law enforcement.

In the months following Stephen’s death, I could not get a hold of his son despite his acknowledgement that we should stay in touch. In addition, Denise has remained aloof. I do not want to interfere with her life; and in fact, we had no relationship at all except for when we worked at our mutual friend’s business. Every once in a while, when I hear a joke that he would have laughed at, or when I see a gadget he would have enjoyed, or when I stumble on a hard memory from my days on patrol, I think of him.

Early in my early career as a rookie, a veteran cop who was about to retire offered me this adage:

“On this job, you’ll have secrets which you won’t tell your wife, your parents, your priest, or anyone that you know, except your partner. Those things die with you.”

Man, he was right. As of today, I have nothing but a few photos to remind me of the time I had with my friend. It is as if he never existed. There is no one else who I can turn to and talk to about all the things I did with him, and no one who will understand except other cops; and still there are things that even they should not be privy to. All of that died with my partner.

A long time ago, we rode in a sector car together. That’s for life.

Author’s note: The original story about Stephen’s death “Goodbye to a True Friend” can be read here. It was written the morning after he passed away.





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