I can explain

Jeff’s family lived across the street. When I was 7, he was a 21 year old college student. When I was in high school, he was an adventurous but unrooted young man, hopscotching between driving a VW Beetle up the Alaska-Canadian Highway to see what he could see, stinting as a handyman on a Seattle college campus, and visiting folks in the most derelict of Baltimore subsidized housing venues as a social services caseworker. None of which had anything to do with his college major--Medieval History--but most people can say the same thing. As the parent of five kids--all with a very relaxed attitude toward the whole marriage and babies gestalt--Jeff’s mother was, shall we say, pleased when her oldest took an interest, at a Christmas Eve party, in the girl from across the street.

I, on the other hand--for all my lack of focus on the points of college major, or career goal--carried with me a certainty that the right partnership was a big missing piece in the bewildering puzzle of life, and it did not take me long, following our first date to a boring film followed by coffee and a donut, to recognize a kindred spirit who’d exactly fill the empty niche.

It is not difficult to recall why I wanted to marry Jeff. He became, in short order, the most extraordinary kind of best friend I’d ever had. We had fun from the get-go. I was hooked, like with coffee. Not because he possessed any glamorous traits which would earn him a slot on “The Bachelor,” but because my brain had found a nutrient of which it had heretofore been deprived, and there wasn’t any deciding...there was just knowing.

A Pavlovian serotonin spike in my brain preceded every dinner out with Jeff. Because we could talk. I could talk about whatever philosophical, religious or creative nonsense was tap-dancing through my cranium, and he'd fully engage, fully grasp, and return in kind. Once, following a physiology exam, I gave him a tediously detailed description of the metabolic processes cascading through a dog as it escaped in panic from a burning house. I don't know how many people would relish such an exposition...but Jeff did. I admired his woodwork, his architectural vision, his curiosity about the world, and he cared for me in all my unfocused randomness. You might say that neither one of us exactly knew what we wanted to do with our lives, so we both pretty much did whatever we wanted until we turned whatever we wanted into a team project.

Conversation could be silly, if you'd even call it conversing. Sometimes it was nothing but rhyming words we vollied like pingpong balls. I was young, awkward, and resolutely stubborn. He was patient, goofy, and open. For some reason, I was what he'd been waiting for, and he was a window of privilege that life granted me for 20 excellent years.

A student of architecture--especially that of F.L.Wright, H.H. Richardson, Stanford White and others with a taste for robust design--Jeff built shelving into any free nook, the better to fill with his growing library of books entitled The Old House, The Not So Big House, The Shingle House, The Small Smashing Shingle House. While I was too scattered to achieve purposefully, we both nonetheless pursued education for its own sake, though with rather different foci. Jeff explored drafting, business, and accounting. I forayed into art, language, creative writing (with a brief traipse through nursing.) And we bred a tribe of creative, fun and pleasant people. (Sadly without a mathematician or auto mechanic in the bunch.)

Not the most efficient yeoman on the job, Jeff trudged nonetheless with dedication toward his extra-career goals...a point of some frustration for me. He habitually underestimated the complexity of any remodeling endeavor, leaving me to raise children in a neglected, leaking house, while he spent half his work days steadfastly turning South Baltimore squalor into sturdy, attactive, rentable row-houses. In the final analysis, and despite his persistent vexation that he'd yet to achieve financial independence, this stood us in good stead when retirement became an unbidden necessity, as I was able to sell the houses for investable funds prior to real-estate crashing in value. (And hire a crew to put his unfinished project--the transformation of our own home from a small Cape Cod into a handsome bungalow--in order.)

The goodwill that family and community extend toward Jeff in his present state of impairment is a testament to the kind of person he's spent his life being. People like him. He's never been anything but honest, earnest, and ready to help, and people are inclined to nurture him in return.

As for me, I have nothing to say in summary. To even attempt to summarize the significance of what has been lost means to--at least momentarily--disengage the robotic force-field I have erected as an emotional buffer. I care for Jeff now with a sort of cantilevered love. He deserves the best attention only, and I provide it insofar as I am able without exposing that now empty niche where, for 20 years, a puzzle piece used to fit.