Friends Whose Names I Don't Know

For decades, I’ve shopped at a particular Wegmans within a two-hour range on a weekday morning. As you’d expect, you see other people whose habits are similar to your own. Maybe you say Good morning or I don’t think much of these green bananas after a year or two. Eventually you talk briefly about the store and it contents, the city you’re in, the weather, a tragedy in the news. You aren’t friends, but you connect with these people.

They remark when they don’t see you for a few weeks, and you tell them of taking your oldest off to college, the funeral you attended, the vacation you enjoyed. Once or twice a week for years, you exchange pleasantries, without even knowing their names.

I have more than one Wegmans-friend, but the one I saw today is special. At one time, he was always with the same woman, clearly her assistant of whom she was fond and vice versa. Over time I learned she’d lost her husband to MRSA in what should have been a routine surgery, and getting out of the house regardless of the weather, shopping every day for food, did her good. Over a period of years, her own health failed and he shopped for her, and we continued to chat over nothing much. Later he appeared to be shopping for himself and I presumed she no longer employed him. I could only guess the reasons, none of them pleasant.

“Haven’t seen you in a month!” he’d say. “You been good?”

I’d tell him of a weekend in Boston, our younger daughter’s search for work, the traffic that made me appreciate where I live.

Today he didn’t look so good. We waved from across the store, and for no particular reason, I stopped, waiting for him to catch up. “How have you been?” He was thinner than I’d ever seen him, and looked tired.

“Not so good,” he said. “My daughter passed, on Mother’s Day.”

“That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”

To my surprise, the tears of sympathy were immediate. I’m not a person who cries easily or often. But it was too easy to imagine the loss of either of my own girls. 

I didn’t hesitate. This was my friend, whether I knew his name or didn’t. I hugged him and cried for his pain, right in the produce section. We talked a while, me crying the whole time, and I learned that this was his second daughter to die in a two year period, the happy one who was always able to draw a smile out of him when he picked her up from work no matter how grim his thoughts. He had another daughter who’d suffered a massive stroke and could not speak. She appeared to recognize family members, but maybe that was just what he wanted to see. He was taking this fresh loss hard, hadn’t been able to really cry about it.

There is no right way to grieve, I reminded him, no clock on when he had to cry. I muttered some platitude I don’t even believe and hugged him a second time.

People stared when a plump white woman hugged a somewhat rough looking black man, and others stared when that woman cried or sniffled through the soup aisle and bulk food.

This was a real connection, a human who cared about another human’s pain and loss. I don’t know his education, political beliefs, who he hates or fears, any of that. I just know he was hurting, and that I truly cared.