I watched the warm glow that came over her as she said it: “Elaine would be so pleased.”
Indeed she would. And we both knew we both felt Elaine knew as well as we did.
Jean and I were talking Tuesday evening when I told her the news.
It was while I was in Washington DC for my 20th high school reunion that my friend Conway, my uncle’s friend too from WWII, had another heart attack, this time at the swim therapy pool where, on a normal day, he and I would have been chatting together as we exercised.
Someone called his wife Elaine. The lifeguard did CPR.
Jean was their neighbor and old friend whose children had grown up with their children; she was home when she was struck with the sudden, intense feeling, Elaine needs me!
This was in ’97. There were no cellphones.
She got in her car and drove, first towards the pool, and then no, and turned the car towards Stanford Hospital. All on the strength of that feeling only.
And so it was that Elaine was coming out the door of the hospital at the very moment Jean was coming in to look for her. Conway’s flattened-out vital signs had kicked in briefly when his wife showed up–just long enough for her to feel he was trying to tell her goodbye.
The two women threw their arms around each other. Their children and grandchildren and all who love them will forever be grateful for that moment.
After his death, Elaine packed up and left the house they’d lived in for so long and moved to southern California to be closer to her sons; she passed away not long after.
One of her sons sent his daughter off to BYU, not many years later…
…Where she started going out with this tall kid from, it turned out, the town where her parents had grown up.
And when he mentioned her name to us (we assumed, rightly, that the very fact that he did meant that they were becoming seriously interested in each other) I said to him, not quite daring to think it might be so, Ask her if…
He called today with such a twinkle in his voice. I’d been so sure it was going to be a girl.  Heh. Ultrasound says it’s a boy, Mom.
Better go get out that superwash merino in blue after all. And yes, this is an announcement: our first grandchild is coming. He will be the first grandson on both sides. He should arrive soon after the first of the year, and to tell you we are excited does not even begin to touch the unfathomable degree of love we feel for this new little person on the way.
Conway and Elaine must be so pleased.