Suddenly

I found it odd that former colleague and friend Rob Feldman didn’t respond to an invitation to lunch. We had started having occasional lunches with our friend Tom Kranz. We all worked together at WCAU-TV back in the eighties. Tom had reconnected with Rob. I hadn’t seen Rob in forty years. After no response for over a week, Tom got a text from another friend who was also having trouble reaching Rob. We were now starting to think something may really be wrong. Tom said he was going to call the police in Ottsville, Pennsylvania in Bucks County and ask them to do a well check on Rob who lived alone in an apartment. The police officer who answered the phone said he knew Rob and that Rob suffered a stroke while out of the country. He was back in the country but the officer didn’t know where he was.

We were stunned. Rob seemed perfectly healthy.  We started calling around to rehab facilities to see if we could find him. It was Memorial Day so we didn’t have any luck. Another friend remembered Rob had a friend who was an attorney in Jenkintown, a nearby town. The attorney gave us the real story. He said Rob was working part time for a local farmer making deliveries to customers. When he failed to show up, they managed to find his car on the route. It was on the side of the road. Rob was slumped over unconscious in the car. The car was out of gas. He was taken to Abington Hospital and put on life support. He died May 19th of a stroke. Rob had just turned sixty-nine. How could this happen? It was what I call “the bullet through the window theory.” Someone is living their life and in an unexpected instant it changes. It happened to my father-in-law and just recently to a friend’s wife who suffered strokes. Rob never married. The attorney said Rob’s only relative was a brother who lived in Phoenix. They hadn’t spoken in twenty years.

I remember Rob talking about his career after working in local television news at one of our lunches. He had worked for Sony Entertainment. He adapted American sitcoms for audiences in Russia, shows like Everybody Love Raymond, Seinfeld, and The Nanny back in the early two-thousands. He spent weeks at a time there, and enjoyed the unique experience. Rob was also a great photographer and posted a new picture almost everyday on social media of rural scenes in Bucks County.

The couple of lunches the three of us had were full of laughs as we reminisced about our time working together, old colleagues, and our lives in retirement. We discovered many things we didn’t know as our lives ran on separate tracks. Tom and I had lunch yesterday and talked about what happened to Rob and promised to keep up the tradition and connecting with another former colleague we hadn’t seen in years.

The thought of Rob alone on the side of the road will always remind me that life is fragile and how it can change suddenly in an instant. We all think about how we will eventually die, and the impact it will have on those we leave behind. As the fleeting years of life go by, I will always have memories of the good times we spent together.