Recently, a gentleman whom I came to know only for a relatively short time passed away. Ron Mahood was my neighbour down the hall of our apartment building on Morris Street.
I knew him only long enough to begin to appreciate him as a person, and a friend, if a peripheral one. The last time I talked with him was in the hall, where he was thanking another neighbour and peripheral friend for the Christmas cookies she’d made for him.
There are many peripheral friendships in life; people we look in on periodically to see how they’re doing; people who, over time, tell us enough of their story that it all starts to form a picture of a real person, a real life.
If there’s time, we come to see the warm heart, the unique brain and attitudes, beliefs, habits, the sometimes caustic wit, the desire to laugh and help others laugh at it all.
People don’t know what to say when something like this happens. He was a good man, he loved his cat Chester, he was a reader, and we were worried when he started falling down and having those blackout spells.
He spoke of all the friends he’d had and lost. He told me he’d stopped making his bed. He knew it was coming. He hoped his cat would go first.
Words that can’t begin to say it all, but something must be said, because we can’t just ignore the fact that he is ... gone, and just get on with our lives as though nothing has happened. Something has happened.
There’s the helpless feeling that there should be something more. So here, then, out of my sadness that I won’t be running into you in the hall anymore, or sitting around your living room talking about anything, are some of my words for you, Ron.
I can’t speak for all your neighbours, but I know they share my sentiments. You were worth nature’s making of you. Four score and six, Ron. Not bad at all. I’m happy to have known you. I hope I heard what you tried to tell me. Any man who loved animals is OK with me.
I hope you had a lot of love and good times, and lots of laughs. I hope you found enough of what you wanted most.
May our paths cross again sometime in eternity, somewhere in the cosmic evolution, in the Great Beyond, if that’s the way it goes.
R. Beauchamp
Greater Sudbury
Posted by Laurel Myers
