When Silence Is Not Golden

It wasn't the noise at the table next to her that bothered her.

It was the silence that got to Eileen Luhta McFarlane.

McFarlane is a middle-aged mother who was sitting with her 5-year-old daughter, Ava, at a local Applebee's. A middle-aged couple came in and sat down at the table next to them. Nothing extraordinary about that at a chain restaurant on a Sunday afternoon.

Now, it's true that Ava was a bit flashier than her already colorful self. She had just come from a "beauty shop party" that turned her hair green and her nails a bright purple. But you can get away with such things when you're 5 and cuter than the law should allow, so everybody just looked at her and smiled, including that couple.

McFarlane figured they were pleasant-enough people. They didn't seem grumpy or worried, didn't seem annoyed with anyone, either.

They just had nothing to say.

The entire time they sat at that table, they were stone silent. Never said a word to each other — not before their meal, not during it, not after. Not so much as, "How's your food?"

And a part of Eileen Luhta McFarlane, the part that still aches every day for her husband, Jim, wanted to shake them and yell, "Do you have any idea how lucky you are?"

She knew this was not necessarily a rational response to two strangers minding their own business, and so she kept her opinion to herself. For a whole three days. Then she shot me an e-mail.

I had never met her, but that didn't matter. She just needed to tell somebody, she said.

"I can't stop thinking about that couple," she wrote.

Grief sure sneaks up on us. One minute we're immersed in the daily mess of life, and then, whoosh , something triggers a memory so raw that we're reaching for the nearest handrail just to keep upright. It's the definite downside to loving somebody with all your heart, which is how McFarlane describes the 25-year marriage she had with Jim.

Two years ago, his leg started to swell, and that was the only warning they got that everything was about to change.

He had never smoked, but he was diagnosed with a rare lung cancer. Three weeks later he was dead.

Jim was the kind of guy who kissed his wife's hand at dinner, squeezed the toothpaste onto her brush and left little love notes when she least expected them. He was a "hands-on daddy" from the moment he held Ava, whom they adopted from Guatemala.

And then, just like that, he was gone.

McFarlane doesn't try to figure out why this happened to her Jim, to her life. They were together nonstop for the last weeks that he was alive, and he was at such peace with his fate that she didn't cry the moment he died.

But there have been plenty of tears since, and whenever she sees a couple arguing in public or, even worse, having nothing to say to each other, it is almost more than she can bear.

I asked her, if given the chance, what she would have told that silent couple. What would she tell them she missed?

"Oh," she said.

"Oh," she said again, this time her voice shaking.

"Oh. Oh, my."

A few moments passed.

"Holding his hand. I miss holding his hand. What I wouldn't give to sit at Applebee's, hold his hand and talk his ears off."

She laughed.

"I used to talk a lot, but he held his own."

She took a deep breath, let out a long sigh. And suddenly, she was back at that restaurant, rattling off the possibilities for two people who didn't seem to notice how lucky they were.

"You know, he could have asked how she was doing. They could have shared a funny story from the day. One of them could have said, 'Did you read Crankshaft today?'"

She doesn't feel sorry for herself, but she is sorry she didn't speak up. She would have said, "You never know how much time you have."

She would have warned them, too.

"You don't want to end up thinking, 'I wish I'd said how much I loved you when we were sitting at Applebee's.'"

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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