Reminder of a friend and a gentle man

On my telephone recording machine, I have a message from my dear friend, Herb Huebsch.

He called a day before our recent election to ask for any enlightenment I might offer about several of the propositions. He and his wife, Deborah, were about to take off for a brief vacation in Palm Springs, and he wanted to complete an absentee ballot before they left.

By the time I got around to returning his call, he had already completed and mailed the ballot.

But I hadn’t yet erased the message four days later when Deborah was on the phone at their vacation condo, and Herb told her he was going outside to retrieve something from his car. The errand took uncommonly long, and Deborah finally went out to investigate.

She found Herb collapsed in the open car door. Sometime during those few minutes he had been gone, he simply left us -- and when help arrived, he was beyond any efforts to bring him back.

Herb, who was 75, had no history of poor health. He was playing competitive tennis right up to the day they left for Palm Springs. His life seemed ordered, full and deeply satisfying. So there was no clue, no chance for preparation.

But in the week since his passing, all of us who will miss Herb sorely have drawn sustenance from the powerful spiritual depths of his wife.

Still, we must each deal with our own feelings -- and wherever they take us. And I’ve been doing a lot of that the past few days.

First was simply accepting the fact that he won’t be around anymore to offer me a voice of reason and warmth as nearby as the telephone or a two-hour lunch.

Herb was a gentle man -- in the full sense of those two separate words.

In a world of belligerently raised voices, Herb refused to shout to be heard. He would wait his turn patiently and make his point quietly. Such civility, however, didn’t substitute for conviction. He had strong views, but they were always reasoned and expressed calmly -- a model too often overlooked by excitable types like me.

For more than 30 years, Herb and I built and sustained the kind of friendship that didn’t leave much out in the way of personal excesses and feelings. It hasn’t completely registered yet that he won’t be leaving any more messages -- at least not on my phone machine. Maybe he’ll find some other way. I’m available.

Meanwhile, I ponder the aftermath of the sudden death of someone very close. It isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last. But it always brings up the question of what is easier for those left behind -- a sudden, drastic shock or a lingering illness that offers some time for preparation.

And, as always, there is no answer -- except, perhaps, that loss is loss, no matter how it happens.

Then there is the awareness that it is downright inexcusable not to take care of practical matters easily managed in health that can, if ignored or procrastinated, cause inordinate stress to survivors. I’ve vowed to mend my ways in this area after several other losses. This time, I will.

But most important is appreciating and embracing the ordinariness of daily life rather than feeling the pressure of shrinking time left to pursue exotic adventures or to reverse failures by reaching out one last time for unattainable goals. Or to right oneself with some higher authority.

This understanding eluded me for many years after watching an uncle, with whom I lived part of the time I was attending college, die a lingering death from cancer.

He spent most of his last months listening to broadcasts of St. Louis Cardinals baseball games, which distressed me. Not because I didn’t share his passion for baseball, but because I carried around this vague notion that he should be nurturing his soul with the brief time left him by pondering profound thoughts -- sort of adding up the various columns of his life.

It took me a good many years before I completely understood that listening to baseball was a true nurturing of his soul -- and some years after that to get past the notion that life should be taken in gulps when the time left is growing visibly short.

Herb had been asked recently what he wanted to do that he hadn’t done. All he could think of was hang gliding, and on reflection, he no longer really cared much about that.

I’ve been looking at the same question, and Herb’s passing has finally made it clear that the minutiae of living -- at least to me -- is inordinately richer than hang gliding and doesn’t have to be gulped. It can be rolled on the tongue without guilt or any sense of miniaturizing whatever stage of life we are in.

I watch many hours of baseball and football every year; Herb watched tennis endlessly. Neither of us ever saw any reason to apologize -- although we constantly needled each other for bad taste in sports.

I haven’t decided what to do about the message from Herb on my answering machine.

I can’t keep it forever, and he would probably be amused at my keeping it at all.

But saving it, at least for now, is more than an emotional reaction. It serves as a reminder, too, that he might quite possibly be out there watching celestial tennis matches, so I shouldn’t feel that I’m wasting what the AARP likes to call the senior years of my life by wallowing in baseball and sunsets and ballet and hating the futility of the Democrats and the arrogance of the Republicans and drawing to inside straights and betting on horses that include my wife’s name because she’s a winner.

Herb didn’t bet on horses, but he would understand.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column appears Thursdays.

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