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PREFACE CONTINUED
I did a lot of growing up along the way, at the same time that Robb was, literally, growing up. He and I learned about life together and learned a lot from each other. In some ways my growing up was parallel to his, except that while I was learning how to be more mature, more careful and more thoughtful, he was learning how to be less careful. As a kid, Robb handled things in a more sober way than I did growing up, perhaps even in a more sober way than I did when he was growing up. He was a happy enough child, but he didn’t laugh off adversity when something controversial happened, like some children do, or say that he didn’t care. He cared very much. He wanted things to be done right. Sometimes he would scold me if I was sick and didn’t go to the doctor right away. When, for example, he found out that scar tissue on my chest, caused by an x-ray burn when I was a baby, should be removed, he got angry when I procrastinated. “Mommy, why would you take a chance like that?” he asked in his stern child voice.
“Life is too serious to take seriously,” I began to say when Robb was in his teens, and in the late eighties it became my mantra. I think I said it as a flippant way of pushing back some of life’s responsibilities: raising four children, keeping a home, owning two businesses, worrying about aging parents. It became my way of saying, let’s forget about all of that for a while and set aside some time for fun. It was more of my not wanting to grow up all the way, to save some tiny piece of myself, to keep that young part of me alive. Sometimes I’d say it to our family. I even spoke the words on Robb’s wedding video. I’m not sure he liked the fact that I recorded this statement. I do know he thought that life was to be taken seriously, as an adult as well as earlier times in his life. I could tell by how hard he worked at things: school, hockey, jobs, relationships.
Once in 1983, my husband Bob and our three other children, Susan, Beth, and Jeff, visited Robb over Christmas vacation when Robb was working in Jamaica. It was the year after he’d graduated from Northwestern University, three years before he got married, and he’d taken a job teaching at a preparatory high school in Chapelton, Jamaica. The six of us were sitting by the pool, watching a small boat take people parasailing, that leisure activity where you’re strapped into a harness and are pulled along by the boat. I wanted to do that, had wanted to for a long time. Looking over at Robb, I said, “Let’s go do that!”
“No way, Mom,” he said. “The people that run these things are not that responsible.”
“Oh, come on, it’ll be fun,” I chided.
More emphatically Robb said, “I’m not going to go and watch you do something reckless.”
I was surprised. I thought he’d be happy for me getting to do something I’d always wanted to do. I probably should have listened to his advice; he knew the place and the people better than I did. But I didn’t listen that time, I went on without him. Bob and the two younger children, Beth and Jeff, accompanied me to the take-off place. For me, it was a lovely experience—flying up in the sky—the closest, I knew, I’d ever get to flying like a bird or a butterfly; even better was the safe landing. When we returned to the hotel I could sense Robb was still miffed at me though relieved that all had gone well.
And yet he’d taken chances too. He’d lived in Jamaica for a year and a half, teaching at the school in Chapelton, a rural community where he was one of the three white people in town. Where he learned what was going on in the outside world through his shortwave radio, and where he often endured the lack of running water, electricity, and a telephone. He’d spent six weeks in Kenya the summer after his junior year in college. He’d climbed mountains there, lived with a native family, eaten all kinds of strange exotic food, come down with dysentery and needed to be hospitalized.
It seemed Robb was willing to put himself in danger for long periods and thought through his experiences, whereas I made quick, last minute decisions that could prove disastrous but so far had worked out okay. Robb would spend weeks staying in places where the living conditions were not all that great. There’d been a solo trip to Haiti where he almost died from some mysterious illness, surviving due to the kindness of a stranger who took him in from the bench he’d been sleeping on at the airport because he was too sick to go further. There were the many later trips to different countries in Africa, when he repeatedly put himself in harm’s way. He could endure bad times or bleak circumstances better than I could have. I would have been out of a locale in a shot if I couldn’t handle the desperate feeling that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, that I was in a dangerous place that was therefore undesirable.
I think of war and how people get caught up in that kind of circumstance all the time and then have to live with it because they have no choice. They’re caught in a trench or a bunker or a tank and just have to bear down and endure, just like I had to bear down and endure Robb’s death.