Last Exit
In my mother’s last years on earth, suffering from blindness and frustration she would often exclaim “thank God I’m in the exit lane”. She was referring to her oncoming demise. Since then, a full generation of years has passed and we are all now in the same exit lane. Sadly, we have lost many of our contemporaries in recent years and the death toll continues to climb.
Recently, I was heartbroken by the news that a friend from the old school, Pat Kopke Dowd had passed away. I first met her in 1957 while attending “7J” at the Laurel Avenue Jr. High School, Northport, NY. Her future husband, Dan would also be a new acquaintance that year and the two of them would become my lifelong friends.
After high school, we drifted apart except for a brief time when they got married in 1967 and the Viet Nam war interrupted. In the years that passed I often wondered what happened to Dan & Pat. When we reconnected at the 30th year reunion of our 1963 Northport High School graduating class, the years melted away quickly. We visited many times, thereafter, re-cementing a relationship that began in those “Happy Days”
When I had a stroke in 2007, among others from the old school, it was Dan & Pat that came to my aid when I returned home from a rehab hospital in Jacksonville. It was they who fed my dogs, stocked my pantry and cleaned my home. They offered moral support and ferried me to additional hospitals and doctor's visits. They never asked if they could be of assistance, they just did it.
Without a doubt, Pat has secured herself preferred seating in Heaven through her selfless acts on earth, not just because of what she did for me, but because of who she was. Her giving spirit has touched the lives of so many. But, alas, she has now taken that final off ramp, Exit 52 N, to Northport, the magic place that helped to mold who we are and what we have become. May her beautiful spirit live peacefully and eternally in the heavens above our little hometown village, hidden deep in the valley, beneath the pine trees, half forlorn.
