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You would have liked Diana if you met her. Her eyes sparkled with amusement. She had this tiny little girl voice, dark red curly hair and fair skin. The twinkle in her eyes was as if she knew the world and most things in it were foolish and insubstantial and she had decided the best way to cope with it was not to take it too seriously. Diana could have been the girl Paul Anka wrote the song about.
Diana was a complicated person. One thing that wasn’t complicated was her love for Ben. He, in turn, adored her, but didn’t pretend to understand her. Some complexity in life is best left unexplained and just admired. Diana was a paradox, an old-fashioned girl who brought her pots of gravy with her to the Shore for family vacations, a woman who cooked not only dinner but lunch and breakfast for her man. One time while dining at a fine Cape May restaurant, Ben fell in love with the gnocchi with gorgonzola sauce. The next week, Diana was cooking that meal better than the restaurant. Ben’s pride in her cooking prowess was the only thing in his life I ever heard him boast about. That and how he, Ben, the short guy hanging around the corner, had somehow mysteriously won the hand of the beautiful Diana. Their song was "Moon River." To see them on a dance floor as it played was to see the wonder of love firsthand.
Diana also was a modern woman in the sense, if she worked for you in the office, you really had something, a human dynamo. How she combined the careers of hardworking housewife and mother while working on the outside was one of the wonders of the world. Her energy knew no bounds. It was as if she knew her time was short and she was going to make the most of it.
Their courtship was a classic right out of the early 1960s. Ben had to deal with Diana’s father, who was tough and very suspicious. He was so suspicious that after the wedding ceremony and reception, he still wouldn’t let Ben change in the same room as his daughter to go on their honeymoon. Ben tried to explain they were married now, you know, man and wife and all that encompasses, but Diana’s father would hear nothing of it.
Ben and Diana became our best friends. Diana and my wife grew up together in the same South Philadelphia neighborhood. They both became members of a high school sorority that still gets together once a month. We became godparents for each other’s children. We often vacationed together. When Ben and I would have one of our arguments about baseball’s designated hitter (Ben was opposed) or politics, Diana would look at us as if we were two silly schoolboys. Ben and I played a baseball board game and formed a league that met every week and Diana labeled it the "Fisher-Price League."
Soon after they were married, Diana began to have health issues. It became the dark cloud that hovered over them the rest of their lives. Their life became marked by a series of illnesses, which Diana battled bravely while Ben worried incessantly. Eventually illness took its toll on their otherwise happy life.
During a particularly rough stretch about eight years ago, Ben and Diana decided to take a cruise to Bermuda. All of us assured them this would be the kind of relaxing vacation they needed. Life has no room for sentimentality. Ben became critically ill on the cruise and had to be flown back to a Philadelphia hospital. He never recovered.
The light went out of Diana’s life. The amused twinkle was gone. The world was no longer anything at which she could laugh. She faded slowly before our eyes like bright colors left in the sun too long. She passed away last Friday, almost eight years to the day she lost Ben. Cause of death was listed as pneumonia. At least that’s what the death certificate reads because the medical world does not yet recognize a broken heart. Poets know better.
I am not a big believer in an afterlife, but today I want very badly to believe there is a place with a beautiful ballroom, where Ben and Diana are dancing, where somewhere they are playing "Moon River" and love lasts forever.
