Red Room Where the Writers Are

It's more than a little disconcerting to read your name in the obituary pages. But one day last summer, as I was enjoying a particularly peaceful breakfast and my morning paper, I caught sight of my name among the dead.

Because the name is not particularly common, it gave me a jolt at first. But then I realized. It was the Other Rosemary.

The "other Rosemary" was how I had come to think of the woman who shared my name. She was married to a distant relative of my husband's, and we lived in the same small town. We attended the same church, our names appearing together on the parish rolls. This would all be coincidence enough, except that at one time we also shared the same pharmacy, dry cleaner, and gynecologist. (In that office, I was known as the "young" one.)

There were times her medicine was delivered to my door, her dry cleaning or bakery order handed over to me, her records brought in to my examining room by mistake. One day, after the usual interminable wait in the DMV, my name was called out. Two of us stood up.

"We finally meet!" she called out to me over the waiting crowd of people. Probably about twenty years older than me, she was slender and red-headed, and reminded me very much of my older Italian aunts. We shook hands and made the family connection, the church connection, and the pharmacy connection. We laughed about the gynecologist. And she graciously let me go ahead of her in the DMV.

That was about ten years ago; not long after we saw her husband's name listed under "prayers for the dead" in our church bulletin. It was perhaps about five years ago that the phone calls began.

The phone would ring in the evening, a distraught woman at the other end. "I'm looking for Jackie," she'd say. "I looked in the phone book. I know he's there." She identified herself as his wife, Rosemary.

When it happened, my husband would take the phone, and patiently explain that Jackie didn't live there, and talk to her soothingly until she hung up. When the calls started coming more frequently, we contacted her daughter, who explained that her mother had become confused since her dad's death. The calls stopped, and the last we heard she was in an Alzheimer's facility.

I hadn't thought of her at all until I saw our name in the paper this summer, and was, for a moment, forced to face my own mortality. To look down a  possible path my own life might take, and but for the good grace of God, might travel myself one day.

That Sunday in church, I lit a candle for both of us.