Touching Base With the People Who Shared Lives and Secrets

Every week, after I’ve met my deadline and breathed my sigh of relief, I take a piece of somebody’s life, stuff it into a file envelope and stash it in a drawer. Then I open the next batch of letters, make the next round of calls, go on to the next subject.

Not this week.

I may file those people away, but I don’t forget them. Each one of them has shared with me--and with you--an odd kind of intimacy. Many of them have revealed secrets they wouldn’t dare tell even their own families, trusting that even as I told their stories I would keep them confidential.

However close these encounters may be, they are also fleeting. One moment we are best friends, and then we are strangers again. I never hear back from most of them, not even to find out how they felt when they saw their stories in print. I usually don’t call them, either. It’s not just because I’m busy with someone else--and I always am--but because I feel somehow as though I’ve already intruded enough.

I feel bad sometimes for not staying in touch.

But I do wonder about them. And now that my file drawer is bulging with another year’s worth of stories, it seems as good a time as any to check in with some of the people in those envelopes and find out how things turned out for them.

“It’s really funny that you should call today,” said Barbara, one of the mothers I talked with last January on the subject of boomerang kids--grown children who move out and then come back. “Stephanie’s in the process of moving out right now.”

Stephanie, 25, the youngest of Barbara and Carl’s three children, moved into an apartment with two friends in 1985, leaving her parents with what they assumed would be a permanently empty nest. But in November, 1987, she came back, overwhelmed with financial problems and fed up with roommate hassles. The adjustment was difficult for everyone involved, but Stephanie kept plugging away, and with her parents’ help she was able to save more than $2,000 by December.

She found a place that’s “just perfect,” and she’ll be sharing it with a friend she’s known for years.

“My dad is freaking out,” Stephanie says. “He doesn’t understand why I want to live somewhere and pay rent when I could stay home and have free rent, a washer and dryer and everything. But my parents got married at about my age, and I tried to tell him that he was getting out on his own then, so to speak. It was fine living here, but it was hard because I had been independent.”

In March I got to know some displaced homemakers, women who were divorced after devoting most of their adult lives to marriage and family.

Desley, whose husband left her after 24 years to marry his secretary, had to struggle to establish a life for herself after the divorce. But now she’s happy and looking forward to living alone “for the first time in my life. I went from my family home right into marriage.” In a few weeks, Desley says, her 18-year-old mentally retarded son will be moving into out-of-home placement, and her day-to-day responsibilities as a mother will be over.

On the romantic front, she reports that “I’m dating a fellow who’s 11 years younger and another guy who’s 10 years older. I got two very nice Christmas gifts.”

Then there’s Louise, whose husband left after more than 30 years of marriage. After years of depression and blaming herself, Louise was “very happy with myself” when we spoke in March. “I have had a rebirthing,” she told me.

Louise couldn’t come to the phone when I called this time. A friend told me she had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer a few weeks ago, and she was exhausted after returning home from radiation therapy. I left my number and asked Louise’s friend to let her know I’ll be thinking about her.

In April, when we looked at the subject of infidelity from all sides, I got to know Lynda, who was trying to repair the damage after her husband’s affair, and Maureen, who was the other woman--not to Lynda’s husband, but to several other married men.

Lynda told me she and her husband are still together, closer than ever now. Her husband’s infidelity, Lynda explained, was both the worst and the best thing that ever happened to her. “I see it as an important part of my life because I learned so much,” she said. “There was a lot of pain. But when it’s over with, there’s a sense of real growth.”

Maureen, meanwhile, has given up on married men. After a series of affairs in the wake of a long and unhappy marriage, Maureen says she’s no longer willing to settle for being the other woman. Shortly after I wrote about her, she ended her relationship with a married man 10 years her junior--she’s 65.

“At the end of the year, you review many things, including the men in your life,” she said. “And that’s just not enough for me anymore.” Maureen says she doesn’t necessarily want to get married, but “I think it’s time that I had at least a steady fellow.”

When I wrote about Candace and Brian Hurley in early August in a column about a TV documentary on infertility, they were awaiting the September birth of their second son. The first was conceived with medical intervention after years of testing and treatment, and the second happened naturally, a one-in-a-million chance because of the multiple problems that contributed to their infertility.

But Candace went into labor prematurely only hours before the show aired, and her son, Braeden, was born Aug. 9. When I called to check up, the family had just returned from a visit to Braeden’s doctor, with good news.

“They just took off the monitor he’s been wearing since he was born,” Brian said. “Now we can get him a crib so he can sleep in his own room.”

“It was a little scary,” Candace said, using her free hand to hold the phone while she nursed the baby. “But he’s just being a normal baby now.

“I do think about all those months of trying and all we went through, all the time. We haven’t lost sight of how lucky we are and how rare we are. They really are little miracles, both of them.”

Happy New Year, to all of them and all of you.