"Why'd He Take Her So Soon?"

October 7th, 1929. Happy Birthday, Flo.

The line is my father’s.

For years, when talking about his wife, my mother, he’d ask the question about the God who allowed her to die at 69 — and this is a direct quote — from “stupid cancer.”

“Nu,” he used to add, “it would have killed HIM to give her another ten years? Ach, I give up!”

Florence Friedman would have been 95 today — she died in 1999 — and of all the stories I have told about her, I’m remembering this one today.

It was summer, had to be 35 or 40 years ago, and my parents had just moved back to Greenlawn, New York, on Long Island’s North Shore, where we had all lived when Wayne, Susan (you may know her as one of 1143 other names my father called her) and I were growing up. Now, though, in this new house, with their children gone, it was just the two of them. They had moved away, moved back, went through an 18-month separation which, I’m glad to say was a failure, and then got back together. I once asked my father, an accountant, because I couldn’t remember, how long they had been married and he responded, thinking about the first 30 years of their marriage, the 18 month gap, and now the years after the reunification, “Gross or net?”

I had come to the house for some reason and found my mother out back. She was in the pool, floating around in an impressive inflatable chair with an Apricot Daiquiri in the impressive inflatable chair’s drink holder.

It was her drink.

“Barry,” she said, which was odd because she always called me Ba, “How are you?”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What am I doing? I’m doing.”

“This is so unlike you — relaxing. You OK?”

My mother was not a woman who experienced moments of unbridled contentment and was not the kind of woman, few in her generation were, who took time for herself. But here she was.

“What do you mean? Can I not be OK?”

“No, you can. You just never do this.”

“Well I am now.”

“Why?”

“What do you want from me? I'm doing it. I’m calm! Leave me alone.”

“All right, you’re calm. It’s good to see. Odd, but good.”

“Ba,” — ah, this was more like it — “I gotta tell you,” she said, using her hands to paddle around her impressive inflatable chair in her in-ground swimming pool, “I could have more, but I couldn’t have better.”

“That’s beautiful,” I said. “I mean it.”

“What can I tell you, Ba? Everything and everybody’s cooperating.”

My father was right. It would have killed HIM to give her another ten years?