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Kresten-Personal Narrative

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My husband and I live in a small, unincorporated town on the outskirts of a bigger city. Although we were almost 50 years old, we are 30 to 40 years younger than any of our near neighbors. Most of them have grandchildren who visit regularly, and drive them wherever they need to go. Not so for the man I usually just called “Professor.” His wife, Elena, died 12 years ago. I only knew her briefly, but she and the Professor were one of those “Life Goals” kind of couples. When Elena passed, it hit the Professor hard. For the last year, he had been battling cancer. With no bus service in our natural area, and cabs from town with an expensive, long wait, I ended up driving him to the doctors. The Professor had been in the U.S since his 20s, but he still retained a charming foreign accent. My name, he pronounced as “Kresten.” Usually, when he called me, he would say “Good Afternoon, Kre-sten.” Sometimes, he would call in the middle of the night, in pain, able only to gasp “Kre-sten!” I would drop the phone and run to his house to help him with his meds or take him to the city’s emergency room. He was adamant about not staying away from home. He knew the end was near and he wanted to go in his own bed. On October First, at …show more content…

So, that evening, with a deputy’s supervision, the families on our block began to sort through the Professor’s papers. We needed the ‘deed’ to his burial pot and any kind of will or link to distant relationships. I looked through a small scrapbook of old pictures that was on his nightstand.There was no “Cousin Marco from the old county,” or “Nephew Bob, NYC 1997.”It was mostly pictures of Elena and the Professor. What stopped me from searching was a certain picture that I never knew existed. It was the Professors never-spoken-of young daughter Maria, who had died in 1971. Which was the same year Elena was also found dead, seemingly in her

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