Identity theft is an ever more common crime these days. It’s a major inconvenience when it happens, not to mention a crime that costs billions of dollars each year. When it happens, it feels like such a violation of privacy, but what about when it is a crime you commit on yourself.
Pop was never the same after mom passed. He missed her so much, though he rarely said anything about it and never really communicated his feelings about his hurt. At least he didn’t say that much to me about it, maybe he was more open with his feelings to my other siblings. But we knew. Mom and Pop were really a matched set and one without the other was just half a team.
I remember visiting with Pop a few days before he passed. He was in a wheelchair because he had fallen a few days earlier and they were afraid that he would fall again and hurt himself. I wheeled him into his room and he said, “This is the room where Dixee was.” Pop had a picture of mom on the night stand and I assumed that he was confusing the picture with mom. Pop passed a couple of weeks after that and I wonder if mom had been there visiting him and preparing him to be with her again.
Mom and Pop were married for 50 years before she died. Their story was a beautiful one. Pop told me the story of their engagement more than once, but I still remember the day that he couldn’t remember it anymore. One of the great love stories had been lost, stolen by a merciless and unforgiving disease. Identity theft of the most terrible kind.
Pop lost a lot of other stories too. Some I try to recall from when I was a child and he would tell me about his experiences in the campus married housing, his work for Kennecott, or how he considered himself Steve Young’s first receiver. But those ones were stolen too.
What a shame.