Teresa and Jeff

Two names so many of us have known for most of our lives.

High school sweethearts.

More than forty years together.

And somehow, when one of those names is suddenly missing from the pair, we all feel it.

I have been trying to figure out why this one feels so heavy.

Of course, the biggest loss belongs to Teresa. To their family. To the people who loved Jeff most closely and knew the shape of his everyday life.

But there is something else here too.

Something about all of us.

About where we came from.

About the way people from those years stay attached to you, even when decades pass and your lives move in completely different directions.

Our high school was tight.

Not just our class, either.

The classes ahead of us. The classes behind us. Brothers. Sisters. Boyfriends. Girlfriends. Friends of friends.

We were all kind of swirled together.

Jeff’s class was ahead of us, but that hardly mattered. He had a twin sister. His younger brother married another one of our classmates.

That is how connected everything was. And it feels like we are taken right back there again.

You didn’t just know one person.

You knew their parents. You knew their siblings.

You knew who they dated.

You knew who they hung around with.

You knew whose house everybody ended up at.

You knew the stories.

And Teresa and Jeff were one of those stories.

They were together back then.

And they stayed together.

High school sweethearts who built an entire life.

More than forty years.

That is so much life.

So many memories.

A hell of a lot of ordinary days that probably did not feel extraordinary at the time.

And now, seeing Teresa lose the person who had been beside her for so much of her life is hard to wrap your head around.

Especially knowing they had plans.

Big plans.

Dreams for retirement.

Things they were going to do.

Places they were going to go.

Time they thought they had.

And then suddenly, they didn’t.

I think there is something else about this age that makes that especially hard to take in.

We have reached the part of life where we know we are going to lose people.

For a lot of us, it has been our parents.

We have watched them get older. We have buried some of them. We know that is part of the order of things, even when it hurts really, really badly.

But somehow, I don’t think we expect it to be our spouses yet.

The people we chose.

The people we grew up beside.

The people we assumed would be sitting next to us for the retirement part.

Maybe that is part of what shakes us.

We know none of us gets forever.

But I think most of us still expect more time with the person beside us.

That part is hard too.

Because most of us are old enough now to understand that retirement is not some far-off idea anymore.

It is here. Or close.

And we all have our own versions of someday.

Someday we’ll travel. Someday we’ll slow down. Someday we’ll do the thing we’ve been talking about for years.

Someday we’ll have more time.

And then something like this happens and reminds you that someday is not guaranteed.

But that is not the only thing I keep thinking about.

I keep thinking about the connections.

How one person’s death can move through so many people.

People who maybe haven’t seen each other in years.

People who don’t talk regularly anymore.

People who have built entirely separate lives.

And still, we feel it.

Because those people from our younger years are part of us.

We knew each other before careers and before mortgages and before kids.

We knew each other before retirement plans.

Before we really had any idea what forty something years looked like.

We knew each other when most of our lives were still ahead of us.

And I think there is something powerful about that.

We were all part of each other’s becoming.

Even if we didn’t know it at the time.

And those connections don’t just disappear because life gets busy.

They may get quieter. They may stretch across miles and years.

But they are still there.

A hallway.

A party.

A song.

A car.

A laugh.

A story everybody remembers a little differently.

A couple who had always just been Teresa and Jeff.

Maybe that is why this feels so big.

Because when someone from that world is gone, something shifts in all of us.

Not in the same way it does for the people closest to them.

But it shifts.

It reminds us that the old threads are still there.

That the people we came from still matter.

That the lives we shared, even briefly, became part of our own story.

And maybe the number of people who feel a loss says something too.

About the life that was lived.

About the people who were touched.

About how far one person’s presence can reach without them ever really knowing it.

Teresa and Jeff touched a lot of lives.

And right now, a lot of those lives are feeling the absence.

Maybe that is the thing I have been trying to articulate.

And maybe that is why so many of us feel this so hard.

We remember who we were then, we know who they were to each other, and we know something has changed.

Rest in peace, Jeff.

And Teresa, I hope you know just how loved you are, and how many of us are holding you close right now.