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I have nothing but the greatest respect for Dr. Motley (see 5/1/16, Loss Without Stress) but occasionally after trying all of his suggestions I still can’t stop thinking about losing someone. Someone like Tom, who passed out of my life nearly three years ago, which seems like yesterday. Maybe telling you our story will help. HE WAS JUST THE MAN WHO DID THE NUMBERS—UNTIL HE WASN’T  There are some people you don’t know you know. Tom was one of those. I’ve never found a way around struggling with tense when someone dies. After his church service cut flowers from his garden were displayed in the basement receiving room. Tom liked to garden. Tom likes to garden. I knew liked was technically correct, but I kept thinking it’s okay that Tom isn’t here because if he still likes to garden maybe he’s planting some lilies and just couldn’t make it today.  Tom was one of those unusual people. Of course, there are many, and unusual is in the eye of the beholder. Tom was my accountant. We never had what people would call a social relationship. That’s when you meet for dinner with spouses. You meet for lunch; that could be a gray area. Tom and I never even met for lunch.  Every few months he would deliver some papers to my house or I to his, and we would chat for a while, especially around tax time. That’s how I found out he had Crohn’s disease and that one of his daughters ran away and he didn’t know where she was for a while. That he was a tax preparer who thought taxes would be the death of America. He said he was trained in every aspect of finance and he was absolutely certain he was right about taxes. I was surprised to hear this intensity coming from a man so slightly built and good-natured, but there it was. Most of the time we communicated by phone, fax and email. He taught me how to use an Excel spreadsheet, how to email my bank statement by making it into a pdf file using a printer dialog box, and how to avoid filling out 5500 forms by converting my Keogh into an IRA.  I sent him a basket of chocolate for the holidays and he sent me a sampler box of Usinger’s sausages. I never had the heart to tell him we don’t eat red meat. He sent it every Christmas and every Christmas I put it in the garage to keep the sausages cold and preserved, thinking I would pass them on to someone who liked them. But I could never think of anyone, so after a few weeks they ended up in the trash. I felt a little guilty about that.  Tom loved the Packers. I love the Packers, too, but we never talked about them. I would append little messages to my emails like “Go Packers!” and he would respond, “Beat those Bears!” We never saw a game together. I don’t know why we didn’t talk about them. We could have discussed the draft, or Clay Matthews’ ferocious charges, or the miracle of Aaron Rogers succeeding Brett Favre. It just didn’t come up. Tom sent me an email to let me know he was going into the hospital Monday for treatment of his Crohn’s. That was like Tom, to apologize for being unable to start on my accounting right away, just after I had belatedly sent him the quarterly data he’d been bugging me about for weeks. “Out until Friday.” I answered asking for details. He replied he was having a small piece of his distal intestine removed, no big deal. When I called him Wednesday morning he sounded a bit weak but otherwise chipper, complaining only that the TV didn’t have enough channels. I could hear his wife Amy in the background  The next day she left a message that he was dead. My wife and I brought her a casserole that evening. She told us that his doctor had come in that morning and found him sitting up in bed without a pulse and with a smile on his face. Nobody knew what had happened. Amy told us when to look for his obituary. It was short and succinct. It said, “Tom was a Green Bay Packer enthusiast”. It also said, “He was blessed with many wonderful clients who were dear to him.” That was really unexpected. I felt the gentle pressure of an incipient tear behind my eyes, where I hadn’t known there was anything to feel. I tore out the obituary and put it on my desk to have the address of the church handy. I don’t know if I can call Tom a friend, but I do know that I miss him. He was an essential person in my life. At the funeral service his minister said that Tom never worried about dying because he knew he was going to another place and another life far more glorious than the one he knew here on earth. I hope he was right about that, too. 
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