Stephanie Died.

Not sure how to begin. Stephanie died yesterday. Stephanie was Jesse’s wife. Jesse was my husband number two — the person who brought me to Arizona.

He was a laughing fun-loving beer drinking man who loved to go to Watkins Glen and fix up old MGs. Forty-odd years later, one of them still sits, ready to be worked on, on his front porch in metropolitan Phoenix. I met Jesse in a bar in Syracuse, after my divorce from the medical student who cheated on me, and and we were having a lot of fun together when he proposed moving to Arizona. Why not? We moved during the summer of love. Everyone was doing something unusual. We had to get married before we moved, because Jess’s mother was Catholic and living together didn’t suit her. So we did it, shrugging our shoulders.

After we got to Phoenix, I fell in love with John Hardaway, who was my boss at Phoenix College, and I became pregnant. Hold your snark. It was the 70s, before sperm counting was a science. John’s wife had told him he had a low sperm count, and he believed that was why they had to adopt their two sons. She was wrong.

Jesse kindly and tactfully divorced me in New York, rather than Arizona, so that John and I could tell a white lie about whether we were married when my daughter was born. Actually, we were married, but to two other people. I was married to Jesse.

During my dalliance with John, we enlisted a student of ours to help us cover things up. That student was Stephanie. A woman of boundless energy and no judgment, Stephanie was from a big family and she loved all of us: John, me, and Jesse. She even allowed John to live with her while he was getting divorced and I was separating from Jesse. We were our own sort of commune.

After the divorce, Jesse and Stephanie moved in together, fell in love, and married. They spent the next 40 odd years together. For a long time, we were all still friends, and my kids knew Jesse and Stephanie. But then I started my entrepreneurial career, got into geekery, and moved on another trajectory.

How did I get back in touch with Stephanie? On Facebook, of course. And just a few months ago I learned Jess was in a hospital. Stephanie had been taking care of him for the past nine months, since he had a seizure and broke his shoulder and then got sepsis in the hospital. They had been driving back from New York where they have a farm. He had the seizure in Ohio.

Since October, she had shepherded him from hospital to hospital, complication after complication. I started visiting him (them) in his hospital room.

Now just when he is about to get out of the hospital and has been transferred to rehab, Stephanie gets sepsis, does not respond to treatment, and dies. She had been sending email updates to Jess’s friends and relatives about his condition, but it was only about a week since the last one when I get an email in the middle of my entrepreneurship class: “To all the people on Stephanie’s list. Stephanie passed today.”

Jess is in the rehab hospital.

I don’t know what what to make of this. It’s so complex on so many levels. I had just gotten back in touch with them through Facebook because we drifted apart when I started my businesses. Because Stephanie was a high school teacher who had recently retired, and Jesse was in the construction business, we lived in different worlds.

I fell down the high-tech rabbit hole in the late 80s and passed entirely through the looking glass when the browser was invented. Jessie and Stephanie continued to live as normal people, while I became an outlier, both an entrepreneur and a geek. There is a lesson here somewhere about old friends.

People who have been in your life for over 40 years don’t just go away if you cease to see them all the time. They occupy a sacred space in your heart.

Today I am grieving the loss of Stephanie, a wonderful person who shouldered every burden joyfully and made a special life for herself and Jesse. And for Jesse, who does not deserve to lose his best friend and life companion.