Requiem for a Neighbor

Rudy, the super, buzzed me on the intercom from the lobby to ask if he could bring Mrs. Goldberg up to my apartment. “She has something to tell you,” he said amid the static of the connection.

I knew then what she had to tell me.

Mrs. Goldberg knew me only as the man who said hello to her and her friend, my neighbor Ellen, in the building. Mrs. Goldberg didn’t know my name or my apartment number, though we’ve lived together in the same building for years; such anonymity is not uncommon in a Manhattan highrise.

When I heard voices in the hallway minutes after Rudy had buzzed me, I opened my apartment door and saw Mrs. Goldberg at the elevator talking to him. 

“Mrs. Goldberg didn’t know your name, but she said to me, take me to that tall, slim man who always says hello,” Rudy called out to me, staying behind at the elevator, as Mrs. Goldberg began her measured walk to me. Mrs. Goldberg was likely amused by that remark, but because half of her face was masked, I couldn’t tell. 

She reached my threshold and though I invited her in, she said without pause, “I wanted to let you know that Ellen passed away last night.”

It was news I expected, but you never expect the way you respond to such news or what you will say in response to hearing it.

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I said, and then immediately added, “And I’m also sorry for you.”  

“Thank you,” she said in a manner that suggested she wasn’t expecting my added remark. “We were such good friends.”

“I know that.”

That she had sought me out to tell me this news indicated that I mattered as a neighbor.

After a few moments lingering in my threshold/foyer, she said, “Do you know how Ellen and I met,” whereupon she launched into a story of how the two women had learned, by accident, that they had attended the same girl’s summer camp, though in different years—by my estimation, well more than 60 years ago. I lost the thread of her story, but I let her go on, uninterrupted, since she was immersed in revery.

As I stood in my doorway with Mrs. Goldberg, I was reminded of my grandmother in her Chicago apartment building, a highrise not unlike mine, and who lived, coincidentally, in the same apartment number as I do now, 21D. For here was the scenario of an elderly woman coming to tell me the news of the death of a neighbor friend. I can recall as a very small boy my grandmother lamenting to my mother the death of her friends in her building. “Soon, there won’t be enough for mah-jongg,” I remember her saying.

Mrs. Goldberg and Ellen would often meet in the lobby at the height of the pandemic for their neighborhood power walks, or they would sit together in the rear of the building at a children’s worktable talking on warm afternoons. If I saw them there, I would wave, maybe take a place for a spell on the bench that is only about four inches off the ground.

I am of that age now where older women such as Mrs. Goldberg—still fashionable, fit, involved in the life of the city—speak of death in carpeted highrise hallways. Like these women, all of them widows, living alone, I, too, am a man of a certain age, though not quite theirs, living alone, aware that deaths like Ellen’s not only happen, but are expected to happen.

Something, though, about the death of Ellen—petite, energetic, pretty, elegantly dressed every Friday for services at her synagogue, motherly and kind to every worker in the building—that feels so blunt. Dave, the sometimes-laconic doorman, who knew Ellen as a tenant for more than two decades, was unable to respond with words when I asked him the next morning if he had “heard the news.” He nodded, his eyes filled with tears, and then he whooshed me through the revolving doors.

Those of us who live in Manhattan highrises know the chill of such places—how we often don’t know the names of your next-door neighbors, how it is that we might never be invited into someone’s apartment after decades of living together in the building.  

Grief, or in this case, sadness for a neighbor who I knew but not well, is, for the most part, a selfish emotion. Much about the death of someone not far from our own age is about the fear of our own death. No revelations there. Ellen was a private, discreet person who was publicly kind and curious and conversational, even bubbly. But I knew something was wrong one day, not many months before she had died, when I saw her sitting on the small retaining wall of our building on a beautiful late fall day. When I asked the standard “How are you,” she paused, then said with a calm gravity, looking me in the eye and then into that middle distance we all occupy sometimes, “You just never what’s going to happen. And I’m so grateful for every day. You just have to be grateful.”

The relationships I have with my neighbors in my Manhattan highrise are not those of my boyhood, growing up in a house in a lovely lakefront suburb of Chicago. Neighbors then were people you saw in their homes, talked with and played with in their yards, visited when they were in the hospital. But even though I never came to know Ellen well, she was my neighbor, and I knew she was a person of quality, someone with whom I would chat on elevator rides and in the laundry room, accompany on an impromptu walk up to the D&D Building, where she worked in a high-end design showroom.

There’s much that distinguishes life in New York from that of other cities, and this distancing from each other in the same building is not one of its best characteristics. But we do know that a bond stronger than we realize had been forged once we learn of someone’s death. I have made a vow now to invite other neighbors into my apartment, to ask some to be that plus-one at an event, to join me for an evening drink on the roof.

Those of us who knew of Ellen’s sudden illness would take notice of the occasional ambulance parked in front of the building, its soundless siren spinning on the dark street. Out of respect, I wouldn’t wait in the lobby for the drivers to wheel her past, but I would look down from my apartment window to check on the progress of the situation. Another one of the building’s doormen said to me recently, “Just a few weeks ago they’d come for her again, but she refused to lie on the gurney. She walked out of here. She followed them into the ambulance. But before she went out the door, she turned to me and said, “Don’t you worry, I’ll be back.’ And she stepped into the back of the ambulance and off they went.”

It makes sense that my neighbor, a woman so invested in life, would choose to walk rather than be wheeled.