Walking Toward Love

A Friendship in Ten Movements

The world lost a good one this month, when, at the age of 62, Jeff Draine went home to the God he loved after eleven years living and dying with Alzheimer’s. (You can read his beautiful obituary here.) Jeff was the first friend I made as a full-blown adult. After college graduation, I moved into the Freedom House community in Richmond VA, where Jeff and I overlapped for just a week. He left briefly to run a local day care center but soon returned, moving into the bedroom next to mine. (Our headboards each backed up to a connecting door, upon which I frequently pounded when Jeff’s thunderous snoring awoke me. “I dreamed the house was falling down again,” he would say.)

Neither of us would have suspected, in those early days, that we would be friends forever—let alone family—and we certainly never envisioned that I’d be one of the last people to kiss that big head of his before he died. But there you have it. We wound up walking together for thirty-eight years, all the way to the end of his road. Here then, in honor of Jeff, is a “top ten” list of sorts: ten movements that capture our ever-shifting relationship. I hope this chronicle of how one friendship endured and evolved over time will speak to your own uncategorizable loves. Cherish them!

1) Lemon Chicken and Other Confounding Beginnings
2) You Have to Take My Cousin
3) Couples, Take One
4) Driveway Moments
5) Wit
6) The Media Years
7) Bonus Family
8) State of the Alzheimer’s Address
9) Last Swim
10) Last Words
Walking Toward Love

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#1 Lemon Chicken and Other Confounding Beginnings (June 1987)

Full-time volunteers in the Freedom House community made $100/month, and the staff house had no food budget; we gleaned donations from the Street Center kitchen. I returned from my first day of work to find no one home but Jeff, and almost no groceries in the house. Jeff responded to my dismay by pulling from the fridge a container of leftover fried chicken—dried, wrinkly little wings and legs—and a lone lemon. Covering the chicken in lemon slices, he popped it in the convection oven, then announced with Julia Child flair, “Voilà! Lemon chicken!” In the months ahead, Jeff taught me how to slice an onion, how to make a sandwich out of anything, and—most importantly—how to make cooking fun.

At 11:30 that night . . . and this is so hard to believe, given my current sleep pattern . . . we both arrived in the living room, ready to watch television. I thought we’d be catching Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show monologue before bed; Jeff was all set to watch Nightline. I can’t recall how we resolved the conflict, but I know we were each horrified by the other’s taste in late-night TV!

Later that week (my first, Jeff’s last as administrative assistant at the Richmond Street Center), our boss asked me to send a letter to “the churches of the Hanover Presbytery.” Having been raised in exclusively Roman Catholic circles, I was stumped. What the heck was the Hanover Presbytery and where were its churches? Ecumenical Jeff to the rescue: he took a yellow legal pad and sketched out for me the organizational structure and terminology of every protestant denomination in Richmond. I still have the list.

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#2 You Have to Take My Cousin (July 1987)

During my second month at Freedom House, my cousin Susan took the train to Richmond to visit for a few days—including two workdays. I brought her with me to the Street Center on Thursday and swiftly regretted it; Susan’s tender heart was undone by an encounter with one of our young homeless guests. I could not take a second day of this! Susan loved kids, so from my afternoon shift in the laundry/shower room I called Jeff at his day care center. “You have to take my cousin tomorrow,” I pleaded. Little did I know that he would take my cousin for the next fourteen years! They carried on a long-distance romance until Jeff moved to Philly in 1989, then married in the spring of 1990 with me as matron of honor. (A year earlier, I had married Bill, my senior-year-of-college boyfriend, who also had been a member of the Freedom House community, living and working with Jeff.)

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#3 Couples, Take One (1989 – 1995)

Susan and Jeff and Bill and I enjoyed a solid six years as friends together, from the time they got engaged until my own marriage dissolved. For the first few years, Bill and I lived away (Boston then New Jersey), while Susan and Jeff settled in Media PA (“Everybody’s Hometown”). We saw each other for special occasions: shore weekends, New Years, etc. Bill and I spent a week on St. Thomas while Susan and Jeff were honeymooning on St. John; all agreed that the most fun we had was the one day we all spent together. (Might this have been the first sign that these were not great marriages?)

Eventually, we joined them in Media, moving onto the same block. Those years were the closest to the “regular” grownup life I’d always imagined. Everyone was getting their careers up and running; Susan and Jeff were also having kids. There were dinners and Scrabble tournaments and community gardening and popping into each other’s homes like sitcom neighbors. It was swell. We thought it would last forever.

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#4 Driveway Moments (1995-2001)

My marriage fell apart in 1995; Susan and Jeff lasted until 2001 (having left Media for nearby Broomall in 1998). It was no longer the four of us, but it was still the three of us; we continued to cook and vacation and generally enjoy life together. (I would say that Jeff greeted me as enthusiastically as Susan did whenever I showed up at their house, except none of us ever did anything as enthusiastically as Susan did.) Often, I would land there on a Saturday after Jeff and I had each listened to NPR’s “Weekend Edition” in the car as we ran errands; a particular delight was discovering that we’d both been captivated by the same story.  That’s how we wound up seeing . . .

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#5 Wit (Summer 1999)

One Saturday in May, I raced into Susan and Jeff’s kitchen. “There’s a play we have to see!” I told Jeff, to which he replied, “I KNOW!” We’d both caught the same interview: Brook Gladstone talking with Margaret Edson about her new play, Wit. (On the playbill, a semi-colon inserts itself in the title—W;t—for reasons that become clear during the performance.) The main character is a professor of English diagnosed with stage IV cancer who discovers that being “terribly smart” is neither necessary nor sufficient to meet the moment. I’d been both an English major and a hospital chaplain; Jeff was a professor and researcher who often wrestled with life-of-the-mind v. life-of-the-heart questions. Clearly, we needed to see this play!

In July, Jeff and I—along with Susan and her dear friend, Bill Schaefer—took New Jersey transit up to New York and checked into the Hotel Edison. After dinner, Susan and Bill went to see Rent on Broadway, while Jeff and I caught a cab to see Wit off-Broadway. The writing and acting were riveting, the denouement gutting, and the final moment stunning and glorious in a way I will not reveal here in case you ever get a chance to see it. When the lights came up, my face was soaked.  “Aw . . .” Jeff said, “You let yourself cry!” (Though it was mid-summer, he still remembered my three-part New Year’s resolution: Cry when I’m sad, sleep when I’m tired, ask for help when I need it.) In the mood for neither cab nor subway, we started walking north. I sobbed for blocks. Once I pulled myself together, we dissected the play all the way back to the hotel.

After that, seeing shows together became a thing. We caught Wit again when it came to Philly. I got us tickets to see Proof on Broadway for Jeff’s birthday; he took me to see Bebe Neuwirth sing at the Mann Music Center for mine. We loved discovering intersecting interests, especially when it was something no one else cared about.

What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”
– C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

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#6 The Media Years (2001 – 2007)

When Susan and Jeff separated, she kept the house in Broomall and he moved back to Media, renting a cool converted garage with bunk beds for “dad weekends.” If you’ve ever tried to stay friends with both halves of a divorcing couple, you know how challenging that can be, but I was determined. I adopted a strict confidentiality policy. Either of them could tell me anything, trusting that I would not repeat it. It was rarely comfortable, but it worked.

Jeff’s garage was just a handful of blocks from my apartment, so for the next six years we enjoyed ordinary, neighborly activities. We took a lot of walks, sometimes around town but often on the five-mile loop in nearby Ridley Creek State Park. Saturday mornings might find us at Custom Bagels, where Jeff introduced me to lox cream cheese on pumpernickel. On a summer night, one of us might call the other to propose a jaunt to Rita’s for water ice. Once, I locked my keys in my running car while a friend and I were about to grab a bite at the Court Diner. Who had my spare? Jeff, of course.

A frequent topic of conversation on those walks was our respective love lives, as each of us had a few false starts along the way to our permanent unions. Jeff married Deb in 2008 and moved into the Wallingford home where she was raising her three children; he referred to them as his “bonus kids.” That same year, I relocated to Jenkintown to be closer to Porter and to Gwynedd Mercy University, where I’d been working since 2004. The Media years had been a gift, though again, not a permanent one.

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#7 Bonus Family (2012 – forever)

Only ten months after Jeff and Deb’s wedding, Susan was diagnosed with a Stage 4 Glioblastoma, the brain tumor she fought for four years until her death in 2012. Although Porter and I would see Jeff at Christmas gatherings and kids’ birthday parties, my focus during those terrible years was on Susan. But after she died, I realized that Jeff had never stopped feeling like family—and his children, of course, were my biological relatives. Susan always used to talk about our “funny little family,” a gaggle of people connected more by heart than blood. Soon, that family expanded to include Deb and her children—and eventually, their beloveds as well.

For years, Deb and Jeff had been renting a house in Cape May Point for two weeks each summer, and they began inviting me and Porter to come for a weekend. It was during one of those visits—only a couple years after Susan died—that Deb and I went for a walk after dinner and she told me about Jeff’s worrisome cognitive symptoms. Our world was shifting again.

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#8 State of the Alzheimer’s Address (Junes, 2019-2024)

Of the four thousand accommodations that Deb and the family made for Jeff’s creeping dementia over the next eleven years, one that brought great joy was our decision to begin vacationing together. We went in on two weeks at the Point—in a house closer to the beach—and welcomed everyone’s children (nine among us) and grandchildren (five and counting) to come as they were able. Though Jeff had been a modest person in his former life, the disinhibition of Alzheimer’s was on full display in Cape May, where he eschewed bathing trunks in favor of a scanty Speedo! Sometimes, however, that disinhibition served him well—like the night we went to see a band playing in the park. Of our whole crowd, only he and I felt like dancing, so we did—heedless of what fools we might have been making of ourselves!

Jeff participated in everything from nature walks to bike rides as fully as he could, until the stealthy thievery that is Alzheimer’s robbed him of the activities he loved. Yet, one tradition remained: mornings at the Point found me up early with Jeff close on my heels. I’d brew a pot of coffee and pour a big mug for each of us. Then we’d sit on the deck, watching birds exult as the sky kaleidoscoped through sunrise. I will confess, I did not always welcome the early morning company. Over just a few years, Jeff went from spouting facts like a firehose to being hard to engage; neither felt like the companionable conversations of old. But I knew that those mornings were both precious and numbered, so there was one conversation I never failed to initiate: The State of the Alzheimer’s.

Unlike many people who drift into dementia in their elderly years, Jeff was fully conscious of what was happening to him, and he had Thoughts—surprisingly serene thoughts. He had no illusions; he knew it was going to be bad. (We recently discovered that he selected for the Gospel at his memorial service this prescient line from John 21: “Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.”) But as he told a reporter in a January 2020 NBC 10 interview, “The main thing is perspective. You have to figure out what life means to you, day to day.” Being able to have a clear-eyed conversation with my friend each year about what was happening to him was a great gift indeed.

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#9 Last Swim (June 2024)

Deb and I often wondered how we would know when bringing Jeff to the Point was no longer a good idea. In 2024, it became clear: this would be Jeff’s final shore vacation. So many things that used to please him no longer did. The guy who could spend all day on the beach no longer liked the feel of sand in his toes. The guy who plunged into the surf at every opportunity—often with a whispered word from Deb to the lifeguard for extra vigilance—no longer had an accurate sense of his body in space, so found the ocean unnerving. Though he could sometimes blurt the answer to a crossword clue or make a truly on-point quip, for the most part Jeff just sat there, lost and perplexed. We couldn’t do this to him again.

And yet . . . on our final day at the beach, I persuaded Jeff to come into the water with me. (He’d always been the one protecting me in the ocean—as I wrote about in my 2018 blog post, Eat the Peaches—and could still respond to that invitation.) The surf at our beach was rough, knocking me to my knees immediately.  A lifeguard ran over, called me “ma’am,” (oh, the indignity!) and directed us to a safer swimming beach a couple blocks away. Without even telling the rest of the family where we were going, we headed south, talking and joking as we went. I wish I could remember the content, but I know we launched into an alliterative volley of escalating ridiculousness. (Something akin to “Banished from beloved beach . . . bopping to a better one.”) Jeff had been speaking so little at that point; it felt magical to match wits one last time. When we reached the calmer spot, he could only bear to be in the water for a few minutes, but it was long enough for me to immerse myself and float freely—one of my favorite things—before walking back up the beach with him, holding hands.

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#10 Last Words (July 3, 2025),

Jeff didn’t come to Cape May Point this June; by April, he needed the services of a memory care facility. The “care,” however, was as terrible as the ambiance was beautiful (books and covers and all that), so Deb brought him home after just thirteen weeks. He was failing, on hospice care, and needing a live-in aid. Porter and I visited him on July 3, glad to find him well enough to sit on the couch with us. I kept my arm around him, talking and singing. When I serenaded him with a 50’s doo-wop, Jeff asked, “How does that help me?” (Point taken!)

But then, as the evening was winding down, he looked at me and said, “Can I put my head on your shoulder there?” Oh, my heart. Of course you can, Jeffy. He dropped his heavy head next to mine, and we sat that way for a long time.

Those were his last words to me.

I saw Jeff three more times. In early August, Porter and I were over for dinner along with Leah and Jafar (Deb’s daughter and her fiancé), but Jeff was agitated and hallucinating, unreachable. We spent an hour with him at Fair Acres—the unattractive yet excellent skilled nursing facility where he spent his final three weeks—but he was sound asleep the whole time. And finally, on Jeff’s last night in this world, I joined those keeping vigil and sang into this ear every old-timey hymn I could recall, knowing that those words and melodies were planted deep in his brain. I left around 9:00 p.m.; Leah called at 4:23 a.m. to tell me he was gone.

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Walking Toward Love

So, there you have it. We’ve come a long way from that idealistic twenty-something salvaging lemon chicken for his new housemate. Yet already, the Jeff of yore is starting to feel more substantial, as though the last eleven years were a nightmare from which we are waking. And maybe there’s truth to that. Through the communion of saints, I can believe that Jeff is whole and himself again, accessible to us in ways impossible for these last many years, even while he remains beyond our heartbroken grasp. (“So quit grasping,” I can feel him say.)

Why have I written this? It feels both too long (who wants to read 3,000 words about a stranger?) and too short (so many memories omitted). Jeff was not my soulmate, or husband, or bestie, or brother. But he was my good and faithful friend for almost four decades, witnessing every iteration of me from young adult through middle-age. He loved me, and I loved him. Full stop.

Who has borne witness to you over time? Who has kept faith with you, through all your meanderings and evolutions? If you are fortunate enough to have such a friend, hold them in the light, and make sure they know it.

A week after Jeff died, I stumbled on this line in a posthumous collection of essays by Brian Doyle: “You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw” (One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder). In the midst of all our many griefs, may we take a deep breath and walk toward love, now and always.

Jeff sure did.