Return to sender

Day 57  

General status update:

State of mind: sad, very sad.

I’ve had quite a big shock today  – I sent an email to someone, and the email bounced right back at me, as they sometimes do.

That wasn’t the shock, though.

The email was to an old boyfriend, Steven, an American I met in Poland when I was working there during the 1990s – having previously been a VSO volunteer in Poland for a couple of years, shortly after the end of communism, I later returned to corporate life and set up and managed the first Warsaw office for one of the big global head-hunting firms (something which seems quite incredible to me now, a couple of lives later, especially as my Polish wasn’t even very good, but there you go).

Steven wandered into our office one day – he was an American in Poland on some kind of Peace Corps–type programme for corporate managers with MBAs, helping Polish businesses get in shape to deal with competing in the post-Communist world, and was wondering about staying on to work in Poland after his voluntary stint was over. He was both impressively well-qualified and drop-dead gorgeous – tall and dark, with a touch of the JFK Juniors - and it’s possible that I may have allowed our meeting to go on longer than was strictly necessary.

You probably would have done too, right?

Then he kept coming back, and I wasn’t quite sure why. How much career advice can one man possibly need?

My male assistant, who guarded my appointment book and my time ferociously, was baffled as to why, when Steven wandered into the office unexpectedly, I would make time for him when there were many more pressing matters that needed attending to. I muttered something about how Steven might be a suitable candidate for the job of Managing Director of a food-processing company in Bydgoszcz.

Eventually, after about five or six chats in my office, he asked me out to dinner, by email. I had absolutely no idea whether or not this was meant to be a date, or an extended career discussion, although by that point there really wasn’t much left to say on that topic. I can’t remember exactly what else I was wearing that evening, but I know it included a pair of vertiginously high Russell and Bromley Edwardian style front-lacing black ankle boots. This particular detail remains vivid in my mind because Steven had booked a table at a Thai restaurant in the Old Town in Warsaw, and on coming to my office to pick me up he suggested that we walk there, a distance of about half a mile or so.

Foolishly, I agreed. I only have to close my eyes to recapture the agony of that walk, trying to make conversation despite the acute pain in my feet as I stumbled through the cobbled streets of the old town, praying that I wouldn’t fall over and break my ankle.

I loved those boots, mind, and was still of an age where I deemed the suffering to be worth it.

It turned out later that this was meant to be a date, which was just fine as far as I was concerned, and a couple of days later we went on our second date, to the movies. Walking down the road together after the film, Steven mentioned something about never having been allowed to go to the movies as a child, back in some tiny town in rural Indiana.

How very odd, I thought.

He went on to explain that his family belonged to an old, originally Swiss, fundamentalist Protestant sect related to the Anabaptists, which regarded every word of the Bible as the literal truth. Moreover, not only movies were forbidden, but also dancing, and dating: marriages were arranged via the Pastor, when the spirit of the Lord came upon him and directed him to bring two young people together. They all spent so much time at church and on church-related activities that was the only social life they had, anyway.

On hearing this my jaw literally dropped, and I stood looking at Steven as if he had just been teleported in from a distant planet. I knew there were 40 million fundamentalist Christians in the USA, but I had never expected to meet one of them nor, in my wildest dreams, to go on a DATE with one of them.

How could this highly educated man, with degrees from Purdue and MIT, for goodness sake, be … quasi-Amish? And if he was quasi-Amish and forbidden to date before marriage, what had the previous date’s enthusiastic goodnight kiss been all about? What was going on?

It turned out that Steven’s stint in Poland, embarked upon in the face of very serious disapproval from both his family and his church, was his way of acting out – his own rather belated equivalent of the Amish Rumspringa. His education had made him realise he needed to see something of the world, and Poland was a place a long, long way from the all-seeing eyes of the tiny, enclosed community in which he still lived in America, although he had been working for Caterpillar Inc for some years. There was also the fact that there had been a girl he liked at church, but the Holy Spirit had inexplicably moved the Pastor to marry her to someone else. Just at that point in his life, Steven was more than a little miffed with the Holy Spirit.

Later, back at my flat, he asked me if I would teach him how to dance.

This I willingly did, with a little help from Van Morrison: you can guess the rest. We spent a magical few months together, during a snowy Polish winter, but it was always clear to me that we came from such different worlds, and had such different belief systems, that this could only be an interlude in both our lives. I took Steven to England once, to attend my best friend's wedding; another friend took one look at him, drew me aside, and hissed in my ear 'I think you should keep this one', but it was never really on the cards.

The Jesuits say "Give me the child until the age of seven and I will show you the man," and such was the case with Steven – part of him needed to see and know the world but like the Catholic characters in Brideshead Revisited, he was still attached to ‘an unseen hook and an invisible line… long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread’. He needed some time out to gain a broader experience of the world, and come to terms with his grievances with the Holy Spirit, but he was never going to flourish long term away from the spiritual soil in which he had originally been planted, and grown.

A few months later I came to the conclusion that corporate life in Poland was just as unendurable as corporate life in London, only with pierogi, and returned to the UK to study for another degree at Oxford. We parted amicably, and with some regret, and Steven moved on to work in Romania; he later returned to the Mid-West and the embrace of his church, as I knew he would, made a pastor-approved marriage and went on to have 4 sons. We kept in touch by email sporadically over the years, getting occasional glimpses of one another's lives, and both valuing the memory of our short-lived but happy Polish romance. 

Steven last emailed me about a year ago, but somehow I never got round to answering, until today. Yesterday, looking for something else, I came across an old photo of him, and it struck me that I was long overdue in updating him on the massive recent changes in my life: from Turkey, to England; from solitude to R; from health to cancer.  So I sent him an email, with a link to this blog, as the quickest way to let him what had been going on in my life since we were last in touch.

But my email, to his Caterpillar work account, bounced back:  

from:	Mail Delivery Subsystem <mailer-daemon@googlemail.com>
to:	carolinefo@gmail.com
date:	4 February 2013 11:58
subject:	Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

h*********_steven_a@cat.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain cat.com by mail3.cat.com. [198.206.246.155].

The error that the other server returned was:
550 5.1.1 User Unknown

Oh no, I thought, I hope he hasn’t lost his job. No, look on the bright side, he’s probably been headhunted elsewhere. Let’s try Google. 

I googled him, and this was what I found.

Obituary: Steven A. H*********, 49, of Washington 

WASHINGTON—Steven A. H*********, 49, of Washington, died at 4:30 p.m. Oct. 1, 2012 at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria.

• Washington Times-Reporter - Washington, IL

WriteOct. 9, 2012 5:13 pm

WASHINGTON—Steven A. H*********, 49, of Washington, died at 4:30 p.m. Oct. 1, 2012 at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria.

Born May 12, 1963 in Logansport, Ind. to Theodore and Lynetta (Furrer) H*********. He married T***** Z******** on Sept. 26, 2004 in Hillside.

He is survived by his wife and four sons, Luke, Joel, Levi, and Nathan, all at home; one brother, Keven (Ann) H********* of Washington; and one sister, Janell H********* of Elk Grove Village. He was preceded in death by his parents.

Steven worked in technology and management roles around the world, most recently as Business Development Manager for the Korea Department at Caterpillar, Inc. He held degrees from Purdue University and MIT Sloan School of Management and several professional licenses.  

He was a member of the Washington Apostolic Christian Church where services were held Oct. 6. Church ministers officiated. Burial was Washington Apostolic Christian Cemetery. Visitation was Oct. 5 at Deiters Funeral Home in Washington and Oct. 6 at the church. Memorials may be made to the Children of Steven H********** Education Fund c/o CEFCU.

His memorial website may be found at www.deitersfuneralhome.com where online condolences may also be sent to the family.

I looked at the memorial website, and saw that he died of cancer, type unspecified, three days before I went under the surgeon’s knife back in October. 

He was a truly lovely man.

I sent him an email only this morning; I still can't quite believe he wasn't there to receive it.