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It’s hard to believe that Bernie and Richard had less than two years together from his, belated, proposal of marriage to his untimely death. To Angie and me, it felt as if they had always been a couple. It was something of a surprise to me, after having known Richard for so long and having assumed that he preferred a solitary life, that it so soon became impossible to think of seeing them apart (except during working hours, of course). And that made it all the harder to come to terms with when Richard fell to his death only weeks before he was due to retire.
Retirement had been something that had hung over Richard for several months. It was quite clear that he didn’t want to go, but equally clear that he was being eased out and that the most he could hope for was to be permitted to continue in some sort of “safe” desk job. For someone who had always been very hands-on, that would have been intolerable, so he had agreed to go gracefully rather than to fight on against the inevitable.
Bernie, of course, being nearly twenty years younger – and that was something else that made it so surprising that they became so inseparable once they had admitted to one another that they did actually care for each other – would continue working; so Richard started to think about how he could fill the empty days. I know that it preyed on his mind that he might become difficult to live with if his mind was no longer occupied with his job. Maybe that was what made him careless and take risks that he would normally have avoided.
Anyway, for whatever reason, he took it upon himself to chase an escaping suspect across the roof of one of the colleges. The man turned on him in an attempt to escape down the stairs up which they had come, and in the struggle Richard fell to the ground and broke his neck. He died in the ambulance on the way to hospital. Bernie arrive too late to say goodbye – or to tell him the news that she was carrying his unborn child.
I’m glad that I was there when he fell – although I can never forgive myself for not having arrived a few minutes earlier and been able to prevent it – and to have spoken to him as he lay there waiting for the ambulance to arrive. Ernie as uppermost in his mind and he gave me a message for her: “tell Bernie I’m sorry.” We’re still trying to work out exactly what he meant.
You can read all about this in the book DESPISE NOT THY MOTHER, which goes on to tell about how Bernie started to find out more about Richard and his early life and, crucially, his relationship with his own mother.
https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/despise-not-thy-mother