LONDON BRIDGE STATION is a mid-sized train station serving commuters who live south of London mainly.  It’s adjacent to Borough Market, which has been the site of food markets since 1014 and probably even before that. Essentially a conglomeration of restaurants, food distributors and merchants, its early location at the foot of the London Bridge, the only span across the River Thames at the time, made perfect sense.  It has undergone many changes over the years and despite its gritty feel, is the location of several fancy restaurants and a magnet for thousands of people on its public market days, which conveniently fall on weekends, leaving the weekdays for professional traders only. Southwark Cathedral is also adjacent to Borough Market, and I would later ring here every Sunday (and sometimes on Wednesday nights) as my stay wore on into 2010. But I knew none of that on Monday evening as we were heading to meet Ellinor and Jon for dinner.

Several tube lines serve London Bridge Station so it was pretty easy to find.  It linked directly to where they lived in Crystal Palace (south of London) so they suggested that we meet at a specific store in the main concourse.  Charlotte and I got there a little early and as we waited, watching the commuters hurry to their trains, Charlotte asked me what Ellinor and Jon looked like so she could keep an eye out for them.  I hadn’t met Jon so couldn’t describe him, but told Charlotte that Ellinor was cheerful, tall and energetic, had short hair and glasses.  She would likely be bounding towards us with great momentum and enthusiasm – at least that is the way I remembered her.  After a few minutes, we spotted them coming towards us, and Ellinor was still cheerful and tall, but lacked the energy I had known her for, and seemed to be walking a little awkwardly.  Tall with professorial gray hair and glasses, Jon seemed friendly though somewhat reserved.

Ellinor and Jon hadn’t decided where we would go as it wasn’t their usual turf.  They did know about The George, a well-known pub and former coaching stop, but as we were walking on Borough High Street, a Turkish restaurant caught our eye.  Mary Elizabeth and I loved Turkish food and had a favorite restaurant near where we both used to work in midtown Manhattan.  I wasn’t sure about Charlotte, but thought she could find something on the menu which would strike her fancy. So as we settled in at a table we started immediately with an update on Mary Elizabeth and her condition. It turned out that the reason for Ellinor’s irregular stride was remnants of her neurological illness that had damaged her spinal cord ten years earlier. She had spent many months in rehab, coming back from an initial paralysis from the neck down to her present near-normal status. So she and Jon knew a lot about neurological issues and how arduous recovery can be.  For Charlotte’s sake, we didn’t get too much into Mary Elizabeth’s condition although since she had been with me every step of the way, she knew everything I knew.

The restaurant was great and made a good setting for our getting reacquainted, despite the surprise of a bad bottle of wine that we had to send back (something none of us had ever done before). Jon grew up close to Brighton on England’s south coast and had always been interested in paleontology.  As a boy he used to comb the beaches near his home for shells and fossils. When he was Charlotte’s age, he found a beach that was literally covered by a fossilized mollusk which he couldn’t identify. He sent it off to the Natural History Museum in London for further help in identification, and they sent it back, identifying it as a particularly common type of marine snail.  He compared the fossil in hand to the identification the museum had sent and found several significant differences, so he wrote back to the museum pointing these out and asking for more help.  He got the surprising news back that he had probably discovered a new species of fossil mollusk and had the opportunity to describe it officially and give it a scientific name. Thirty-five ears later, although his career had required describing many new species through his research, this starting point for a career in science, still remains unformalized.  Jon explained with a wry smile that he was still thinking about it, not wanting to be hasty.

Ellinor was still involved in her research, but had an additional job as the Executive Secretary (which to American ears sounds like a administrative assistant, but is in fact more like Executive Director) of an organization called the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature – ICZN for short (it’s pronounced I-C-Zed-N).  The ICZN is tasked with keeping order in the complicated and sometimes fractious world of scientific names for animals.  Scientists can disagree about what names should be used for the almost two million animal species currently recognized, and sometimes get into disputes which need to be resolved by a higher authority.  The ICZN is that higher authority – it’s the high court for scientific names of animals. Both Charlotte and I found this fascinating and a welcome diversion from thinking about Mary Elizabeth.

Ellinor and Jon were very interested in Charlotte and what her interests were as a 10-year old citizen of the world, so they kept her talking, which was contrary (but very welcome) to her normally reserved nature.  Perhaps it was the extraordinary circumstances in which we found ourselves, or maybe finding some interesting friends to talk to in an unfamiliar city, but Charlotte blossomed into a conversationalist that night and kept us all entertained with her stories and commentary.  Towards the end of dinner I started to become anxious, knowing that 3,000 miles away, Clark and Louisa would be coming home from school soon and as planned would receive a call from me telling them the news about their mother.

We all walked back up the now quiet Borough High Street towards London Bridge Station and said goodbye to Ellinor and Jon.  We found our way to the Jubilee Line and rode the three stops to Canary Wharf.  I would have preferred to call Clark and Louisa from the hotel, but their grandmother and I had made plans to call them at a specific hour to talk to them and that hour struck as we were coming out of the tube at Canary Wharf, so we found a quiet corner of the vast, modern station and called home.

Clark and Louisa were 8 years old at the time and in third grade. They hadn’t any idea that something had happened, and just knew that we were in London on vacation and would be back on Saturday, in time to celebrate Charlotte’s 11^th birthday as a family.  I dialed the number and Lucille put each child on a different extension so I could talk to them both at the same time.  Deep breath.  I explained that Mary Elizabeth had gotten sick and had a problem with her brain and was asleep in the hospital, being taken very good care of by the doctors and nurses.  They immediately wanted to know what was wrong with her brain and I told them she had had a stroke.  They were shocked because their grandmother had had a mild stroke several years earlier, and at 48 their mother seemed to be too young.  Fortunately, they immediately assumed that she would be fine, like their grandmother, except she might walk with a cane.  While I think they understood what I was telling them, they didn’t seem too perturbed by the news and were more interested in telling me what they had been up to, and hearing about their big sister.

So they finally knew, and it wound up not being such a big deal.  I just didn’t want them to hear about it from anybody else in case they had a bad reaction or needed the kind of assurance that only a parent can give (albeit from 3,000 miles away).  It was a great relief that they knew, but it also left me feeling slightly sick.  Everybody wants the best for their children, and my children were for the time being without a mother, and a father who was an ocean away.  I wanted my kids to be spared all the difficulties and unhappiness that I had experienced as a child and now I couldn’t help them.  All most kids (mine included) want is to be normal and like other kids.  The pressure to fit in starts early, and when Charlotte asked plaintively, “What am I going to tell my friends?” on that first dreadful night, I knew it was an issue. Now they were going to be the kids whose mother died, or if she survived, the kids with the mother who had a stroke.

As I was growing up in a severely dysfunctional home, I yearned for normalcy. When I would go away for the weekend to a friend’s country house, it was heaven to be part of a normal family if only for a few days, and made more poignant by what I faced on Sunday night upon returning home.  I perpetually felt like I was an outsider looking in, not being able to be like other kids because of my family – or lack thereof.

I keenly felt that need to fit in, and wanted to be able to provide that environment for my kids as well.  So if I underplayed the seriousness of the situation, it was to keep my kids from too much worry, and to give them as normal a life as possible while I remained in London, keeping a vigil by Mary Elizabeth’s side.