The Italian authorities were going from village to village in the valleys and gorges below the mountains along the Amalfi Coast. They were asking the same questions of everyone…did you see anyone fall from the mountains? Where did you see it? When? Finally after a few days a little boy in one of the villages told them he had seen a man in an American cowboy hat flying through the air one day recently.  There was no flying cowboy, of course, but what he had witnessed was how our new acquaintance Murray had met his death on a beautiful September day in 2007.

Until then, it might have been the best vacation we ever took. Five days in Rome with our more seasoned travelling friends, Dennis and JoAnn, acting as our tour guides. We saw the soaring architecture of the Vatican and several dead popes lying around in their glass caskets, the Coliseum, the Sistine, the Palatine Hill, the Tivoli Gardens, Trevi Fountain and those great open piazzas that seem to show up every few blocks. And everywhere the warm, friendly and incredibly hospitable people of that good country. There was no part of Rome that seemed dangerous and no restaurant that wasn’t delicious and memorable. We walked and walked.

The second part of our trip was further south, past Naples, in the region of the Amalfi Coast. It was a hiking tour and we were tagging along with part of a much larger group of American Airlines employees who had arranged all of this. After an endless train ride with about thirty stops, our group met in a decent little hotel in San Angelo and met our hiking guides. They were English, mostly retired engineers, and were in great shape for this work. Each day offered a different hike and you could assign yourself to easy, medium, or hard trails. Being a guy, I assumed we would try medium, but that only lasted a day. With tongues hanging out, we reassigned ourselves to easy, which wasn’t really all that easy, but we had been training for months in the mountains of Chicago, which of course don’t exist.

We walked up the side of Mt. Vesuvius, down into the lava covered ruins of Herculaneum (also buried along with Pompeii, but less famous) and along an old mountain trade route for mules high over the Mediterranean known as the Walk of the Gods. We walked down the sixty or so stories of the vertical cliff-side town of Positano and had wine and cheese and olives on the beach, only to learn that the single way back up was the way we came down. We slept pretty well those nights.

One of our group was a tall thin attorney from Toronto named Murray. He and his wife Sonia had been on many such hiking trips, but she confided quickly that these trips were all about Murray and his passion for hiking. He was in good shape, always taking the “hard” route and each day wearing his official olive drab hiking pants, shirt and hat, which in the military would have been known as a “boonie hat”, but had sort of the shape of a cowboy hat. Each night he would wash his sweat soaked outfit in the bathroom sink and hang it out to dry for tomorrow’s adventure. He took his hiking and I guess his life pretty seriously.

Like us, Murray and Sonia were not part of the American Airlines s group to which our friends Dennis and JoAnn belonged. Dining seating was your choice and, as groups will do, they tended to gather with fellow employees to share the dinner table. A loose dinner confederation formed consisting of my wife Maureen and I, Murray and Sonia, a very eccentric but hysterically funny octogenarian woman from the Isle of Guernsey, a retired British Air Force mechanic, and a few others.

Over dinner and a few other times, Murray shared with us that he was not happy with the degree of difficulty of our hikes thus far. He had been on many hikes and this one was not pushing him. It was sure pushing the rest of us, but we listened politely. And so it was on Wednesday that we got the day to ourselves. You could go sightseeing, shopping, or, if you were Murray, seek out that more challenging hike. The guides were against him going alone and tried to talk him out of it, but he had already picked the place and made it clear to them that he intended to go. They made him show the location on a map the night before and warned him that their insurance would not cover any misadventure like this. He was the soul of confidence at dinner that night, his last on earth, and seemed pleased that he would at last be on his own, free of less able hikers and guides.

We spent the day in Sorrento shopping, grateful for the break in the activity. At dinnertime back in the hotel Murray had not returned and Sonia wasn’t worried; she was sure he got held up somehow. Cellphones didn’t work too well internationally in 2007, by the way. By 8 p.m. she was nervous, but still sure it was just a delay of sorts. It had happened once or twice before, she said. By nightfall, about 9 pm. in that region, she was clearly worried. Maureen sat with her in the lobby of the hotel while I made pointless trips to the street every 30 minutes or so to spot him if he should come by. I didn’t know what else to do. Eventually, Maureen told me to get some sleep and that she would be up later, but I awoke alone the next morning. Maureen had sat with her all night, the realization dawning more clearly by the hour that something was wrong. Very wrong.

By morning the tour guides were on the phone to headquarters in the U.K., police were in the lobby and the search was on. The hotel management gave Sonia a private sitting room off the lobby and she asked Maureen if she would sit with her. And sit she did, holding Sonia’s hand much of the time. The rest of the group went on a final hike and, upon returning and learning that Murray was still missing, did what people so commonly do when a near certain tragedy is about to befall someone. They distanced themselves from Sonia and the room in which she and Maureen sat. They weren’t comfortable, and to be honest I couldn’t blame them. It can be hard to know the right thing to say, if indeed there even is a right thing to be said.

Maureen sat with Sonia until on Friday we had to leave for Rome and a flight home; we had a big family wedding on Saturday. She made sure Sonia finally made the inevitable phone calls to Canada that made it official. Murray was missing and they needed to come to Italy. His brother arrived the next day.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that Maureen found an online newspaper article written in Italian, but it contained the words Toronto, Murray and the Italian word “morte”. We learned from a letter from Sonia a few months afterward what had transpired.  His body had been located after an extensive search by over 500 local police in a remote valley after a child told his story of the flying cowboy. He had changed his mind about where to hike and they thought he might have climbed above the cloud line where the rock is wet and lost his footing, falling more than 200 meters to his fate.

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A few times in our lives we have learned that close friends have suffered the sudden loss of an adult son or daughter. There may be no greater shock and sadness for a parent to absorb. Like in the Amalfi Coast, Maureen has known exactly where to be and what to do. She insisted we go right now to their homes to be with them. There was no argument to be had, her resolve was that strong and that clear.  Every instinct in my body told me not to do this. We’re intruding. We’re not their closest friends. Their family will resent us.  It’s somehow not the right thing to do.

And she was right each time. It was exactly the best thing to do. Our friends were bleeding and we needed to be there not to stop the bleeding, but to bleed with them. Their bleeding would slow, and eventually stop, but that is the function of time passing. And even time can’t remove the scar that would form and always be there. But when the tragedy first strikes and your friends are at their most vulnerable, the shocked and brokenhearted need their friends closer, not further way.

We honor first responders, the police officers, firefighters, paramedics, nurses, and soldiers who run toward danger while the rest of us run the other way or at least move aside. But there are other, less recognized first responders like Maureen. I think of her and those precious few who share this remarkable quality as first responders to the heart.

I have a hundred reasons for loving my wife, and maybe another hundred more for admiring her, but this is where her light shines most brightly. I don’t have the instinct and I surely don’t have the skill set to offer much comfort at those times, but I am lucky enough to be married to someone who does.