My husband, Dan Collins, died this month because of COVID-19 and pneumonia. By the time he passed, Dan had been sedated for a while, and there’s a small controversy over what was said the last time he and I actually exchanged words. It was either “I love you” or Dan’s claim that he was the one who ordered cans of salmon and vegetable for our dog.
Either one seems good. One of the great joys of a long marriage is how the personal and pragmatic moosh together.
We married in 1970 in Amherst, graduate students studying government at the University of Massachusetts. Dan, who had been drafted right out of college, always said that he’d signed up for the program because it would mean an early release from a deeply boring job processing forms for the Army.
My conservative parents were thrilled when I was home for vacation and received a picture of my new boyfriend in uniform and carrying a rifle, taken while he was finishing up some final piece of duty. They became less euphoric when they read his inscription: “Pfc. Daniel Collins awaits the next infringement of his civil liberties.”
We lived together for a couple of years, and I agreed to become “Gail Collins” because our postal worker refused to deliver mail to a man and woman at the same address with different names.
Dan got a reporting job at The Evening Sentinel, a paper in Ansonia, Conn. He proposed when I told him I was not following him to the Lower Naugatuck Valley unless we were married.
We both eventually got hired by United Press International in New York. Dan’s specialty was big police stories. (Mine was making fun of politicians.) Back when Rudy Giuliani was a famous crime fighter, Dan negotiated with him about writing an authorized biography. It was exciting – until Rudy decided he wanted to run for mayor. Dan found the political Giuliani a much less attractive co-worker and dropped out of that project fast. But he eventually revisited the subject with “Grand Illusion,” a book he wrote with Wayne Barrett about Giuliani’s disastrous handling of Sept. 11.
Wayne was a legend in New York journalism for his incredible reporting and his, um, independent spirit. Dan went on to other jobs – I think his favorite was senior producer at CBSNews.com. He didn’t love the internet, but he really enjoyed shepherding all the younger, relatively inexperienced reporters through their paces.
He was my editor, too – the at-home one, frequently pointing out places where the language could be a little better, the examples a little livelier. If I tried to slide past another revision to make dinner or watch TV, he’d cheerfully stop me and say, “Your work is our Job 1.” It became a kind of mantra.
We both wrote books.
Dan, as his friends all knew, was deeply into wine. It wasn’t the sort of thing you might have anticipated for a guy from a working-class neighborhood in Boston, and early in our marriage we pretty much stuck to varieties of Blue Nun.
He was a great party host, and even after we’d passed our – oh, Lord – 50th wedding anniversary, I always had a fine time with him.
Dan came down with respiratory problems this spring, and he seemed to be recovering just fine until we both caught COVID-19. It felt like a bad cold on my end, but Dan woke up one night unable to breathe. We went to the closest hospital’s intensive care unit, and he never recovered.
I visited, of course, all the time. On what turned out to be his last night, I found myself propelled back late in the evening. “Got a chance to say ‘I love you’ again,” I whispered. Kissed his forehead and went home.
Gail Collins is an Opinion columnist for The New York Times.
