Au Revoir Barry

Barry Manilow is the nickname I gave to Robert, our next door neighbor, almost 2 years ago when we moved into this apartment. I first met him when, at 5 months pregnant, I spent 10 minutes fighting with the 3 locks and keys, trying to get myself into the apartment, swearing profusely as I really needed the toilet, as you do when you are pregnant. I called him Barry because he had a haircut that was "dated", as you might say, and because in the first week after moving in I could hear him strumming a guitar through the open window and crooning away to ballads from the 80's. In the nice weather (most of the year here in Nice!) he pulls a big armchair out on his balcony and reads the newspaper in the setting sun, looking out a the little slice of sea we can see from our building.
That day of the key-battle, Barry popped his head out of his apartment and said, in his unmistakeable Niçois accent, "Can I help?", and within a minute all was well.
I baked him a peach cobbler for thanks. He had never heard of peach cobbler and had a lot to say about it!
We have shared tools, anecdotes, cookies, tips, and many other things in two years. I've scolded him for smoking his atrocious cigars in the elevator. We've hung out on our balconies discussing my dying plants and his passion for fishing and swimming several kilometers every day in the sea. In the beginning I could hardly understand him half the time, his Nicois accent is so thick! And he has funny expressions that only true Nicois people do - like starting almost all his sentences with "Dites" and then saying whatever he wants to say - sort of like saying "Say,...." in English.
If I leave my hall light on, he knocks on my door and says "Julie, are you are Thomas made of money? Can I send you my electricity bill too?" and then chuckles away to himself. He invites us in at regular intervals to show us his progress as he has been painstakingly renovated every last inch of his apartment which he inherited from his grandmother. We discuss his artwork. He adopted a table I was going to throw out and the next thing I know it's in his entryway, all spiffed up.
Barry is a widower, his wife died young and tragically when his children were very young, and now at 54 he is in half-retirement, enjoying living in this one bedroom apartment next door to us.
Imagine our shock when Thomas saw 2 strange men burrowing around in Barry's storage closet on our shared private landing and found out they were his son and son-in-law, and that Barry/Robert had dropped dead of a heart attack the other night.
Now his sad adult-aged children are outside my door, both of them the spitting image of him, overwhelmed with responsibilities and decisions and turning around and around in his apartment, not knowing how or where to begin, Christmas lights blinking around them.
I kept saying to them "But I JUST saw him." "Us too", they murmured. He was in great health, his daughter said.
Proof that life is short.
Here's to Barry Manilow. I hope he is dancing the Copa Cabana with his wife somewhere up above.