My Wonderful Son’s Life Was Taken Suddenly. It Made No Sense

Her husband. Their father. Her brother. A life-long dear friend to many. Their talented up-and-coming Muni-Bond analyst. Our loving son.
Each of these people only in part define one person: Our son Richard (Rick), who was taken in November 2022 as he and his spouse, Maria, planned an extensive Thanksgiving Day gathering.
His 37-year life was taken in a manner that made little sense to any of us.
After a short bout with Influenza A, which was diagnosed on a Saturday in autumn, he died of cardiac arrest on the front steps of his home 18 hours later, while waiting for an ambulance as his two young daughters slept upstairs.
And since that moment and that taking, we have been left with a deep wound, a wide and empty space, that will remain in each of our lives for as long as they go on.
There are no words to express the powerlessness and the anguish we all felt then and to this very moment. Each word alone and many said together cannot express the depth of emotion we still carry in us.
Deep feelings are very difficult to express with so simple a tool as mere words.
Take, for example, a word like heartbroken. A word used for centuries, yet it doesn’t capture, can’t ever capture, what the heart really feels, what the body endures in times of such intense grief since the depth and the dimensions of the damage are missing.
The word heartache too does little justice to define the pain we still feel, for that ache sits not only in our hearts, but throughout our entire bodies.
During this very trying experience and its deep intensity, oddly or perhaps of necessity, I found myself thinking back to happier times when Rick blessed us with his presence and how, in each of them, he was driven by his deep love for each of the people in his life.
Truly, Rick’s goal was to live each and every day to the fullest. He loved life and showed us all that a day was not meant to be wasted.
Accordingly, Rick was always busy—a man in constant motion—but never too busy to share his love of life with those around him. The horizons he saw were bright and hopeful. He was genuinely an optimistic person. And this optimism drove him with the love he held for each of us within his heart.
With the same intensity, Rick was always grateful. He always told anyone who would listen that he looked at his life and felt he was lucky. Success in his studies, success at work, and in the circles of friends and family he cherished—he was always grateful and expressed that gratitude often.
Rick loved eating great food, especially real authentic Italian foods, but his palette extended well beyond his own heritage. And boy did he love a great bourbon or tequila. The rarer the better!
He was a simple person, really, but he cherished his collection of the most expensive bourbons and tequilas he could find. He opened and poured them regularly to anyone who would share them with him, and he loved it.
He valued character over pedigree. He looked for the good in each person—and usually found it. He truly believed that anything was possible and all you had to do was be focused on the goal and it would come to you.
It may take time, but he was absolutely convinced it would come in time.
Rick loved sports. He was an enthusiast of college basketball, especially his alma mater, Villanova, college football especially his wife Maria’s alma mater Penn State, major-league baseball, but especially ice hockey.
He loved watching ice hockey, but more than that, he loved playing ice hockey since the time he was a young child. In more recent years, after a crushing injury to his right hand, he became an active runner and had great endurance.
A person I truly admired, since I could barely walk a mile and a half, but he could run five miles without breathing too hard.
He loved playing golf, but as a former ice hockey player, always found his swing had not fully converted to a golf swing and, even at age 37, couldn’t yet correct or perfect the slice to the right.
He had an enormous capacity to give of himself. Many a person would tell you that Rick became a mentor and a role model in their lives. He listened and he consoled. He was everyone’s true friend.
Rick was captivated by need and would often open his checkbook to charities and even to friends and family in need of a bit of assistance at that moment.
Unfortunately, there were certain things in life where Rick was out of his element. For instance, he wasn’t exactly Michael Jackson on the dance floor. He was known to have the most unique dance moves, and we have tons of video of him dancing at weddings, or on ski trips, or with his two daughters in his backyard to prove it.
Rick’s short life was blessed when he married his high-school sweetheart, Maria. He adored her. He laughed and cried with her. He loved talking about anything and everything with her and most of all, loved the simplest things as long as they were together, like planning a night out for dinner at some up-and-coming eatery.
Even when unconscious in a coma in the ICU, Maria could feel his comforting presence.
He loved his younger sister, Lauren, with his whole heart and would talk with her about the most basic things in the most explicit detail. Growing up, I saw him serve as her protector and many a time, boys would run for cover whenever they had crossed some pre-set line with his sister that Rick had previously established.
His mom and my wife of 46 years, Noreen, was completely in awe of Rick, even as a young boy, and would often refer to him as her “little man” since he behaved graciously inside his still small body. He lived to also make her happy and in her eyes, was always just the perfect gentleman, her “sonny boy”.
As for me as his dad, I just loved our son more than myself, truly I did. And I would give my two arms and two legs to bring him back to all of us if that were possible.
I, as a father, like any parent, have had a difficult time with all of this, especially since parents, as they say, are not supposed to bury their children.
But I have been so very proud to see the man and father that Rick had become, to feel the honor to have been his father, and to have had the blessing to have had him on this earth, if only for the shortest time he was with us.
There are so many negatives about what happened to Rick around the Thanksgiving Holiday in 2022, but if there are two glimmering positives in all this, this is what I’ve learned:
1. Rick will never grow old for our family and his friends. We all will remember him just as he was, a young 37, full-of-life with some thinning hair, perhaps a slightly larger paunch, enabling us to remember Rick for the joy he brought us—not for the last trying days that are now etched within our memory, but for the wonderful person he was every day.
2. When facing circumstances that do not improve with every passing hour, when a change in the trend does not arrive after at most 24 to 30 of those hours, and even when you do not understand what is happening, DO NOT WAIT to act. Seek help. Call. Get resources. Rick himself would want you all to hear his own lesson.
My son had a gift to deeply touch each of the people in his life in such a plain and unassuming way. It was his nature to do everything simply, but 100 percent completely, to inhale, into his soul, each of the lives that surrounded him every day.
S.R. Inciardi is a retired healthcare executive and author of three books of poetry released on Amazon. He lives in New Jersey with his wife of 46 years and has a daughter and son-in-law, a daughter, and four grandchildren.
This essay was produced in partnership with Evermore, a national nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to making the work a more livable place for all bereaved people.
All views expressed are the author’s own.
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