I was visiting my next door neighbor, Claire Cressler, on his porch one summer afternoon when Jill, our neighbor from across the street, joined us. Claire described how he worked most evenings in the third-floor studio of his house on scrapbooks of his life with his wife of 60 years, Gloria. “They’re not chronological. I just put together different photos and drawings and sometimes sonnets by Shakespeare,” he told us.
Jill asked what makes a sonnet a sonnet and Claire explained.
A couple weeks later, when Claire was leaving my house after having dinner with us, he handed me a folded sheet of paper. He’d written a sonnet but I was to wait until he left to read it, lest he die of embarrassment. A fear unfounded: it was a charming ode to a white lily that had unexpectedly popped out of the soil in Claire’s back garden earlier that summer.
Born in Decatur, Illinois, in 1911, when Claire was in high school he painted posters for the Decatur movie house in a studio under the stage. He’d memorize the entire dialogue of the film that played while creating a poster for the upcoming one.
Claire was an only child and he and Gloria never had children themselves, nor did her brothers. He told me the first time we shared a dinner – at the end of our shared driveways the night the power grid collapsed in 2003, plunging the northeastern quarter of the country into an electricity-free zone – that he didn’t understand why he was still alive three years after Gloria had died.
When he retired, Claire continued to work as an artist, taking commissions, submitting to competitions. For several years he produced pen-and-ink drawings of well-known buildings in Summit County for Great Northern Savings and Loan’s annual calendar. But after Gloria’s death, Claire never again painted or sketched, channeling his creativity instead into scrapbooking.
When beginning a friendship with someone who is 92, it is understood that the duration will be limited. This is true of all relationships, of course, but with someone who has already lived well beyond average life expectancy, it is very much front of mind. And, yet, even as we became close friends, I never asked about, and Claire never volunteered, his end-of-life wishes.
“When Gloria was in the hospital she asked if I’d sell our home after she died,” Claire shared with me one afternoon as we stood chatting in the driveway. “I told her, ‘No, the house is where we lived and where we loved and I will stay there the rest of my life.’”
I made a grand feast with several courses for Christmas 2007, all of which Claire heartily ate except for the Brussels sprouts because he’d had a lifetime fill of them in the military during World War II. He brought with him that day his ninth sonnet, which I immediately read as he was no longer anxious when sharing them.
“That’s the last sonnet I’ll ever write,” he told me. It was also his best.
“Wherever you are, my shadow will be / Long as it takes my heart to break / Let Time flow swiftly for you and me / Visit me in dreams while in the dark/ It will comfort me until I embark.”
Eight days after Christmas, Claire called and asked for help. He was in his second-floor bedroom, too sick to walk down the stairs. Pneumonia. An ambulance took him to Akron City Hospital. For a few days, Claire improved. I rubbed his dry skin with cocoa butter and though he was medicated to tolerate intubation, he’d lift his eyebrows as I lotioned his face.
Claire’s attorney shared a copy of his DNR with the hospital. But Claire did not need resuscitated. When his condition began to deteriorate, the doctors turned to me. It was not likely Claire would survive, we were just letting him linger. But if by some miracle he did, I was told there would be enough lung damage that he’d need a permanent tracheostomy and would have to spend his remaining days in a nursing home.
I recalled his words to me in our driveway. I had his self-declared last sonnet, a call to his beloved wife to come to him. I had his DNR. And so, I solemnly agreed to what Claire’s physicians recommended. On Jan. 8, after a medical team removed Claire’s ventilator, Jill and I softly sang to our friend while holding his hands and stroking his head. In fewer than 10 minutes, he embarked.
In a single plot, Claire’s small box of ashes rests alongside that of Gloria’s. At the burial I read letters of longing they’d written to one another decades earlier when Claire’s employer sent him to work temporarily in Chicago. I now have lived in their house for over five years. The love they shared within its walls continues to resonate.
This column was published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, January 11, 2026.
Whoopsie Piggle 