I miss him. Ken Ruben, my years’ long friend. Once he had seemed indestructible.
A year ago this morning, he was comatose after suffering a body- and mind-wrecking stroke at his second-floor apartment across from the Police Station.
Rescued by his best, most persistent, most loyal friend who had detected moaning through a locked front door, the train-group friend’s heroic act extended Mr. Ruben’s life for 2½ months.
But he never again was the beloved Ken Ruben of Culver City public transportation fame. He knew buses and trains better than executives of the country. He knew every train schedule in Los Angeles and points south, north, west, east.
At this wrenching moment, though, his keen mind, his instantly recognizable short, stocky body lay in unrecoverable pieces.
Mr. Ruben — second only to Chris Columbus and A.J. Foyt in lifetime miles schlepped — was shifted from one care facility to another a half dozen times. He could not have afforded health insurance.
We tried to convince ourselves through daily visits all over Los Angeles and Orange County that God was going to assay one more miracle.
When Mr. Ruben refused to cooperate with physical therapists, we finally accepted he was done. He was much too proud to imprison his restless self in a stationary position that amounted to a coffin. Effectively, he never got out of bed again.
He enjoyed a sprinkling of sparse moments of abbreviated lucidity.
More often, he was a touch quirky, in, of course, an endearing manner. With his bump-and-run lexicon, he would ask me to dial my wife, Diane, who was at least six feet away from his hospital bed. They spoke.
My daily visits were massively more poignant than they might have been because at this very time Diane was dying, too.
Every time I saw him, I thought of Diane, her war against ALS, her deteriorating health. Bravely soldiering on against Twin Towers’ odds, she accompanied me to his bedside on weekends. As a brilliant nurse practitioner, she assessed his ongoing condition with the precision of Queen Elizabeth’s Christmas- gift Rolex.
March 12 was one of the saddest mornings of my life. I walked into his latest care facility at 10:30. A nurse kindly stopped me before entering his room. Mr. Ruben, she said, had died 10 minutes before.
I leaned against a wall. I cried. I did not want anyone to see. I told God I understood this was a warmup for the main event, Diane’s death five months and two days later.
