![]() ![]() But Gustavson says, “He was still the wonderful man that I knew 50 years ago. Infections led to his left leg being amputated just above the knee. About 15 years ago, he’d had a stroke, then another. He’d lived with his sister until she died suddenly. ![]() Gustavson learned Watts had been married for 12 years but had no children. They spent nearly two hours together at that reunion after 42 years. Then, in a whisper, he spoke the nickname he’d given her all of those decades before - a name no one else knew and Gustavson won’t reveal. “I knew it was him, but it wasn’t him,” she says. His hair, thinner, was long and scraggly. The tall, handsome man she remembered, who’d always worn a sports jacket and tie, was in sweats now. She went to the nursing home and said she was there to see Watts.Ī nurse wheeled him to the waiting area. But she never heard back.Ī few weeks later, she flew to Chicago anyway. She couldn’t say more because of privacy rules. “He’s alert and oriented,” the nurse on his floor told her. “That was one of the happiest days of my life,” she says, “because I thought: Oh, my God, I can find him now.” “Someone who is willing to take the time out to locate you and to make sure you’re OK and to help you is one in a thousand,” says Baskin, 49, who lives in Iowa. In May, she heard back from one of them - a call from Watts’s niece Adrienne Baskin, who told her she’d last seen her uncle a few years before and that he was in a nursing home near Chicago. So she tried plugging in the names of family members of his she remembered. “Steve Watts?” There were thousands of them there. She didn’t want to interfere in his life. “I prayed he’d be married and be happy and have kids,” she says. With no job now and no longer needing to care for her mother, Gustavson says she thought a lot about her life with Watts. He was her first love and her “true love.”Īnd she says she was tormented by guilt over how she’d ended things. Through everything, she says, she’d never forgotten Watts. ![]()
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