Clara’s Crossword

Jeff Walters

Merl Reagle was a crossword-puzzle creator known for his intelligence, creativity, and humor. He passed away in 2016, and I want to share a story that shows yet another side of him, illustrating his caring, his compassion, his generosity, and even his sensitivity.

I never met Merl in person. He and I communicated by email over a period of weeks back in 2009. The reason I got in touch with him was that my wife Clara was diagnosed with melanoma in December, 2008. She died thirteen months later, in January, 2010. We had been married for twenty years, and our son Matt had just turned sixteen.

However, this is not a story about cancer, but about joy and generosity.

Clara’s form of cancer was rare and aggressive. During 2008 we went through many therapies – radiation, chemotherapy, surgery, the whole works. During it all, Clara insisted that she wanted her life to be about living life, not about the cancer. She was a pediatric nurse, and her co-workers didn’t even know she had cancer until the chemo treatments meant she could no longer work with children. There were friends and neighbors who didn’t know she had cancer until the very end, or even afterwards.

I decided I wanted to do something extraordinary for Clara. In October of 2009 I came up with the idea of surprising her with a Clara-themed crossword puzzle in our local newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer. Clara and I really enjoyed doing the puzzle together every day. We’d take it to bed. We took it to the movies with us and did it while waiting for the show to start. Between the two of us we usually did most or all of the daily puzzle.

After I had this idea, I started making calls, and frankly I hit lots of dead ends. Then I finally had the good fortune to reach Kevin McCann of Cruciverb, an online database of crossword puzzles. He put me in touch with Merl, who frankly I had never heard of before. I explained the situation and my idea to Merl, and quite surprisingly he agreed at once to help me create, and place, the Clara crossword puzzle. With Kevin’s help Merl determined that our local newspaper’s puzzle was distributed by the Los Angeles Times syndicate. Rich Norris, the Times’ puzzle editor, agreed to publish the Clara puzzle on December 16, 2009.

I offered to pay Merl whatever he wanted to create the puzzle, but – and this is true Merl – he said the only compensation he wanted was to hear how it went when Clara did the puzzle.

The way we worked together, I would send Merl relevant names and themes and other words. He would fit them into the puzzle and send it back to me and we did that several times, back and forth. Then after that was done, we used other words in the puzzle to see if we could create clues relating to Clara. So for example, one word was “SEDAN” and the clue became “Ford Taurus,” the car she drove.

By the time we were done, the puzzle contained nineteen Clara-related clues and answers. We spent hours and hours on the project, and again the only compensation Merl would accept for his incredible generosity of time and talent was to hear how it went when Clara did the puzzle.

On Wednesday, December 16, I took Clara for chemotherapy and also, unfortunately, a rather difficult session with her cancer specialist. When we got home I said I would make lunch and we would sit down and do that day’s crossword puzzle.

The first clue was “The first name in nursing.” And Clara suggested, “Florence Nightingale?” But that didn’t fit, because the answer was only five letters long. So she said, “Let’s move on to another clue.”

But I said, “Wait a minute. Florence Nightingale was British. Who was the first name in American nursing?”

And Clara said, “Clara Barton. B-A-R-T-O-N.”

That didn’t fit either. But I prompted her, “It says first name.”

And she said, “Clara. C-L-A-R-A. That fits!” And she added, “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen my name in a crossword puzzle.” I tried not to smile.

We continued on to other words. I let Clara do most of the answers, because I wanted this to be her experience, and frankly…I already knew the puzzle inside and out. She didn’t notice that the answers included her middle name (ANNE), our married name (WALTERS), our son’s name (MATT), and even our dog’s name (CHOCO).

It wasn’t surprising that she didn’t catch on right away. Because you know, when you do the daily crossword puzzle, do you really expect it to be all about you?

The bottom right clue was “Lewis or Lois colleague.” Five letters. If you think about it, Lewis and Clark explored the West together, and Lois Lane’s boyfriend is Clark Kent. When Clara filled in the answer, C-L-A-R-K, she saw that it was her maiden name, which, combined with the upper left answer, was her full name before she and I were married. That stopped her for a second, and she said, “Huh. Clara and Clark. What are the odds of that?”

She started to look at the puzzle more closely and saw ANNE, and WALTERS, becoming more amazed. She said, “Hey, Jeff, I wonder if you’re in there?” Then she found JEFF, and then MATT, our son’s name. Each time she repeated, “What are the odds of that?”

At that point I couldn’t hold back and I pointed to the lower left corner and said, “And look! Even CHOCO is in there.”

Then she caught on and said, “Hey! Wait a minute!”

It was truly beautiful. When Clara realized that the crossword puzzle was not only all about her, but for her, she was on cloud nine all day. We started to pick out some of the other nineteen answers and clues. For example, when she was in high school she loved drama, and starred in The Crucible, and also as Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes. So the clue for 55 Across was “_____ Sweeney, Ethel Merman’s ‘Anything Goes’ role” and the clue for 58 Across was “The Crucible, e.g.” The answers were RENO and DRAMA.

The year before this, when her cancer was first diagnosed, we had gone out to Pasadena for New Year’s Day, because a lifelong dream of hers was to attend the Rose Parade. So clue 28 across was “The _____ Parade.” Even her favorite baseball player, Chase Utley of the Philadelphia Phillies, was in the puzzle. Those two were also interlocking answers, with the E of ROSE being the E of CHASE.

One of her childhood nicknames was BELLE, which was in there, as was SKI, which is something our family loved to do. There were also some answers that originally didn’t have any relation to Clara, but we rewrote the clues to make the connection. Thus, OWLS became “Temple’s team.” ARLEN became “Specter on the Hill.” (Arlen Specter was one of Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senators.) Clara just lit up every time she found one more of these. It was really cool.

For me, the forty-five minutes I spent watching Clara do this crossword puzzle is still the best forty-five minutes of my life.

Just let me touch a minute on Merl’s sensitivity. As I mentioned, Clara said that she didn’t want her life to be about cancer. She wanted it to be about life. Later on, Merl had a friend who worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer and was interested in doing a story on this. But Merl didn’t push back at all when we chose not to do it, because we didn’t want to dwell on Clara’s cancer.

As you may know, some crossword puzzle fans like to critique puzzles in online discussions the day after they come out. The day after Clara’s puzzle came out, some people criticized it for containing too many proper names. Merl very gently dodged the question as to why that was the case. As far as I know, he never told anyone what he had done for me and for Clara.
Later that month, Clara wrote to a close friend of hers in a letter that the crossword puzzle was the best gift she had ever received. And that best gift would not have happened without Merl Reagle.

In January, when the chemo was no longer working, Clara had to move into a hospice care facility. A car came to pick her up, and I stayed behind to straighten things up. The hospice called to tell me Clara was peacefully sleeping but that when she had arrived she was awake and alert and kept telling everyone about this wonderful crossword puzzle. To me that meant that Merl’s gift to Clara wasn’t just a momentary respite for an hour or a day. It was a joy that Clara loved to share with others right up until the end.

At a college reunion the following summer I told several old friends the crossword puzzle story. At our next five-year reunion, which was last June, to my surprise, classmates came up to me and repeated the crossword puzzle story. They said they had been touched by it and in turn shared it with others. How often does that happen? It made me realize that all of us have talents and abilities that can be used to help someone at a difficult time. I have tried to become more alert to those situations.

I feel privileged to share with others what a compassionate act Merl did for Clara and for me. And also to share the joy he brought to Clara, not only on the day she did the puzzle but on every day of her life she had left. And to share how much he touched my life and perhaps yours. I think Merl did what many of us hope to do, but perhaps very few achieve–which was to make the most of his talents and his time while he was here and touch lives in the most positive way.