It’s a moment that comes several times in various ways over the course of a life. It’s that first crisis after you leave home, and the first time you realize what it means to work without a net.
It’s that first time your child asks a question you’re not prepared for, and suddenly you intimately understand your parents who knew everything had no idea what they were doing raising you. Just like you, they were making it up as they went along and hoping for the best.
It’s that moment your aging father gives you a look and you suddenly see the giant who would move heaven and earth to keep you safe isn’t strong enough now to lift a grandchild.
We can’t help but feel such a way in light of the news that Norman Hunt passed away last week. The original N.C. Hunt sold his business and stepped back last year, but the company today is bigger and better than ever.
Hunt himself had been such a presence in the community for so long that those of us who arrived on the scene any time in the last 40 years could be forgiven for thinking it was always so and it always would be.
Hunt’s departure follows Sigrid Sproul’s, who left us Aug. 22. Like N.C. Hunt Lumber, Sproul’s real estate business was a fixture in the Midcoast for decades. People who never met her know of her and they almost certainly know someone who knew her well.
A no-nonsense woman who never suffered fools gladly, Sproul is fondly remembered today by the clients she served, the friends she treasured, and the generations of local brokers she mentored.
Unlike Sproul and Hunt, Gene Boothby did not have a namesake business to keep himself in the public’s mind. What the longtime Bremen resident had was a sharp mind, a subtle sense of humor, and a strong sense of devotion to his family and community.
He served on Bremen’s planning board and the board of assessment review and did two stints on the Bremen Select Board, one of them as board chair during a particularly contentious period in 1999 when the town adopted a development moratorium long enough to work out some land use issues.
If our obituary page these past few weeks has you feeling the weight of years, you’re not alone. Every week our obituary page reports a terrible loss for some family and always, to some degree, their loss is our loss, too.
