Greg and Susan Wageman used to cruise down our nation’s two-lane highways, including Route 66, in his blue Corvette. Greg did the driving; Susan did the navigating.
Greg had always meant to teach his wife how to drive a stick-shift. But he didn’t get the chance. He died unexpectedly of a pulmonary embolism at age 48.
The first few days were a blur for Susan Wageman, 47. As weeks stretched out, she drew up a list to bring some sense of order to a life so painfully disrupted. On it: find someone to help her learn to drive a manual transmission. She wanted to keep alive some of her fondest memories of Greg, the man she had fallen in love with nearly 30 years earlier when they were students at Boston College. “I know that it will be different on my own,” Susan wrote in an e-mail to Roadshow that ran on Valentine’s Day. “But I don’t want to give up road trips in the Corvette.”
You can read what happened next in this report by the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury-News. And there’s video, too.