Susan and Joel Jacobson, married for 57 years. A year ago, as 2023 wound down to its last hours, Joel Jacobson, 83 years old at the time, set out in his Toyota sedan from his East Rock condo for a holiday dinner at Adriana’s, on Grand Avenue.Going to this popular Italian restaurant had been a household tradition, but this visit, he knew, would be different.Even though the setting and food would be familiar, nothing else would be. For the first time ever there, he would sit at a table for one. When he made the reservation he asked that it be in the main dining area, and not the bar, as ​“I’m not a bar person.”When he entered at 6 p.m., Joel was ushered to a table in a corner. ​“This is just fine,” he thought. And then studied the empty chair across from him.For 57 years, he and his wife Susan had been married. On so many New Year’s Eves they had celebrated in their own quiet way at an Adriana’s table for two. They had been so compatible, he likes to tell people, that they had over that long period of wedlock a mere 11 or 12 spats.When a waitress came to take Joel’s order, he asked for his usual one glass of sauvignon blanc and a dish that wasn’t on the menu, but that loyal customers knew about: John Dory, the fish entree he always ordered there. (Usually, dinners out meant choosing seafood, as it was something that he and Susan didn’t cook in the condo because of the lingering odor.)That’s when the unexpected happened, another thing not on the menu. A man at the next table — a long one at which 12 or 14 revelers sat – heard Joel’s order and turned to the diner sitting alone and said that he heard from friends how good the John Dory was.The two started an across-the-aisle conversation. Joel has always played down his own accomplishments. He earned degrees from two top-ranked universities, was an agent in New York City, a pioneering salesman in the early days of cable television, owner of several video stores, and lately has worked as a volunteer in the effort by his synagogue, Mishkan Israel, to help resettle refugees from the Middle East. He preferred, instead, to talk about Susan.The prompt arrived to do that. After he mentioned that Susan had recently passed away, the woman next to the man who he’d been talking to asked, ​“What did your wife do?”Joel told the story. For he is, at heart, a man with many stories.He had met Susan in Manhattan while she worked for a small paperback publishing company. Over a coffee date (“Do they even have those anymore?” Joel asks), he learned that she had graduated from Syracuse University’s journalism school with honors. He said with those credentials, she could have gotten a job with much higher pay at a bigger publisher.She replied that she was happy where she was, evading the male-dominated corporate offices. ​“I didn’t want to begin my day by pouring coffee for some guy.”In time, though, the small publishing house was bought by a company that later became Warner Books, and Susan became the first female editor to work there.When Joel mentioned that she had retired from her last job, as director of the Shubert Theater box office for more than two decades, the man across the aisle said, ​“Oh, we love the Shubert.”Joel, at right, went with Jonathan to the first Connecticut screening of the film his son had written, and that Susan, in a Hollywood ending, managed to see before she died. Then Joel told him about the morning months earlier. Susan, who had back issues that required the use of a walker but had otherwise seemed healthy, had gone to the bathroom, returned to bed, and then fell to the floor, no longer breathing. Joel later learned she had suffered a fatal stroke.In recounting this, Joel, who of course was shocked by the suddenness of her passing, wasn’t necessarily asking for sympathy; to him, it was a story of fact. When the restaurant conversation ended, he digested the last of the sole, and emptied his wine glass. He asked the waitress for his go-to Adriana’s dessert.When she returned with the homemade cannoli, he asked for the check. The waitress said it wasn’t necessary; the gentlemen Joel had been talking to had already paid his bill.Joel was astonished. He got up from his chair, and went over to his benefactor, and said, ​“You, sir, have performed a mitzvah.” And then had to explain what that Hebrew word commonly refers to: a good deed.This last New Year’s Eve, Joel, didn’t return to Adriana’s alone. Instead, Suzanne and I invited our old friend to our house in East Rock, where he told us the details of that restaurant visit a year earlier.We had no John Dory to offer, but made sandwiches with the corned beef, dill pickles, coleslaw and potato salad from Katz’s Deli in Woodbridge – my own family tradition, honoring the memory of my parents.Joel had brought with him some bubbly, and we couldn’t help but think of Susan. The four of us often met for dinner at Caffe Bravo, where Joel, as advertised, always ordered the fish, and then retold the story of once stinking up their condo.A posthumous tribute. Though Susan’s passing was unexpected, she lived long enough to get satisfaction from the many accomplishments of their two sons and the grandchildren. By then she had seen, blessedly, the results of Jonathan’s debut as a screenwriter. ​“The Kill Room,” starring Uma Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson, though it hadn’t yet been released, Jonathan had visited from New York City with an early copy.But, the modest person she was, she never stopped people on the streets and said, ​“Let me tell you about my son, the film industry genius.”She did, however, tell me a couple of stories from the inside of the Shubert. One was about Faye Dunaway’s appalling behavior when she came to perform in New Haven and lived up to her billing as a diva, treating the staff rudely. Susan was asked by the theater’s manager to use her prodigious people skills to intervene.But here was nothing she could do about Robert Goulet’s intransigence. When he came to star in ​“South Pacific,” he insisted that the Shubert hire a limousine to take him less than a tenth of a mile from the Omni Hotel around the block to the stage door.During our recent New Year’s Eve dinner, I thought of the honor Susan had received last summer when a small ceremony was held in the Shubert’s lobby, attended by family and old friends.The event marked the Shubert’s tribute to its late and much valued employee, a renaming of the spot where she had served so diligently, to the Susan Jacobson Box Office.Joel made a speech in which he praised the woman who was, in his view, smarter, and better looking, and who always made more money than he did. And he mentioned that he had arrived in a place of peace himself.He has been talking with others who have gone through similar experiences of losing spouses, and, after hearing accounts of how difficult it was to be a caregiver to the very ill, decided that he and Susan, in a way, had been fortunate.The inevitable had come quietly and peacefully in the middle of the night. It was, Joel now considers it, a bittersweet ending to a meaningful and rewarding life.