Bill Durbin retired from the Defense Mapping Agency in 1986. He then did some consulting work, dove deep into family history research, cooked meals and baked bread for family gatherings, and began taking long walks with Mom in nearby Rock Creek Park. On one of those hikes, he felt some chest pain. This led first to an angioplasty procedure to open up narrowing blood vessels, and eventually to heart bypass surgery.
Owing to a family history of heart disease, and a Depression-era diet that did not include an abundance of heart-healthy foods, we lost Dad to a heart attack in February 2001. Although his health issues had been mounting, losing him at the age of 71 was still a shock. It deprived many future Durbins and spouses of ever getting to meet Bill Durbin, just as his own dad’s passing at the age of 53 deprived so many of us from ever meeting our paternal grandfather.
After Dad’s passing, some of the ten kids remained in Maryland to make homes and start families of their own. Some had already relocated to other states. At one time or another, Bill and Lorraine’s children could be found raising families in Illinois, Indiana, Texas, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina.
In 2005, Mom sold the house on Thornwood Road (for more than ten times the $43,000 she and Dad paid for it in 1973) and moved into apartment 912 on the top floor of the Kensington House apartment building. Her unit was in the back, looking out over the town railroad tracks. The roar of passing trains—exceeding 90 decibels when the windows were open—alarmed visitors but did not bother Mom one bit. It just reminded her of East St. Louis, she said.
Around this time, Lorraine Durbin found a wonderful traveling companion in Bob Schaeffer, a friend from her high school graduation class. With their shared ESL roots and passion for seeing the world, they got along wonderfully. Bob died of cancer in 2010.
Mom lived in the Kensington House for 14 years. In 2018, she moved into an apartment with her daughter Barb and Barb’s husband Max in the Avalon apartments in nearby Rockville. Two years later they moved to an apartment in Waldorf, Maryland, to be closer to Barb’s children and grandchildren, then later to a house in the nearby town of La Plata.
Like everyone else on Earth, our family spent most of 2020 in our homes due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, the deadliest since the Spanish Flu pandemic 100 years earlier. Offices, restaurants, movie theaters, and all other such gathering places closed. We went to grocery stores wearing masks and otherwise stayed home. The planned 2020 Thanksgiving gathering at the Outer Banks was canceled. A videoconferencing service called Zoom—previously known by few—became a household word. It wasn’t the same as gathering in person, but it was all we had.
When vaccines became available in early 2021—no vaccine had ever been developed so quickly—we got them as soon as we could. By the end of 2021 we had begun returning to offices, restaurants, and movie theaters, and our family booked a house on the Outer Banks for Thanksgiving. Few family gatherings had ever been so anticipated.
In 2023, Lorraine Durbin held her ninth great-grandchild in her arms. She had already welcomed 23 grandchildren into this world. Mom could by then count 42 direct descendants, each of whom could trace their existence to one afternoon in East St. Louis in 1949, when a young sailor named Bill Durbin went to Jimmy’s Malt Shop in search of a date for the Easter Dance.
In 2024, after six years away from Kensington, Mom, at age 90, decided she wanted to return there for “her last stop,” as she called it. The metaphor was appropriate. The Modena Reserve assisted living facility is on the town railroad tracks, barely a mile from where she had lived all those years in the Kensington House. She moved to the Modena in January 2025. With her apartment window open, when the train roars by, conversation pauses. And Mom smiles.
On my first visit a few weeks after Mom moved to the Modena, she surprised me not at all by sharing that she had already met more than 50 new friends. Confined to a wheelchair, on every visit to the dining room she would roll herself up to a table and introduce herself with a smile. Her new friends and staff soon gave her a nickname: Scooter.
Mom could not be happier at this place, her last stop on a journey lasting now more than nine decades. Nor, despite all she has experienced in this life, could she be more eager to learn new things about her home and neighbors.
“Mike, those are my secrets to life,” she told me. “Joy and curiosity. They get me through every day.”
When it comes to words to live by, one would be hard-pressed to find any wiser than those.
Next: Family Reference
Previous: 25. Kensington
Michael Durbin 