Everyone has amazing stories. In each day a person will encounter countless other people in their cars, at work, at the store, on the street, in the parking lot. Several weeks ago I took a bus from Bakersfield to the L.A. airport. The three hour ride wound up and down through the mountains with scenery that I found more fascinating than my book. Still more fascinating, though, was the conversation between two women across the aisle a seat in front of me. Sound carries in vehicles and once two people begin gabbing those adjacent are immediate spectators to the whims of the entire dialogue. I listened unwillingly to the stories of two lives that had only encountered one another that day. And what I found most amazing was the willingness to share the most private details.

The woman on the left talked about her failed marriage and dating her next door neighbor for over ten years before marrying him. One of her daughters received a full scholarship to college and found tremendous success in the financial world with her impressive computer skills. Another daughter moved to the area, Bakersfield, so the woman could be closer to her grandchild. The most interesting part came later. The woman began talking about her son, a diabetic who refused to acknowledge the warning signs of his illness for some time. He dated a woman who dumped him once he exhibited some ambition and stopped allowing her to take care of him. He worked long hours at a nameless job that I don't remember. Hair began thinning, then falling out. He lost weight, a pleasant change that his coworkers noticed, though their polite smiles turned to curious stares and muted comments when slight jaundice set in and his cheeks sunk. Concerned at his own appearance, he made an appointment to see a doctor, only to discover his health insurance would not cover it. The doctor gave him a referral to an M.D. covered by the son's plan, but he did not call the referral number. His appetite left him and the little food he ingested quickly found its way out of his body. At the end of a work week he felt bad enough, and had endured enough health-related questions from his coworkers and enough trips to the bathroom to make an appointment with the new doctor.

On Friday the son returned home late, leaving his keys on an end table near the door as he entered his apartment. At some point he removed two substantial wads of cash from his pockets and put one next to his keys and one on a nightstand near his bed. That night he made several more trips to the bathroom, the frequent flushing drawing the ire of a neighbor who shared a wall. Like always, he went to bed nude and managed a few hours of intermittent sleep. He woke early the next morning in staggering pain and he found it nearly impossible to walk to the bathroom. Something was very wrong. He decided to take himself to the hospital. He put on underwear and stumbled around for his jeans and perhaps something else. On his way to the bathroom or his bedroom he collapsed.

Three days later a step-father placed a call to his mother shortly after she arrived for work. The woman on the left of the bus had stormed right through the story without crying or pausing for breath or in search of the right words. She retold her son's death in a manner almost alarmingly calm.

The step-father insisted his wife get in the truck and he started driving back to their house, but she sensed something and made him pull over. She asked if something had happened to her scholarship-winning daughter who then lived alone at college. Her husband and former neighbor said if that had been the case he would not have been able to drive at all (here the woman stopped and said that the new husband had served as a surrogate father to this aforementioned daughter).

After the investigation and autopsy the professionals determined that he had fallen into a diabetic coma and died, finding nearly nothing in his intestines. His mother, still sitting on the left of the bus, her audience captivated (and me too), deduced that her son had tried to get dressed to go to the hospital but succumbed. She spoke of the several hundred dollars on the tables as evidence that no one broke in or robbed him, though his front door was left slightly ajar.

Here she paused briefly, then continued. She did not mention the funeral, however she let out other horrifying details. She said that she had the body cremated and spread his ashes over the ocean and kept some, which sit in an urn on her mantlepiece. The ex-girlfriend, apparently more distraught than anyone else over the death, received her selection of the son's things, including his truck. The rest of the unclaimed items were dropped off at a shelter or given away to neighbors.

She ended the story shortly before we arrived at the airport and as it wrapped up the two women thanked each other and traded business cards. Naturally, they discovered upon exiting that they were flying the same airline.

I spoke to no one save to mutter a few pleasantries and salutations. I managed to dismiss the woman's story and lose myself in my book and when I arrived back home I promptly shoved the entire strange episode aside.

But today it crept back up on my conscious and I am once again bewildered at the lives people live, the stories they tell, the secrets they harbor, and the pain they endure. Maybe every ten years one should sit down and write their story as best as they can recall it, speaking it into a tape recorder or video recorder if need be.

Too much happens to us not to record some of it before more happens that makes us forget the other stuff again.