On a rural road during one of the meandering drives they enjoyed taking together, a highway sign prompted Jeff Truesdell to pull over and insist his husband pose for a photo.
Jeff was always on the lookout for tourist traps to take pictures of his muse with. There he is with an oversized buffalo, or a gigantic Fred Flintstone. Here he is at a ball game, or looking contemplative at an art gallery.
Usually his husband would go along with it, and other times he would say, "I'm not getting out of the car. Take your damn picture."
But this day, Sept. 14, 2018, Jeff spotted a sign pointing to the tiny community of Nelson, Missouri, and was able to convince his husband Nelson Figueroa that the obvious joke was worth a quick picture. They would go on to take two photos then drive towards the town for another, this time next to a welcome sign that boasts a population of 192 residents.
Like any town of that size, it exists to most as a place one stumbles upon, drives through and forgets.
Jeff returns alone to Nelson, Mo., in 2022. He wanders the community carrying with him a blown-up photo of Nelson's bearded visage, and positions the 2D-figure in front of the town hall, the water tower, the post office, the cemetery.
No one greets him, and he's thankful for it. How could he begin to explain why he's there? How can he ever describe his grief to a stranger?
Exceptionally unexceptional
Jeff was sure Nelson was preening for him.
It was 1988 and Jeff was on a date with someone else at an outdoor patio bar in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., when he spotted Nelson. Ten years older than Jeff, Nelson stood out with his then-dark beard and muscular physique. Out of the corner of his eye Jeff watched Nelson for nearly an hour, and thought Nelson might be trying to get his attention.
Then Nelson approached, because by coincidence he knew Jeff's date. When they were alone, the pair exchanged numbers and spent the following weeks chatting for hours at a time. One month after they met, Nelson and Jeff had their first date. Six months later, they moved in together.
Jeff soon fell in love with Nelson's personality and quirks. Nelson started every morning with a bout of up to 20 sneezes in a row. A would-be travel agent who couldn't read a map and preferred to stay home, Nelson still went along whenever Jeff, an investigative reporter, dragged him out for trips to the theatre (Nelson's favourite play was Mamma Mia!) or baseball games (Nelson adopted Jeff's St. Louis Cardinals as his own).
Nelson could be generous and emotional. He made choices in Jeff's interest — it was Nelson who insisted they relocate to St. Louis in 2007 to take care of Jeff's aging parents, and he adopted Tico, a terrier-chihuahua that belonged to Jeff's mother after she moved into a nursing home. He could also rage like a hurricane if he felt either one of them had been wronged.
They relished leading what Jeff describes as an exceptionally unexceptional life. They bought groceries together. They did their laundry together. They made meals together. They became an old married couple, albeit only in spirit.
Jeff and Nelson talked about marriage but there was never a proposal, only an unacknowledged agreement that it would happen when the time was right. That time came in in 2015 when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. At that point Jeff and Nelson had already been together for 27 years and could have married in states like Massachusetts that legalized unions prior to the Supreme Court's ruling.
But it was important to them to marry in Missouri, which in 2004 had voted in a referendum to restrict marriage to unions of a man and woman.
So they waited for the Supreme Court's intervention, and marked Nelson's favourite holiday by getting married at St. Louis City Hall on the morning of Dec. 31, 2015. At noon they flew to New York City and celebrated being newlyweds in Times Square as the New Year's Eve ball dropped.
They committed to spending the rest of their lives together. They would get seven more years.
Pins on a map
Search for cities named Nelson on a Google Map and you'll likely land first on Canada's Nelson.
It's the most populated Nelson in North America. It has a nearby ski hill, a cupful of coffee shops and a bridge advertised as orange but is partially pink. You may have heard Steve Martin shot a movie there once, and if you hadn't then Nelson would love to tell you about it.
But it's not the only Nelson. The United States of America has 21 states with communities or areas named Nelson, although it is arguably a little more or less depending on the source and your own definition of whether or not a place exists.
There's Nelson, Arizona, which has 249 residents, and Nelson, Oklahoma, which is actually just an empty field next to the Nelson Fire Department. Nelson, Nevada, is a community that is often mistaken for a nearby ghost town, also called Nelson, but with just 22 residents will probably be a ghost town someday as well. Virginia has a town called Nelson, a county called Nelson, and another town called Nelsonia, and none of them are located near to one another.
Neighbouring states have their own Nelsons. There's one in Illinois, another in Wisconsin that sits on the Mississippi River across the border from Minnesota, which also has its own Nelson. Other Nelsons are less towns and more places where people live. In Montana, three houses and a Nelson Road arguably counts as a Nelson, and the same could be said about a cluster of homes around a Nelson Creek in Washington State.
The first Nelson that Jeff visits outside of Missouri is in Georgia. North of Atlanta with a population of 1,145, Nelson doesn't present as a liberal place open to the LGBTQ2S community. It's a reliably Republican stronghold that voted for Donald Trump in November's presidential election. In 2013 the town made headlines when its city council approved a bylaw requiring every family own a gun and ammunition, only for it to be shot down by a legal challenge later that year.
When Jeff arrives in November 2022, he doesn't advertise why he's carrying photos of his husband around town. But at the city hall he's greeted by a local historian and councillor who give him a tour. They tell him the town was built on a marble mine that operated for over a century until 2002. They invite Tico in from the cold fall weather to pose in the council chamber.
It was a warm welcome, and afterwards Jeff decides to write letters to his hosts to let them know who his Nelson was. Neither reply, but Jeff isn't offended. Instead he's encouraged to visit another Nelson.
His next stop is Nelson, New Hampshire, where for over 40 years a public contra dance is held every Monday night and beginners are encouraged to join in. There Jeff swings arm-in-arm with strangers and, with some of Nelson's ashes in his pocket, relishes one last dance with his husband.
The lie he told
Who was Nelson Figueroa? For many years Jeff thought he knew. Then in 2014 Nelson received a letter from a man claiming to be his father, and Jeff realized there was a history to Nelson he'd never been privy to.
When they met, Nelson told Jeff he was from the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco. The truth, it turned out, was he had been born in Havana to a Cuban mother and Puerto Rican father. They divorced when Nelson was still young, and after Fidel Castro took power in 1959 Nelson's mother decided to bring him to the United States.
They fled Cuba in 1961 and lived among other exiles in Miami who believed Castro would eventually be ousted. Nelson never returned to Cuba and vowed he wouldn't as long as it remained under Communist rule. But Jeff also came to believe Nelson didn't want to be associated with America's negative image of Cuba. In the years after Nelson's mother died in 1985, he spent his inheritance travelling on weekends and lying about his history. That was who Nelson was when, in 1988, he met Jeff.
Nelson lied to Jeff about his past for 26 years until his 94-year-old father wrote asking to see him one more time before he died. Jeff encouraged him to go, and when the pair arrived in Miami they found an old man thrilled and ready to accept Nelson.
"This was a man we discovered was alert and mischievous and playful and physically able, and all the things that you would have expected and wanted for someone to be," says Jeff. "I just watched the hole in Nelson's heart fill, a hole that I don't think he realized he had."
Nelson's father lived another four years, and before his death spoke of his decision to stay behind in Cuba, his pain over losing his son, his memories of Old Cuba.
Nelson too became more forward about his past. He told Jeff about growing up as a child in Nueva Gerona, Cuba, his passionate views on the country's politics, and his regret over not telling Jeff the truth when they first met.
Jeff forgave him, easily and with understanding. “He had no way of knowing that I'd be the one who would stick around for 34 years.”
On May 14, 2022, the couple were at home when Nelson began to feel unwell. They discussed visiting an emergency room, but Nelson decided instead to see if a shower might help. Jeff left to buy groceries for dinner, and when he returned he found Nelson still on their couch. He'd suffered a heart attack, and died that evening at the age of 72.
'I'm so glad I touched you'
Two months after Nelson's death, Jeff met a Missouri man who found a unique way to make peace with his loss.
In 2020, Dan Bryan watched his 16-year-old son Ethan play baseball one last time before he was killed later that day in a car accident. Inspired by a book about playing catch with strangers, Dan began meeting with a new person every day for a game of catch using Ethan's baseball and glove. In doing so, as Jeff wrote in a piece for People Magazine, Dan found his own grief could be used as a connection to keep the memory of Ethan alive and help others heal as well.
After writing the story, Jeff returned to Dan for his own game of catch and wondered if there might be a similar way to honour Nelson.
The answer was on his phone, where pictures of Nelson visiting Nelson, Mo., had reappeared. In November 2022, carrying about 10 life-sized photos of Nelson glued to cardboard, Jeff returned to the rural town with an idea.
“I thought to myself, if Nelson can't be my literal muse in life, he can still be my muse in death.”
Over the last two years, Jeff has visited seven Nelsons including Nelson, B.C., this September. At each destination he dutifully poses his Nelson at local landmarks, but Jeff has also begun speaking with local residents about their town as well as their own experiences with grief.
On some trips there's not much to see — all Jeff found when he visited Nelson, Kansas was a cemetery and empty farmland. Data from the 2020 U.S. census shows many Nelsons on the map are gradually losing their populations (the highway sign showing 128 residents living in Nelson, Mo. needs to be updated to just 99 people).
But in other stops Jeff has found history, stories, life.
In Nelson, New York, ironically named for the British admiral Horatio Nelson who died two years before the town's founding and, controversially in the U.S., well after the end of the Revolutionary War, Jeff meets a man who has collected 9,000 Coke bottles. His prized bottle is broken, but it's one of a kind.
“While in many ways these are dying towns, they are nonetheless full of people who celebrate a pride of place and are very invested in who they are and where they live and then what that life represents.”
He's also started asking people how they live with their own losses. One woman who found her husband dead while they were out for a nature walk says she still sees him every day. Another says she regularly speaks to her sister, or perhaps the memory of her sister, who died in a car accident
Unexpected human connections continue. After his trip to Georgia, a local art gallery sends Jeff a painting it commissioned as a gift for him. In Nelson, B.C., Jeff sits down for a beer and finds a bar of strangers asking about his photos.
In Nelson, Nebraska, Jeff visits a diner where he overhears a waitress complaining about immigrants. When she serves Jeff, she advises him not to drive through an area recently devastated by tornadoes. “What do you think those tornadoes mean?" she asks. "Do you think we need to start living our lives better?”
He doesn't reply, but before he leaves the waitress insists on giving him a small plastic cross with a red ribbon. Jeff thanks her, leaves and drives for 13 miles before turning back to the diner.
"You were kind enough to give me a gift, and I wanted to give you a gift," he says to her.
"I wasn't sure what you meant when you said, ‘do we need to start living our lives better?' But I'm here on a mission. I'm visiting your town. I'm celebrating a love and a man who I had for 34 years, and I don't think we could possibly have been living our lives any better than we did. I just wanted to lay that on your heart.'
The waitress smiles and reaches out for his elbow. "I'm so glad I touched you," she says.
"I'm so glad I touched you," he replies, then leaves.
These stories are gradually being collected in a book Jeff is writing tentatively titled The Road to Nelson. He doesn't know if he'll visit every Nelson, and the trips can be a struggle. Tico died of cancer earlier this year, leaving Jeff alone on the road with only a cutout of Nelson on the dashboard to keep him company.
But Jeff has also endured. He visits friends and stays social. He travels and makes new memories. His grief remains, but it doesn't consume him.
“When I find myself dipping into the dark, I know that I can call up a Nelson town on the computer, and I begin to do the research, and I begin to conduct the interviews, and I start reaching out to people, and it just brings me back.”
Then it is onto the next town, the next dot on a map, where Nelson is waiting for him.
