Lifelong Marguerite resident Kenneth Pollard has had a year to learn how to live without his wife, Elizabeth, who fell to her death in a sinkhole on the outskirts of the Unity village.
Though one of his children, Axel, moved in with the 75-year-old and good neighbors have pitched in — sending extra food for Thanksgiving, for instance — it hasn’t been easy.
“I’ve been sick for a while,” he told TribLive on Monday, a day before the first anniversary of 64-year-old Elizabeth’s fatal fall as she searched for a missing pet cat.
“About a week or so after she died, I started having health problems,” he said. They include a leg condition that has affected his mobility.
“I’m 10 years older than her,” Pollard said of his late wife. “I figured I was going to go before her, but it didn’t happen that way.”
Elizabeth Pollard went missing the night of Dec. 2, 2024. Pollard was shocked when he learned that crews were searching for his missing wife in a sinkhole. She had fallen into a hole that opened into an abandoned underground mine behind Monday’s Union Restaurant along Marguerite Road. Her body was found the morning of Dec. 6.
“Things like that happen, but I never thought it would happen to me,” he said.
Though he knew about Marguerite’s underground mining history, it was hard for him to realize a sinkhole had taken his wife and that it had happened near the restaurant.
Pollard said he’d never encountered any problem walking on the restaurant grounds in the past.
“This is the first time I can remember a mine opening up around here,” he said. “When we were kids, we used to run up and down the hills around here. We never thought there was a coal mine underground that’s going to let go.”
Pollard understands only too well the concern other Marguerite residents continue to have about the possibility of additional sinkholes and mine subsidence occurring in the community.
But he’s resigned to that risk.
“If it’s going to let go, it’s going to let go,” he said.
Pollard has been retired for eight years from a series of occupations that included working at a Greensburg shoe repair shop and making deliveries for local banks.
Among the memories of his nearly 40-year marriage he most cherishes are the vacations he finally was able to take with Elizabeth to West Virginia.
Thinking about her death brings to mind other loved ones he has lost — including his son, Brandon, who was 28 when he died in January 2024, and his mother, who died just weeks before Elizabeth.
“My family is starting to disappear,” he said.
With his wife’s death, he said, “If somebody asks me about it, it’s been long enough now that it doesn’t bother me.”
But, he added, “I try not to think about it.”
He still lives with the regret he didn’t convince his wife to give up her search for the missing cat that night.
He recalled, “I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. The cat will come home; they always do.’
“It didn’t come home that time, and she didn’t either.”
