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| Cynthia Lufkin in her Upper West Side apartment in 2008. Photo: Jeffrey Hirsch. |
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| Tuesday, July 9, 2013. Partly sunny, partly cloudy and very warm in New York yesterday, but not as humid as the weekend, with a brief but torrential shower in the early evening which cooled things down, if not off. Cynthia Lufkin. I’ve been putting off writing this since I heard the news last Wednesday afternoon. I’m one of those people that if I put something off long enough, it will go away and I’ll begin to forget I was putting it off. I’ve been putting this off because it was grievous and disturbed me deeply. I feel there is nothing I can add to the situation but can only look for comfort. However, I know I am not alone in feeling this way; and that there are many people out there who want to know and who are thinking about it.
She had fought valiantly and courageously. She had much to live for including her three children, two of whom are still little ones; and a devoted, supportive husband, Dan Lufkin, who had enhanced her life immeasurably in the last decade of her life. These realities must have distressed her even more deeply than the great pain she endured; she knew she was being overtaken and leaving them. I loved Cynthia. We were friends – not close, but good – for almost 20 years. I first met her professionally. She was a young woman newly out of college (Trinity), working in public relations at Tiffany under Fernanda Kellogg; and I had started the Social Diary in Quest magazine. She was one of those women whose charm was her smile and her laughter. Otherwise she was seriously conscientious, as if to make certain that she got something, got everything, right. She was also newly married and forging a professional life in New York as well. That marriage ended a few short years later, right after she gave birth to her daughter Schuyler. The word went around among her friends that she was devastated by her husband’s desire to leave. All dreams she might have had about a future were shattered. She was nonetheless fortunate despite her great disappointment, because she had backbone and possessed the gift of friendship. She was a good friend, and she had friends and a support group here in New York. Her professional life at Tiffany also gave her access to an expansive social life where she could form friendships. As a young married woman, she and her first husband had already become part of the younger set that was, and in some ways still is, identified with social impresario Mark Gilbertson. After her divorce, Cynthia remained active on some of the junior committees on the charity circuit – a kind of volunteering that allows a lot of young people to meet and create friendships. This is where making a social life begins in New York for a lot of newcomers who are enthusiastic and seeking to make a life as members of the community. Cynthia was well suited for it because she was a “joiner” by nature. She liked people and she was easily inclined to participate. Her professional experience also gave her something to bring to the table in party planning and fundraising and entertaining.
Dan was immediately taken with Cynthia. But from her side, despite her natural charm and openness, it was a moment in Cynthia’s life when she was still picking herself up from a serious loss: she wasn’t interested in a new relationship with anybody. She was not a young woman given to illusions or visions of some white knight coming to her rescue. Her focus would be on pulling her life together, and taking care of her infant child as a single mom. Dan Lufkin, however, is a glass half-full man no matter. He pursued her, gently but assiduously. She couldn’t help liking him. But she had a life to work out, and she couldn’t see any man as part of it at that moment. Furthermore he was older, and very wealthy, and had a couple of marriages in his past. However, as she soon learned, youth blessed him. It was a moment when she felt unprepared emotionally. She turned him down the first couple of times he called for a date. The third time she relented, thinking that would at least get him to stop calling. He didn’t. Instead he romanced her despite her doubts. He took her “no” for an answer but continued to pursue her anyway. She liked him. He made her laugh. He was kind and thoughtful. He was fun, and a mature man behind that youthful joie de vivre. On the second or third date he proposed marriage. That kind of shocked her. Although she had an effervescent charm that could have been mistaken for impulsive, she was quite the opposite: levelheaded, responsible and grounded. Doubts or not, those magic powers of persuasion that made Mr. Lufkin a wunderkind in his youth prevailed; not long after she agreed to marriage. She seemed to make the transition to newlywed, wife of a wealthy and influentialman, patiently and prudently, naturally committed to holding on to her own identity. She stayed on at Tiffany and thereafter wrestled for some time about a decision to leave and follow new pursuits. She was cautious. She had now married a dynamic man, an experienced leader in the community, a man of means and an adventuresome curiosity. He was also a man in charge of his life; self-possessed, confident, and worldly. He would be a new, very different experience from her first marriage. There would be a lot to learn and a lot to adjust to. She met the challenge. I don’t know who motivated whom, but together the Lufkins became more active in New York philanthropy and the social life surrounding it. Cynthia took on more committee work. She also became pregnant. Then toward the end of her pregnancy she was diagnosed with breast cancer, It was a very serious case, requiring extensive surgery. The window of opportunity in beating it was narrow. It was decided that she’d have to have the baby prematurely so she could have chemotherapy as soon as possible. It had become a matter of life and death. She did it, and she sailed through her treatment and her recovery to arrive at a clean bill of health.
A few years after the birth of her daughter Aster Lee Lufkin, Cynthia gave birth to a son, Daniel Patrick Lufkin. The Lufkins spent much of their weeks in Connecticut where the children were in school. Never more than two hours away from the city, they continued their involvement in several charities including the American Cancer Society, Evelyn Lauder’s Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the Museum of the City of New York, the Women’s Conservation Committee of the Audubon Society, The Central Park Conservancy, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Care Center, The American Museum of Natural History, to name only a few of their interests. Cynthia and Dan Lufkin became one of the most attractive and sought after couples in New York, and for a number of reasons: both warm and friendly, empathic and philanthropically inclined, they liked people and they were participators. Separately and together they were both gregarious, courteous, gracious, serious about their interests and easy to laugh. Away from their “social life,” Cynthia and Dan were a family of children, dogs (they had three at last count), and friends. As comfortable as they were at fundraisers and black tie benefits and opening night galas, they were just as comfy at home in their jeans and tweeds, dividing their time mainly between Manhattan and Litchfield County. |
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| Her life had changed dramatically after meeting Dan, and it was a good life. I don’t know when she was last diagnosed with the cancer that would take her. I had heard vague references about her state of health in the last year but I am not one to inquire about such things unless there is a way for me to be helpful. Otherwise the most helpful way, in my view, is to keep stlll and follow the lead. I saw Cynthia in the last couple of months at Michael’s where she was lunching with Dan and friends, and at the Audubon Society’s Women in Conservation luncheon. That was only a little more than a month ago, and Cynthia was her warm and smiling self. There will be a memorial for Cynthia Lufkin at the Dune Church in Southampton this coming Friday afternoon. The church is where Dan and Cynthia were married and where one of their children was baptized. Cynthia’s concern for now would be the grief of her children and for Dan who was her rock on what turned out to be a difficult and challenging path of life. |
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