a friend since childhood, mine not his

This week it was Rep. I was stunned. He's old enough to die. We all knew it was coming, but he wasn't the dying type, ever. In his seventies still, he had cleared trails for Mohonk Mountain House, liked working by himself but if you caught him sometime, like a wood spirit accidentally caught in a hunter's trap, he could charm with his West Virginia accent just slight enough for you to understand all the words. Like Stein in Lord Jim, he was ready to leave this all, ready for some time, I'm told. Was he, too, disllusioned by what he had seen, or was it some interior deconstruction of mind and will like so many others of Conrad's protagonists. And do I keep going back to modern literature for examples because that's all I read all those years, or because that's all those writers wrote about, how we live toward dying. That's where the story ends, with Stein among his butterflies. So what happens to Patsy? From the time I was so short that my neck hurt trying to look at all the grownups at the party (I think it was a small wedding reception for the two of them), they were Patsy and Rep. That's who I visited on my way to the Hudson River where my father finally built his last house. The stop at Shale Hill Farm was a relief after the effort of looking at disappointment in his eyes. Whatever disappointment was in Rep's eyes was part of the mystery that made him fascinating, and anyhow it wasn't about me, and Patsy was far too busy cooking at the counters she specially installed for the tall woman she was. Cooking, canning, drying herbs, later her garlic recipes, she took care of Rep and whoever walked in their door. She was down home, her accent was Virginian and also soft, and there were books everywhere. They strayed out of piles in the livingroom and down from shelves so high that there was actually a ladder although you would never have thought to call the room a library. It was a room for lounging comfortably and having stiff drinks. If you wandered out into the barn, Rep always gave the same tour and told you the names of all the animals, mostly chickens but a few riding horses. He was as proud of that barn as Patsy was of her evergrowing garden. And now she has to leave that all, not in the Conradian sense but very simply, sadly, sell her home and find somewhere to go. It is the new story that we shall hear over and over now. The house is too much for her to manage and besides she should be somewhere where strangers can help her with the things that she will need help with. Goodbye Shale Hill Farm, goodbye Patsy, goodbye Dr. Reppert. I will visit all of you again and again for as long as my memory holds. That's a promise.

Despite the absence of an obituary in the Times and of visitors at the hospital kind enough to take him in for those last months, we all knew that Ray was dying, and he left lists of people for his two chosen gatekeepers to call after he died. It must have been very hard for them, closest friend Lillian and more recently reclaimed friend, Sue. When Sue called me I could hardly ask her what she thought about hope. She had too much of her own exhaustion and more names on the list after mine. But she never used the word. I didn't either, nor did I think it when I was listening to her, or for that matter to Ray. None of us used it in either its positve or negative form. Nor did the old student of mine who called after years of silence to let me know that Ray was dying. So why does it turn up all the time in Hospice work? For one thing, there have to be people who want someone to live longer and therefore want to believe he will. I believe that none of us wanted what Ray so clearly did not want, to continue in an existence which did not allow for taking care of himself and doing the things he loved to do. He could not give up that image of man about town, that wonderfully complicated joie de vivre of a converted Manhattanite which he gave of so generously to anyone he entertained. For him entertaining was just another of the burrough's one-way streets. We did not entertain him. That was not allowed, and when it happened rarely, because someone invited him home for dinner or to a wedding reception, he was clearly uncomforatble in the role of guest.. And yet this is a partial picture, isn't it, because he was invited for weekends in the country and he was a boarder at Lillian's for all the years he commuted to Boston, and I know nothing of those places. I was a protege. I am here in the role of one of Henry James's narrators. I know what I saw and what I was told, and if you can look over my shoulder and see more, that's what makes reading limited narration exquisite.

The Ray we all knew should have had one hell of a memorial service, in Riverside Church (that's the biggest, I think, that isn't Roman). Celebrity spotting would have been a given, and the people who spoke would have spoken beautifully if you could have heard their words through their tears. They would have been well-dressed New Yorkers, nothing flashy though, and a few Virginians, family come north for the occasion. The guestbook might have been auctioned off later by Glenn Horowitz along with the whole collection filling bookcases, solid under the bed, and sometimes stacks by a table, first editions, galleys, all signed, like a guestbook after all. And the quilt his mother made for him, always on the bed which had been raised to permit more book storage, perhaps even the tiny needlepoint pillow with an "R" surrounded by rosettes which I gave him on my first visit there. I swear I'm not making any of this up so far, although it's possible there may have been some flashy dressers that I didn't know he knew.

I didn't know how alone he felt until one fall afternoon I was walking across town in the 20's and saw him waiting at a bus stop. This is Ray Roberts, who always took cabs when he wasn't walking by preference, or so the myth goes. He always found you a cab to send you home at the end of a perfect evening and they were always perfect evenings. I digress. It was Ray. He stood there in his raincoat, shoulders hunched and head forward as if against the rain but there wasn't any rain. He looked so damnably alone. I didn't go over. And I never told him what I saw, that reality of him when no one was looking. It made me so goddamn sad because I knew there was nothing I could do about it. It wasn't like the pulmonary fibrosis pain, the kind of pain that my credentials could deny out of existence. Once upon a time, I thought that I could enter the aloneness and then it would no longer be, by definition. You have to be very young to believe that, and you can't be up against a pro. The once great love of my life was beyond question a pro, and he was for that matter beyond questioning.

Preamble: In Memoriam R.A.R.

He was afraid. Not of what happens after death, which he believed was only biological. He was afraid of the moment when biology stopped his body, afraid of some unthinkable pain that would occur at just that last moment. He did not choose to rage. The doctors at a Bronx hospital simply increased the morphine and he slept into what we call Death. I promised him it would be that way, but I don't know. I only know what monitors report, and they show no measurement of anything like the pain he feared.

The cancer docs ask us what they can do, about their patients' fear, about their own failure of hope. And is that what hope is? The belief that doctors can heal? Heal a body that belongs to this illness called dying, that comes in so many different forms we can't name them all?