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.