from Possession by A. S. Byatt--

It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or sex. . . . They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading. . . .

[Yet] now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark--readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.

* * *

I woke this morning feeling, for the first time in weeks, rested, alert, focused, calm. The sensation is so new that I can hardly stop marveling over it. Certainly I have been working steadily toward this end--setting traps for sleep and solace--yet a generalized hopelessness has shadowed my efforts, an expectation of failure: similar to the way in which, when I'm really sick, I can no longer picture health.

But in fact the traps I've been setting seem to have worked. I am better: fully rested, mostly over my cold. My sap is running again, reviving the vigors of mind and body but also the silly dogged optimism that I have somehow managed to tote around for much of my life.

* * *

Outside the sky is barely blue, and a pale crescent moon floats among wisps of moving cloud. T has just headed out to take photos, the cat has just headed in to crunch up his breakfast, and I, like a fat spider, am sitting in my couch corner thinking about books, thinking about warmth, thinking about Ray's tragicomic playlist, thinking about the swirls of friendship and time, and about my faithful sons, and about this long sweet unstructured day that lies ahead of me . . . thinking also, with gratitude, of my eagerness to enjoy it.

I grew up in a glass-half-empty household. Always, fear and dread; always, an assumption that life is out to do us wrong: "Why bother? Why get my hopes up? No one cares. The deck is stacked against me. Let me wallow in my failures." Et cetera.

It's notable how hard my sister and I have resisted that state of mind, how appalled we are when we find ourselves slipping back into the mire. We share a horror.

* * *

I'm not sure if writing that essay about my history with Ray was a deliberate element of my "set a trap for recovery" plan. It's hard to tell with writing. I resort to words so automatically; they are what I do; they are my frame, day by day, decade by decade. Writing isn't therapy; it's greed, an obsession with making.

Still, I try to say what I see. What I feel. Even when I'm lying, as I often am. Though I don't think I was lying in that essay.

* * *

To go back to the Byatt quotation: the writer, too, has moments, when "every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark." What melodrama in that claim! But writing--and reading, and sex, and long-acquainted love, and dear friendship . . . and food, too, and making a garden, and listening to music, and also grief: these glories of body and mind and heart, these sentimental arcs, these greeds and ecstasies . . .  Why else do we live, if not to leap into their arms again and again and again and again?

So far this day is performing exactly as I'd hoped it would: a slow 6 a.m. wakeup after mostly unbroken sleep; air filled with quiet rain; a cup of hot strong coffee on the table; a wood fire slowly beginning to catch in the stove; my dear one upstairs, not rushing off to work but sleeping for as long as his body needs sleep; the white cat curled up next to me on the couch.

Saturday-morning dreamland . . . thank you for arriving on cue.

I don't have plans, other than letting the weekend do with me what it will. T and I might go to a movie, we might wander into town, we might occupy ourselves at home, we might go for a walk, we might do something useful, we might not. Mostly all we want is to be alone together and to not be running on anyone's else's schedule. My little cold is mostly gone, and T never caught it. Now, if we could only vanquish this bone-weariness, we could step onto the holiday train with a bit more enthusiasm. I am not excited about the holidays. I'm longing to stay home, but I have to travel. I despise shopping, yet I have to shop. I love making the big meals, but I don't get to make the big meals. Such is our life, but at least we have this weekend.

Meanwhile, odd poetry-biz stuff has been bubbling up around me, seemingly without my volition. First, there was that little review in the Boston Globe. Now a Massachusetts-based TV producer wants to feature me on her show, called Write Now, which is mildly syndicated around the state. A festival organizer reached out to invite me to take part in an on-stage dialogue this spring. I did no work for any of this stuff . . . the emails just show up in my inbox. I feel a bit like seawater, washing back and forth over pebbles. I am bemused, but I guess I am willing.

The fire in the stove has fully caught now, flames greedily licking the firebox, crackle of logs, low roar of heat, the click and snap of iron expanding . . . How I love a wood fire. Watching it, I feel tension leach out of my bones, feel my muscles relax, soften.

I am still reading zero news. I do not watch any television or listen to any radio, other than occasional sporting events. On Thursday, talking with my poet friends, we discussed what to do next, and all of us, as a unit, agreed that the community would have to be our mission. So after I nurse myself back to stability, I am going to track down some regular local volunteer work--soup kitchen, food pantry, refugee shelter, whatever makes sense. The resistance starts at home.

I know these weeks of deliberate self-protection have also been necessary. Yet it feels good, slightly good, to have reached the stage of figuring out a next step, at least as regards my private politics. What is my purpose on earth? Loving my work, loving my people, loving my place. Putting words to that love.

I woke up to rain, rattling, swirling against panes and roof--the first real rain we've had in months, and it's supposed to continue all day and night and into tomorrow. It is a beautiful sound, even better because I'm not driving north or south or east or west. I'm staying home, under my own lamp, beside my own fire.

Gradually sleep has been chipping away at the deep exhaustion. The little head cold hangs on, in a small way, but my body is finding its rhythms again: walking, working, lifting, balancing.

Last night I went out to write, and that, too, was a rest and a release--eating chicken soup with friends, then snatching words out of the air, another step toward regaining my lurching sturdiness, the unpredictable predictability that seems to be my natural habitat.

All week long Tom and I have been craning toward this weekend: "We'll be alone, we can do whatever we want . . . " I have no idea what reality will ensue, but the anticipation has been a tonic in itself.

In short, I am trudging through the border country that is convalescence. I am taking shelter, out of the rain.

Those metaphors look pompous and dumb, written down. Still, they feel true. There is a space between grief and no-grief--at times a broad and vacant DMZ, at others a narrow winding track among the hills. 

**

While I'm thinking of it, I should mention that I've got a new class posted in the Poetry Kitchen. The participants in the class I taught a couple of weeks ago asked me to run another revision weekend, and this is it. However, you don't need to have attended the first one to attend the second. As of this morning, there are only two spaces left. So if you're interested, sign up quickly.

I woke up this morning feeling that I had finally reentered a space of quiet. After close to three weeks of turmoil--including three weekends spent either on the road or in class, including two weekday overnights to Monson, including death and election and horrid aftermath--I have finally lurched back into my own house and am here to stay . . . for a few days. A weekend without teaching or an absurd travel schedule or a funeral or a looming election; a weekend without demands: I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to this.

Of course, rest will be evanescent as we'll be on the road again next week, driving south on Thanksgiving morning. But something is better than nothing, and nothing is what we've had for too long.

Today: A walk, a small editing project, a poem draft. Housework, laundry, a haircut. Chicken soup simmering on the stove. A night out with the writers.

A book, a warm coat. Rain and a brisk wind. Day as plainsong.

And here I sit beside the window, staring out into the blue-black morning of Monson, Maine. I'm happy to report that the little cold has morphed into an even littler cold, though it could easily have done otherwise. Thus, I am sort of well rested, sort of ready to step into the classroom, and this feels like success.

In a few minutes, the general store will open and I'll step across the street to fetch my coffee and yogurt. Meanwhile, lemony streaks hem the fading night sky; log trucks mutter down the road; the bare tree branches are pencil scratches.

In this stray moment between dawn and day, my thoughts feel drained of color. Yet today's class will be all about details: creating images, tracing images, conjuring up a dense materiality in words. I'm curious to see what my pen will make of this. Nothing, maybe. Or something strange and wonderful.

I woke up with a little cold--tiny sore throat, sour mouth, both very minor, definitely not Covid, not nearly severe enough to cancel class for, presumably linked to travel and being overtired, will probably be gone by tomorrow when I have to teach: but still, they're just one more blah to add to the chain of blah. I've been trying to hype my enthusiasm about driving three hours this afternoon in my great "new" car--new brakes, new rocker panels, and now a fabulous new exhaust system and shiny new catalytic converter--but my enthusiasm is not falling for the hype. No surprise, but I do need to snap myself out of this state of mind and refocus myself on my work.

What I really mean is refocus myself on different work because I've been completely absorbed in writing a very painful essay-memoir about Ray and our times--painful because it's been complicated to write, painful because it's been like picking a scab. But it's done now, I think. It it took me into some shadowy places. It had to be written. And now it is sitting on my desktop asking, "What next?"

I have no answer to that yet. What I have is a tiny sore throat and a sour mouth, a day of obligation and driving, the fear that I will never again sleep purely and simply.

But I'll go for a walk this morning. I'll figure things out--figure something out, or let the breeze do it for me . . . watch a bird or two, watch a dog, maybe begin to watch myself.

I write to you from home. We got in last night about 7:15; dropped our stuff, then immediately walked around the corner so we could get drinks and dinner before the restaurant stopped serving. Probably it would have been wiser to stay home and heat up leftovers, but wise hasn't felt like a coherent philosophy this weekend.

We did go straight to bed as soon as we came home again. That was as wise as we could get.

Anyway. Here we are at Monday. Tomorrow I've got to drive to Monson, so today is my day for figuring out how to function. Groceries, laundry, a walk . . . I haven't glanced at the calendar. I have no idea what other obligations lurk there.

Forgive this rattled note. Tired doesn't begin to describe our state of mind.

As expected, it's been an insanely exhausting weekend.

Yesterday morning the alarm went off at 3 a.m., and we began our long trek: a 4:15 bus to Boston, a 7 a.m. bus to NYC, then straight to Brooklyn, a quick meal, and then two and a half hours standing in the blocked-off street beside Commonwealth Bar talking to people I hadn't seen for 40 years, or had never met before, or had seen but under wonky circumstances, or had just seen a couple of months ago when I was in New York, or talked to all of the time every chance I could get, or were my own beloveds . . . and this was punctuated by a bagpiper playing "Amazing Grace," and Ray's impeccable playlists unrolling from the speakers, and a bright blue sky, and sudden gusts of tears . . .

Afterward our posse gathered--Tom and I, both boys and their partners--and trudged the long blocks to Paul's apartment, where we sat together and mulled things over as Paul whipped up chili and cornbread and salad; we wondered what we might do all evening . . .

And then my phone buzzed and it was Steve, Ray's husband, asking us to meet him at his apartment, so our posse said yes and rode the train to Gowanus, and when we arrived, we realized that this wasn't the larger, multitudinous gathering we'd pictured but the apartment was full of Steve's family and Ray's family and two lone guys from foreign lands, and now us, which was the most touching thing that had happened to us all day because, as we said afterward, a person can feel like family but the family doesn't necessarily see things that way, nor should they . . .

But there we were, sitting and standing around amidst a shifting collection of brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, everyone's heart on their sleeve, everyone eager to take comfort, ask questions, make jokes, tell the funny stories: it was the sweetest thing, and we were so tired, but so was every person in the room, weary and open-hearted . . .

And now here I am, still so tired, not well slept but sort of slept, lying in my son's living room listening to the traffic on the highway and the subway rumbling underneath the street and the whoop-whoop of a passing cop car, girding myself for the next things: breakfast with the boys and their partners, then splitting away again, back into Manhattan, back onto the bus, the long drive back to Boston, then on to Maine, and our house, and Monday morning glowering ahead of us like a piece of dented sheet metal . . .

Friday. Recycling day, leaf-raking day, packing-for-New-York-in-the-smallest-bag-possible day. This will be a dreadfully compressed trip for us, but at least the boys and their partners will have an actual weekend to hang out together--a glint of cheer amid the sorrow.

I did manage to get stuff done yesterday: returned an editing project to the press, wrote a blurb for a poetry collection, finished my Monson plans, formulated my next Zoom class, plus walked to the dentist, did the housework, proofed a kid's grad-school application, probably did other chores that I can't even remember now . . . and then in the evening I went out to write, which was such sweet relief after a long and sucky fortnight of not being together. For some reason everyone was writing really well; the drafts were just pouring out; it was tonic to be sitting in that room feeling the sparks fly. I love my writing group.

So today I have a poem draft to look at and I have my essay to look at. As far as I can recall, I have no other pressing desk obligations, nothing that can't wait till next week. There are worse ways to enter into a weekend of hard things.

You likely won't hear from me again till Monday. We'll be leaving the house tomorrow at 3:30 a.m., and wifi on the bus is always wonky. Sunday morning I might have a chance to write, but I also might not: we'll be crammed into my son's tiny apartment, and I can't be sure I'll have any waking moments to myself.

Then again I could surprise you, and myself, with a rambling picaresque narrative of my travels. We'll see what happens.

The days this week have been cold and windy and bright--late autumn in its glory, lungs filling with breeze, hair blown into rat tails, warm boots kicking leaves.

In the garden kale reigns supreme, but the tough late-season herbs also hang on: sage, thyme, oregano. I'm still cutting snippets of mint, posies of cilantro and parsley. Even the salad greens linger: more bitter than in their youth but still lovely with balsamic and feta, apples and fennel, roasted carrots and red onion.

In the kitchen I turn out pumpkin pudding with hard sauce; spaghetti squash with butter, parmesan, and cilantro; roasted kale and cherry tomato salads. I carry firewood and empty ashes and scour the glass door of the woodstove until it gleams. I arrange bouquets of dried grasses and hydrangea blooms in vases all over the house. I take care. It is a thing I know how to do. It is useless it is not useless it is useless it is not useless.

Yesterday I cranked through an editing job. I readied myself for next week's Monson class. I answered emails and filled in dates on my calendar and went to the gas station and lugged returnables to the bottle bank, and the essay sat quietly at home, breathing to itself.

This morning: dentist. This afternoon: work phone call. In between: mopping and vacuuming and toilet scrubbing and laundry. The usual slog of obligation. 

What does self-preservation mean, and is it selfish? The answer is "depends," of course. Do no harm is a sweet thought, but we all do harm. Every time we buy a cup of Dunkin' coffee sourced from Central American plantation conglomerates that exploit their laborers and their environment. Every time we set a match to a twig,

The tentacles of evil strangle our good intentions.

Still, there is this day, this house, this body. An essay waits for me. Tonight I'll go out to write poems for the first time in weeks. And, oh, these bright, bright days of wind and sun.

I worked all of yesterday morning on my essay, which continues to be unwieldy and disjointed but at least there is now more raw material to consider.

It's been so long since I've written willingly in this form. Outside of a few small review-essays, I've produced nothing but poems for more than a decade. So there's no sense of ease in pouring out my material. All I can do is acknowledge a need to write prose and trust that some version of synthesis will happen in its own time and manner.

I feel like Gretel in the witch's oven; I feel like a beat-up old mixtape that's been rattling around under the front seat of a car for time immemorial. I'm swamped in responsibilities I didn't know I had. Yet as my son said to me on the phone yesterday, isn't that an artist's response to grief--the urge to make? He is 27 years old and smarter than I am, which is such a comfort. I am the dumbest person in town when I am in the midst.

But I've got to plug the faucet and and turn my attention to actual paying work--an academic article to edit, an author to coax, Monson class plans to dredge up. I've got schedules to fix, materials to pull together for a teaching day with Teresa . . . and then there are the unpaid obligations: blurbs to write for two poetry collections, materials to gather for teachers in need, notes to send to friends in grief . . . the myriad tasks of community care--

We are huddled together in a small glass house. We are fenced in by malice. I am tired. But so what.

My first full night's sleep in ten days or more. I did not budge till the alarm went off at 5. I did not wake at 2 or 3 and have to coax myself (or fail to coax myself) into another thin hour of doze. Now I am groggy and heavy-eyed and shuffling around the kitchen in pursuit of coffee, and I could not be more relieved. One solid night won't mend everything, but it will surely help me cope.

Yesterday I worked on my essay. I finished a batch of sharable teaching plans I had to do for the state epistolary-poem project. I got onto my mat, and I went for a walk with Gretchen. I harvested my fennel crop in anticipation of the ground freezing later this week. I read Olivia Laing's The Lonely City--which is stunning: a book I barely know how to speak about; a book that is a mirror for the world I am living in and writing about at the moment.

I am still not looking at any news. I feel as if I am in a state of self-defense. I am writing and reading about matters that are deeply raw, matters that, despite my logorrheic tendencies, I haven't written about before. They are matters that must be dealt with. I cannot allow the national wickedness to blight my work.

Today I'll trudge the streets again. I'll cook. I'll wander into the sleepy garden. I'll hang clothes on the cellar lines and haul firewood up the stairs. I'll wash dishes and I'll think. I'll think and I will find a way to write a sentence or two, a paragraph or two, a page. My words are disjointed. There are no transitions yet in this essay, no suave links, no mimicking of intelligence. Thoughts burst into language, like blots of wet snow thunking a windowpane. It is an ugly form of making, but it is making, and that is all I ask of myself right now.

I keep forgetting that today is supposed to be a holiday. In my household it's the usual Monday routine--alarm erupting at 5 a.m., T trudging out to his truck before 7.

I had another terrible night's sleep, but they're so normal now that I don't even get frustrated anymore. Just wistful.

But anyway here I am. At home, with the week's tasks ahead of me--a few lesson plans, a small editing project, the essay that I'm trying to drag into the light.

Turns out that little review of Calendar did appear in the Boston Globe: a friend sent a photo of the clipping. A bright spot, to know that it's in the world. And my weekend class went so much better than it might have gone. I was fortunate to have a group that was eager, eager, eager to work. And so we did, which was undoubtedly the best thing for all of us.

While I was in class, T was in the kitchen installing another batch of cabinetry, this time drawer fronts and side panels. The elegance increases. I don't know how to reconcile it with my distinctly inelegant state of mind. I feel a bit like the help working in someone else's house, but I expect I'll get over that.

So today: laundry, a walk, my desk, the kitchen. I want my body to do the thinking. I want air. I want to discover something . . . hear it, touch it, let it be.

I'm sure you're sick of listening to me talk about sleep or the lack thereof, but honestly it feels like insomnia is my body's central preoccupation these days . . . so when I tell you that last night I woke up only briefly at 3 a.m., then slept till 5:30 and lolled till 6, you should take this news as a major success story.

Now, on this cold morning, I am sitting in my warm couch corner in my warm house. I'm wrapped in my old red bathrobe and I'm drinking black coffee from a white cup and saucer and my beloved and our silly cat are upstairs in our cozy rumpled bed, and, sure, the nation is going to hell and all, but for the first time in days I don't feel like a zombie, so I will take my minor joys where I can find them.

Supposedly Nina MacLaughlin's review of Calendar is in today's Boston Globe, but I can't track it down online, and the Globe has impenetrable paywalls anyway, so I may never see it. If any of you are print subscribers, let me know if it's really there. I suspect it's embedded in a roundup of New England literary news, but I don't know.

However, I can share Ray's obituary with you, in case you didn't see it on social media and/or are intrigued by the obituaries of strangers, which I am, so I understand the impulse.

Day 1 of my class seemed to go well enough. With little sleep and much grief, I know I'm not at the top of my game, but so far that seems to be coming out via stupid kitchen mistakes (e.g., forgetting to do obvious things such as line a roasting pan with parchment paper and thus spending 45 minutes scouring scorch) rather than giant public teaching flubs.

Of course I still have plenty of time to screw up day 2. We'll see.

Yesterday, while class participants were working on their poem drafts, I was paging through the photos in Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and slowly beginning to tap out an essay about Ray and our swirl of friends and lovers. It's not a topic I've written about before, and it's a hard one to grapple with, but my brain says try and so I am. For the moment it seems to want to emerge in small bursts of prose. Maybe it will eventually be a long poem. I don't know anything about it yet, except that it seems to want to be written.

Meanwhile, I have been reading Olivia Laing's memoir-essay The Lonely City, I have been reading Lori Ostlund's story "Just Another Family," I have been ploughing through hard crossword puzzles, I have been raking leaves, I have been talking talking talking to sad people, and so go the days, as the nights wrestle among themselves. 

It's a cold morning out there--in the 30s, with a sharp wind. The trees still have leaves, but most are on the ground now, billowing into crackling heaps, skidding in solitary droves down the pavement, swirling against fences and foundations.

I slept badly of course, but not too badly. And I did manage to stay in bed until 6. So all in all, I'm in moderately good condition to undertake this weekend of work that lies ahead.

Yesterday I managed to reenter some version of my routine. I cleaned the house. I went to the grocery store. I baked salmon brushed with lemon and maple syrup. I cooked wild rice and put together a salad with greens and kohlrabi from the garden. I made a batch of lemon squares.

While I cooked, I listened to albums that I had listened to with Ray . . . Tammy Wynette, the Smiths, Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run . . . and I wept, as I knew I would, as I intended to do. It was the first time since his death that I was finally able to let myself go. When Tom came downstairs, he looked at me and said, "If you don't want to do that, don't listen to the Smiths," and I laughed through my tears.

There is gift and pain in being with the one person who knows. We were both there in that borrowed living room, sprawling on couches in the middle of the night, listening to Morrissey mourn and desire. In the end, we became the only people from those days who didn't split away into other partnerships. Our life together arose from those long nights of music. Our children arose from that past. My son tells me that he, too, has been crying to the soundtrack of Born to Run.

I purposefully set myself up to weep last night because I knew that, if I have to spend all weekend in a class full of hurting poets, I'd best get my own grief into the air. I'd best bring it into a place where I can use it for my work.

Because now, more than ever, that work had better get done.

I spent most of yesterday alone, at least physically. Tom was at work, and I was in the house; and though I went for walks and smiled at people, and though I dealt with yet another horribly expensive car problem, and though I was texting/Google Doc'ing all day on a collaborative obituary, and though my sons and various friends texted and called, I had more solitude than I've had for a week. For the first time in seven days, T and I spent our evening alone--no long talky meals, no bonfire musings: just the two of us, awkwardly exhausted on our own couch, trying to play cards, trying not to get too upset about the bill for the car repair, trying to parse confusing bus schedules, trying to eat dinner, trying to fall asleep as soon as possible.

I won't say that I slept well last night, but I slept better than I have been sleeping. I still jolted awake at  2 a.m., my heart pounding over the horrors of the nation, but eventually I was able to soothe myself back to sleep and stay that way until the alarm went off at 5. So all in all, it was not the worst day--not the best, not close to the best, but nobody can expect the best right now.

I'll be teaching all weekend, meaning that today is my day off, such as it is. I won't do paying work, but I'll get the housework done and do the grocery shopping. I'll get onto my mat, and I'll rake some leaves. One thing I haven't been able to do is read--you know life is bad when that happens to me because normally I read like I breathe. So I'm hoping today to find a way to fall back into the necessary patterns of my mind. Little steps, little comforts. Hell yawns before us but we still have our work and our loves. I can't let myself lose them.

This has been a hell of a week. There's no way to sugarcoat the pain of losing my oldest friend and losing the American experiment within the same handful of days.

The amazing thing, though, are the lights that keep glowing, the steady beacons--the friends and family members who are holding us up, holding each other up . . . Weslea in West Tremont, Angela and Steve in Wellington, who fed us and housed us and sat around the table and pressed us to tell the stories. Valerie, our next-door neighbor in Portland, who left meals in our refrigerator and assuaged our cat. Gretchen and her family, in the throes of tending their dying mother, who lit a bonfire and asked us to come sit by it in the gloaming. My sister and my parents and my in-laws, reaching out from afar. My sons murmuring I love you, day after day. College friends embracing over miles and time. My students, grappling honorably with confusion. Poets breathing words.

The work is so simple, so profound. We hold one another up.

And so, today, I will pick up my battered hoe and go back to work. I've been assigned to co-write Ray's obituary: that's my number-one obligation for the day, but I will also return to reaching out to sad people, I will finish an editing job, I will do laundry, I will send birthday greetings to my father. I will walk out into the city and make eye contact with strangers and smile. I will fill my beloved's cup with coffee. I will rake leaves into the garden beds, and I will tease the cat. I very much doubt I will write poems, but who knows?

Yesterday, amid the grim aftermath, I received a piece of extraordinary news: a review of Calendar will appear in the Boston Globe on Sunday. This will be the largest review venue I've ever had, and the opportunity came about almost by accident. I'm intensely grateful, also extremely nervous. Still, the timing has been yet another small gleam in the darkness.

Thus, we stumble forward, with hands outstretched.

Love.

Courage.

Thanks to death and the time change, I have not been able to stay in bed past 4 a.m. By midday yesterday I could feel myself getting ready to crash, and I did loll around for most of the afternoon, but I never napped. Well, whatever. Someday I'll sleep again. Presumably.

In the meantime, here we are at Election Day. Five days ago I thought this was going to be the week's major stressor. Now it's no more than a hovering cloud of doom. Granted, a very big hovering cloud of doom.

My son spent yesterday evening with Stephen so was able to glean more news: about how he's holding up, what tasks he's dealing with, how he needs help. Stephen's good friend Chris was also there. Chris is a union organizer, and who could be a better aid for funeral arrangements than an organizer? This morning I got a text from Chris saying that Steve wants the two of us to collaborate on an obituary. So that's step 1: something solid I can do. And P says they are beginning to sketch out plans for a funeral celebration--which will be a massive undertaking. Hundreds of people are likely to show up. There are thoughts of getting permission to block off 12th Avenue for a few hours. Ghost Ray must be rubbing his hands with glee at the idea of having a party so big that his friends have to shut down a New York City street.

T and I did get into the park for an hour or so early yesterday morning. My energy level is spotty at best, but it felt good to clamber over granite and stare out into the glassy sea. We watched an eagle; we watched a sinuous swimming harbor seal. Then we came back and did a few jobs for Weslea: sorting out junk, insulating windows, throwing down cardboard on the weedy garden. I kept thinking: surely, this will make me sleep; surely this will make me sleep. But no.

So I trudge on. Today we'll be on the road again, heading inland to Wellington. Tomorrow I have to be in class all day. And then finally, finally, finally, we can go home.

Tom thinks it's good we're not home. I think he's right but also wish I were home. Still, I do agree that these few days on the island have allowed us to be fully with each other and our emotional turmoil, and we couldn't have done that if he were going off to work every morning.

The evenings have been a bit of an Irish wake, no doubt. Wine and storytelling, too much of both, but Ray would have done the same for us. And our friend Weslea is a magnificent listener, with her own griefs. Yesterday morning she and I played some music with a local ukulele band at the Southwest Harbor food cupboard. In the afternoon Tom and I climbed Beech Mountain. In the interstices I've been fielding dozens of texts and emails, many from people I haven't seen for 40 years, many from our tight family knot, all of them drenched in sorrow and anecdote. As the writer I am responsible for writing, it seems. And thus the days have been weirdly cathartic, perpetually distressing, oddly ridiculous, immensely touching.

Today will be our last full day on the island; we'll leave after lunch tomorrow for Wellington. One of the great strangenesses, for me, is the fact that this loss has literally taken place within the confines of the three couples to whom I dedicated Calendar: Ray and Stephen, Weslea and Curtis, Angela and Steve. Ray died in Brooklyn, and Stephen called to tell us while we were at Weslea's cottage by the sea--which had also been Curtis's until he died last year. And tomorrow we are going into the woods to spend the night with Angela and Steve--who are both fully on earth, thank God. The synchronicity of this embrace makes me shiver a little.

In 1984, I was a junior at Haverford College when my then boyfriend (let's call him MTB) decided to sublet a house for the year with a couple of guys I'd seen around campus but didn't know at all: Ray Gish and someone named Tom. I wasn't yet 20 years old, unsettled both socially and academically--overwhelmed by the institutional wealth that seemed to permeate the other students, uneasy about my blue-collar roots, my unremarkable education, my non-academic obsession with books (e.g., I was absorbed in a private project to finish all of Charles Dickens's novels before I graduated from college--one that had absolutely nothing to do with the college reading I was supposed to be focusing on). I had made a few women friends--one, in particular, Jilline, who was gradually opening my eyes to the fact that I was an artist. But I was also completely distracted by being in love--an intense volatile affair with MTB that fed on melodrama. I was self-conscious, awkward, badly dressed, romantic, and way too full of feelings.

So when MTB signed a lease with these unknown guys, I was nonplussed. What would they think of me? Would they be more of the same--jovial private-school dudes outfitting themselves for law school or med school while playing a little lacrosse on the side? To a degree, MTB himself fit into that mold, though he was more of a mess than most.

But then I met the new roommates, and my life opened.

Ray Gish was tall with a mop of curly hair. He wore big boots and band T-shirts and thrift-store trenchcoats. He drank beer like water and smoked incessantly. As soon as he woke up, a record would drop onto the turntable--classic country, hardcore punk, early folk, the blues . . . his record collection was massive and detailed and music played constantly in that house. Going to class was not important to him, yet he was brilliantly well informed. He was from Appalachian Kentucky, where his parents ran the Mountain Eagle, one of the most famous small newspapers in the nation. They chronicled coal mining, union busting, poverty, local corruption. All of the kids in the family worked on the paper. All of the kids knew how dangerous that job was. Ray, the youngest, recounted many scary moments--not least when the county sheriff set their office on fire.

Ray's quiet friend, Tom . . . it took me longer to get to know him, But I fell hard for Ray: a version of a love affair, but one that was new to me--because Ray was the first gay man I had ever met . . . or so I thought, until I began to realize what I hadn't been seeing all of my life. The two of us were romantically involved with other people, but we also became entwined with one another. Sometimes we stayed on the phone together all night, whispering syllables of nothing, back and forth, little hums of comfort. Sometimes we quarreled, and had huge dramatic arguments, and flounced and carried on. The feelings were all; they were the centerpiece.

Well, of course things couldn't last like this. Ray failed out of school and went home to Kentucky. MTB started carrying on with other women. Quiet Tom and I took the train into Philadelphia in the midst of Hurricane Gloria and returned to campus sopping wet and euphoric.

The brief college idyll had morphed into our adult lives. But Ray never left us. In 1991 he was the best man at our wedding. He moved around a bit, eventually settling in Brooklyn, opening Commonwealth Bar in Park Slope, meeting the magnificent Stephen, becoming a version of steadiness--but only a version. When our children entered the picture, he and Stephen assumed yet another role: they became uncles, devoted, adoring. Nearly every summer we traveled from the Maine woods to Brooklyn, and the boys threw themselves with delight into the joys of the city, the charms of Ray and Steve. As did Tom and I. Without those trips to Brooklyn, I don't know how we would have maintained our sanity in the isolations of Harmony.

As the boys grew into men, Ray and Steve continued to be huge parts of their lives--helping with apartments, welcoming their partners, buying a few meals . . . behaving exactly like generous and loving uncles, though there is no blood link, only our long and goofy trajectory of devotion. Every time I came to Brooklyn, I stayed with them--all I had to do is text, "I'm coming!" No invitation necessary. No need to pretend that we were anything other than family.

Monday, October 28, was my son Paul's 27th birthday. He stopped by Commonwealth that night and Ray gave him a big hug. On Thursday, Halloween, he stopped by again. The bar was hopping with its usual Halloween party, but Ray and Steve were nowhere to be seen. Everyone thought this was odd: Steve, they knew, had gone on a trip to Iceland, but where was Ray? He wasn't answering his phone.

I don't know exactly how the next events transpired, but by Friday someone got a key to the apartment and let themselves in and found Ray dead, apparently in his sleep. The next events are a blur to me: I know the medical examiner was called; I know someone called Steve in Iceland and broke the news that his husband was dead.

What I do know is that on Friday evening, as Tom and I sat on the porch of this little cottage on Mount Desert Island, listening to the slow swish of the tide in the cove, Tom's phone rang, and Steve was stammering out, "He's dead, he died in his sleep, I'm in Iceland."

***

Our youth. Suddenly it's been kneecapped. With Ray dead, Tom and I have lost the one person who knew us at our messiest, our most melodramatic; who knew our sloppy eagerness, our stay-up-all-night feeling-everything-there-is-to-feel past, our silly quarreling, all that music we listened to, and the conversations, the love affairs: our need, so raw and sloppy.

And my sons' childhood: also kneecapped. They are in deep mourning for the joie-de-vivre, the city opening its arms to them, these two beloved caretakers, now suddenly amputated to a single loneliness.

We all knew that Ray would not live to old age. He was a severe alcoholic, a heavy smoker. He never exercised or watched his diet. He lived recklessly. This death is far better than the slow tortures of lung cancer and cirrhosis. But it was so sudden. And Steve was so far away. And Ray was only 59. And we loved him so.

This will be a short post.

Last night, Tom and I got bad news. Ray Gish, one of our closest friends, beloved since college, best man at our wedding, devoted uncle to our sons, our home-away-from-home in Brooklyn, died in his sleep. He was only 59.

We are stricken. Maybe tomorrow I can write about him more clearly, but I've been awake all night, so words aren't my best medium at the moment.

It's bizarrely warm outside--62 degrees at 5 a.m. on the first of November. I think temperatures will drop into the normal range after today, but this small blip of heat is peculiar and unnerving. My body doesn't know what to make of it.

I ended up ensnarled in desk work and housework yesterday so have done almost nothing to prepare for our departure downeast. Thus, today will be a flurry of lists and groceries and packing: five days away, all of our food, hiking clothes, teaching clothes, teaching materials, books, cameras, violin, tools . . . the car load is always ridiculous. Fortunately I have all day to accomplish this as we're not leaving till T gets home from work. And then we'll embark on a three-hour drive, requiring a whole new layer of stamina.

At least this fuss means we'll wake up beside Goose Cove tomorrow morning.

Though I've been to Acadia many, many times, the park never ceases to amaze me. It really is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Granite and wild sea. Sharp jut of mountains. So many birds. And because we almost always visit outside of tourist season, there's quiet too.

A few days of slow waking, of clambering and bright air; evening wine and chatter with our friend beside the fire.

The election still looms, of course.