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. 

Some days my freelance life is a jumble--hours spent circling aimlessly, waiting for a reply to a query before I can move on with a project, and then suddenly the reply arrives, but late in the day, when my mind has already turned away from paying work and is focused on home obligations . . . so by evening I am wondering, What the hell did I get done?

And thus today, when I thought I would be mostly concentrating on housework and errands, I will instead be cramming in editing hours . . . which is fine: it's a typical freelance situation, one I am so accustomed to, but it's always a drag. What I want is less hysterical flurry in my life, not more.

Well, anyway. So be it. A fat morning of editing, and afterward I'll get done what I get done. At least the laundry can churn while I check files.

Last night, as I basted a pork roast, Tom installed another batch of finished cabinet doors. The sudden sleek quiet is startling. No more under-the-sink clutter staring out at us; instead, an expanse of polished fir, silken to the touch. These doors are heavy, elegant, magnificently plain. The kitchen, always beautifully functional, is becoming a showplace. It feels very strange to possess such a room. (Fortunately, hideously inept bathrooms and dog-eared vinyl siding keep us grounded in reality.)