Helene, my friend Louis' partner and spouse of 29 years, called to tell me that Louis is in a hospice at St. Peter's Hospital in Albany, NY. His bladder cancer has spread. This is the same hospital that I was brought to on April 20, 1998 when I had a heart attack, the day of the Columbine High School massacre. I met Louis at the NY State Dept of Health in 1997 about a year before my heart told me my name. Our office had been melded into the Dept. of Health's disparate units supposedly caring for the aged. From what I saw there I would rather die in my grapevine covered screen house. Louis was a secretary for the fragmented hapless unit. Louis himself was not fragmented but unified in his desire to live. He told me that he had already had one heart transplant and that a brother had died from the same heart complications that he had in 1974. Louis was an athlete's athlete. He excelled at baseball, basketball, track. We had very different political views, but that didn't get in the way. There was a connect before I had a heart attack in 1998. After that, the bond was welded even more. You can encounter someone for 30 years and not get the immediacy that Louis and I felt within a few short years. He was a gentleman, whether his meds screwed him up that day or not. I remember him only once complaining that his meds made him unapproachable. He was on tons of meds. His tenacity to life is what affected me. His grasp on history was astounding and belittled me. He is a voracious reader. He has read more than I will in two lifetimes. Louis loves to debate tete-a-tete. His psychic energy is palpable. I could feel it on my skin when he engaged me. It was infectious and compelling. He made me think about what I was saying or trying to say. I also listened to him without forming thoughts about what I was going to say next. People like Louis are rare. He is extra-ordinary. Lust for life, Louis, that is what you have. How many people could learn from your living life? Those with hearts and souls to feel and fathom the horrible and the unfair alongside the glorious and mysterious. Louis, you know that life is unfair and cruel over and against the will to live another day, to see a reticent dawn. You will rage against the dying of the light. You will be a person that people will re-member from the scattered remains of their own lives. You will help them re-member it all for, what it's worth. Damn Louis, you fought back from the darkest pit almost without hope and then cancer calls on you to devour your breath of life. You almost died waiting for a 2nd transplant in August 2001 that came at the midnight hour from a young soul who died in an auto accident. People are worried about their 401K's. You are dying after struggling to live for so many years. It seems ironic that people should commit suicide over Ponzi schemes and you are dying to live. Louis, you are a human being, a gentleman and a scholar and for that I and Aldo, our French bulldog, commend you from the bottom of our hearts.
Update: I just returned from seeing Louis at the hospice. Many members of his family were there. One of his sisters prepared a love-filled flank steak dinner for him and brought along two bottles of Brunello di Montalcino. I had planned to go tomorrow, but I am glad I went today. When I left a priest came in to give him the last rites, I believe. It's not an easy thing to see someone dying and I did have some trouble getting some words out at first. He is surrounded by many people who love and admire him. His family, as I expected, are very warm decent people. His mother and father, I was told, were not doing well at all. The cancer has spread from his bladder to his bronchial tubes. Dialysis was discontinued yesterday. His time is near. His wife Helene is pretty amazing. She is gritty in the face of the inevitable imminent loss. She just lost her 80 year old mother in November. She has been at his side constantly and I salute her strength and warmth. Louis had told me long ago that there would be no funeral. A memorial of some kind is planned. Peace be with you Louis.
Update 2: I walked into the hospice today and saw no one around. I thought that Louis might have died during the night. When I left yesterday he appeared very weak and sleepy. But I was glad to see that early this afternoon he was sitting up and alert so we talked some. I apologized to him for my blurting out of a four letter word the day before. I was a little, um, unhinged. The people keep coming. Louis has a lot of friends and family. I never met anyone who didn't like him. He is rich with people whose lives he has touched. I have met some good people there and have had the pleasure of talking with a few at length. Policemen, anesthesiologists, airline workers, shoe salesmen, health care workers and so on. The weather looks nasty tomorrow so I doubt that I will go to see him. Oh, a very good Chianti was served today.
Update 3: I didn't go to see Louis yesterday because we had a Andersen windows provider repair our 4 defective windows that were installed around 1990. The orginal manufacturer of the windows, Cardinal, pumped too much gas beween the double panes causing them to collapse. In the worse cases the windows can actually bust. The repair man takes a read on each pane and then drills a hole in each sash to adjust the pressure. He then seals the window back up. The appearance of ovals of condensation is a symptom that tells you this. Andersen's site explains this and after you request service they send someone right out. So this morning no condensation on the windows.
Today, Thursday, I am going to bring a bottle of good red wine up to Louis and his family. I hope he is able to take a sip or two of the vine of life. Blessed be all those souls who hunger for life and it is denied them by fate.
"Grounds for an unusually intense fear of death are nowadays not far to see: they are obvious enough, the more so as all life that is senselessly wasted and misdirected means death also. This may account for the unnatural intensification of the fear of death in our time, when life has lost its deeper meaning for so many people, forcing them to exchange the life-preserving rhythm of the aeons for the dread ticking of the clock."
"In the secret hour of life's midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberence, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life's fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical to not wanting to die. Waxing and waning make one curve."
"The sun, rising triumphant, tears himself away from the enveloping womb of the sea, and leaving behind him the noonday zenith and all its glorious works, sinks down again into the maternal depths, into all-enfolding and all-regenerating night. This image is undoubtedly a primordial one, and there is profound justification for it its becoming a symbolical expression of human fate: in the morning of life the son tears himself loose from the mother, from the domestic hearth, to rise through battle to his destined heights. Always he imagines his worst enemy in front of him, yet he carries the enemy within himself--a deadly longing for the abyss, a longing to drown in his own source, to be sucked down to the realm of the Mothers. His life is a constant struggle against extinction, a violent yet fleeting deliverance from ever-lurking light. This death is no external enemy, it is his own inner longing for the stillness and profound peace of all-knowing non-existence, for all-seeing sleep in the ocean of coming-to-be and passing away. Even in his highest strivings for harmony and balance, for the profundities of philosophy and the raptures of the artist, he seeks death, immobility, satiety, rest. If, like Peirithous, he tarries too long in this abode of rest and peace, he is overcome by apathy, and the poison of the serpent paralyses him for all time. If he is to live, he must fight and sacrifice his longing for the past in order to rise to his own heights. And having reached the noonday heights, he must sacrifice his love for his own achievement. He may not loiter. The sun, too, sacrifices its greatest strength in order to hasten onward to the fruits of autumn, which are the seeds of rebirth."
CG Jung
Family only were allowed in Louis' room today. He was sleeping the Sleep. Louis it is for the living that I wrote the above. You are at the end of your epic struggle. As I write this you might be on the other side already. (But no, you lasted until Sunday as I found out later.) I brought your family a Zenato Ripassa and the quotes above. It is they who have looked to you as a son, brother, friend, lover, husband, dog caretaker-trainer, hunter, teacher et al. It is they who in grieving your loss will reflect on their own mortality. It is the living who search for some kind of sense to the horribly cruel along side the gloriously beautiful. The sense, if there is any, is in their living life, I guess. Perhaps, a sense we do not make. Our lives are interwoven in the tapestry of lives which becomes more interesting when it is turned over to reveal the underside. The underside shows how it is woven together, thread by thread, moment by moment, day by day, year after year. Each life somehow someway connected to others in sometimes mysterious ways.
Louis once casually told me that his brother who died in 1974 sends him pennies from heaven. I looked at him a little puzzled and Louis explained. No drama, no taps in the night. This has happened on many occasions. They just mysteriously appear. I was told at the hospice that Helene had recently found three in the attic where she was staying with a co-worker before she moved into the hospice. Her co-worker's husband told me that his wife had completely cleaned the attic before Helene moved in.
A long time ago
A million years BC
The best things in life
Were absolutely free.
But no one appreciated
A sky that was always blue.
And no one congratulated
A moon that was always new.
So it was planned that they would vanish now and then
And you must pay before you get them back again.
That's what storms were made for
And you shouldn't be afraid for
Every time it rains it rains
Pennies from heaven.
Don't you know each cloud contains
Pennies from heaven.
You'll find your fortune falling
All over town.
Be sure that your umbrella is upside down.
Trade them for a package of sunshine and flowers.
If you want the things you love
You must have showers.
So when you hear it thunder
Don't run under a tree.
There'll be pennies from heaven for you and me
Rosemary Clooney
Download 02 Pennies from Heaven
Louis' Memorial: I was wrong or totally forgot about the glowing lights. There were multi-colored lights of miraculous healing besides the three pennies. Louis' sister Frances told me this and more. I watched her watching her brother eating in hospice. Her empathy for her brother was palpable in the air of the room filled with people whom Louis had touched in his brief life. You would need many rooms or one very large room to put all these people in at one time. Frances, like I said, it was as if I were talking to Louis through you. You told me just how close you and your brother are. What you told me will stay with me forever. Love transcends death. The healing is within the love. Louis had a lot of heart and soul. That's what affected other people so deeply. Through his living his life, knowing at an early age that he would die young, he showed us all how precious and transient it all is in the light of eternity. It is there for those whose hearts and souls are open to it. It is the golden treasure hard to attain that the alchemists wrote of. It is the rejected common cornerstone. It is with us everyday, but most people trample it with fear, cold hearted disdain, mercenary lust or plain old apathy.
Louis and Helene loved each other. Helene, it shows. When the love shows, everyone else should listen and feel. It glows like the healing lights. They are of the same stuff and transcend life and death. I felt that love through all of Louis' and Helene's family and friends. You would have to be a barren brick not to feel it. Thankfully, I do have feeling left. I am not burned bitter by life. Singers sing of this bitter earth. James Baldwin was right, people. Google him on You Tube and listen to what he says about the English language. Bittersweet is one of the few words we have to describe what I have been trying to circumscribe. How many other words do we have like this? I am not a poet. If I were one, I could bend words and create metaphors that attempt to say what really can't be said in words. Poets are magicians who use words.
Let's talk La Famiglia, again. For an Italian, this is always a good topic to go off on. Louis' family is enormous. It was confusing as to who were his sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews. All I know is that I spoke and cried with them. I think that they knew that I loved Louis and that I will never forget him. His extended family seems to have a certain tenacity that is grounded in living. I felt this in my own Italian family growing up in Rhode Island. Everyone was a part of something larger, the family. It's the womb and cauldron of your character. It nourishes you and fires you, like a kiln. Louis was born and raised in Ozone Park, Queens. They are New Yorkers. For me New Yorkers are special. Where did all our ancestors arrive first in the New World? New York. I don't care what bias I express, true New Yorkers are a breed apart. They represent my ancestors' first glimpse of a new promise, a new life, a rebirth. Upstate NY is filled with native New Yorkers who fled the city amidst the decay and violence. But you can't take the city out of the man or woman, boy or girl. The talk, the sense of humor, the knowing look, the directness. Louis' family is not The Waltons, neither was mine. This is not TV. How many families are Walton-esque? This is life as we know it, as it comes to us; the life we sometimes have to throw ourselves on expecting some mercy, but not banking on it by any means. However, most of Louis' family have kept the vital warmth alive by living with and for each other. Fortunately, some of my cousins know the worth of love and life. You have to feed this warmth or it'll die. It needs care, like a candle in a hard north wind. Louis, you, your family and friends have given me something that is hard to describe. I feel it in my heart and soul. That is good enough for me, my friend. I am eternally grateful for it.
P.S. Louis, if you can swing it, I wouldn't mind a few $100 bills instead of pennies. Money's not getting any cheaper, my friend.
"For what the center brings
Must obviously be
That which remains to the end
And was there from eternity."
Goethe
PPS I hope that Helene and all of Louis' family understand that I am writing this in tribute to Louis. This tapping of the keys also helps me to work through the whole experience; the fortunate timely encounter with Louis and Helene; a way of dealing with the heart rending sorrow that I have felt, seen and heard; the lasting loss. All matters of the heart are work, maybe our most important work. If I can somehow someway try to express what I feel, then maybe, I can gain some strength from it all. I feel obligated to bear witness to a life lived con brio. Something someone is helping me to articulate, however clumsily, what we all know is much greater than our senses, brain functions, intellect, whatever. We are in it, a part of it. We don't own it and cannot control it. I guess thinking with the heart is the best I can do for now or maybe forever. The head and tongue, if not connected to the heart, are worthless and very often dangerous. Take a look around. You don't have to look far to see the effects. Now, I need some pasta, red wine and music.
"Religious experience is absolute; it cannot be disputed. You can only say that you have never had such an experience, whereupon your opponent will reply: "Sorry, I have." And there your discussion will come to an end." CG Jung
PPPS I have floated the idea of a blog that would stand as a virtual perpetual memorial to Louis. It could include stories and pictures. It would not only preserve memories but would enable the younger people in Louis' family and friends to learn things about him. Someone who is now too young to know anything about Louis' life could read about him 20 years from now.
Helene, this for you and Lou
"Dance Me To The End of Love" Leonard Cohen
