Tomorrow Will Be Fine

I was sitting at his side with his large hands like paws on the bed in Davies Hospital, only a few blocks from his house but weeks of persuasion to get him there. His hands were no longer warm or able to reassure me he would always be there. My confidante, brother, who was always there at my hospital bedside, for birthdays, ours and his, my readings, other writers’ readings. His palms were flat and even larger as he lay dying, the life of him pulled away, from him and me and his family and his best male friend, Peter, to whom he whispered on his deathbed. Only later I found out what his dying words were. Go into my closet and take out my magazines.

Gordon, my best friend, he was 79 when he died. He'd been called a sissy growing up. His father beat him. His mother dressed him in girls' baby clothes because she wanted a girl. He joined the Navy at 18 and left his family for good, to go gaily forward, as he would say. He never told his family he was gay and his dying wish was, Get rid of my magazines.

We cleaned out his things, his family, Peter and I. A stack of journals was lined up on a shelf above the coffee table I now have in my living room. The journals were different colors, gray, green, light blue, indigo, each one most likely given to him as birthday gifts, or just because people loved him. And each one empty except for three pages in the black one, where he was complaining about something or other. He wanted to be a writer, our Gordon. That was how I met him.

When I entered the workshop I was teaching in the lesbian and gay center in—was it San Anselmo? I am close to the age he was when we met, but even then his memory was better than mine. All I heard were people calling Gordon! Gordon! Gordon! until this beautiful man walked in, with a thick white beard and head of hair, barrel-chested and soft spoken, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a large turquoise ring he would leave to his nephew, a puzzle ring.

I fell in love with him immediately. This wide-berthed, funny, sarcastic, refined large bear of a man, unpretentious—unless he was around someone he fancied, sexually awkward as he was. All those fatherly beatings and confused signals from mom, it took him time to trust and warm up to me. I pursued him for months. I knew he was good people, I knew instinctively he would be the brother I never had, though I had three, but he was a reluctant receiver.

I had a dream a few months after meeting him that he was old, dressed in yellow, sitting in a wheelchair in his blue carpeted living room. I was looking after him. He was only in his early sixties then and fit as a fiddle. He still rode horses with his friend in Oregon every summer, backpacking into the wilderness. I phoned him, Gordon, are you all right? And that was it. Best friends until five p.m. on November 10th, 2009, when his body was about to be taken from him. His spirit had already flown away, he was no longer there. I knew there was no point in staying and left his family to say their goodbyes. One and a half hours later, I got the call.

His AARP magazines were still on the coffee table in his flat, he always kept the table mirror bright, unlike I would end up doing. He was so fastidious; when he went out, he left his thermostat on 58 all year round. On the counter beside the large window in his sunny kitchen, bottles of Ensure my wife and I had left him as he shriveled to half his size, unopened.

I wanted to bathe him, but he wouldn't let me. I wanted to go to his oncologist with him, but he would just let me one time, and only when I wore him down. He told me I wasn't allowed to ask any questions. Gordon, this big strong bear of a man managed by not always facing what was happening.

But I followed the doctor out into the corridor and did ask, seeing Gordon suffering with oozing sores puffing his lips and inside his mouth. The cancer treatment was only making him worse. I asked the doctor, what are the chances of the chemo working?

And he said, two years tops. But then I asked him another question and he said, for younger men.

Gordon’s memorial was arranged by his family in a sterile meeting room at a hotel in downtown San Francisco. On their request, I had printed out the stories that Gordon had written over the years in my workshops and gave a copy to each one of them. I read one out as my eulogy. No one spoke about him being gay. They must have known.

The things Gordon left were few and beautiful. My wife loved pottery and took some mugs he collected from a gallery he worked in decades before; he had such refined taste. Along with the coffee table, I took a yellow pitcher inscribed Gordon's Gin in red script that has a place of honor on our kitchen shelf. I didn’t take the brass framed photo of me in his living room. I didn’t like how I looked but he saw something in me that not that many people did, and I loved him for that.

But I did take his brass clock to have him with me every time I checked the time. The clock suddenly stopped working a few months ago, fifteen years almost to the day he died. I put it in my car to get it fixed, but it would cost $200, so I left it in the car, not able to discard it. A few weeks later, the second hand was rotating again. Movement had brought it to life, and I remembered a poem I wrote that had the line ‘an object in motion keeps moving forward’. Gordon’s body didn’t, but that didn’t mean the same for his spirit.

Gordon didn't want to be buried anywhere. He didn't want to have a headstone. He donated his body to science, and he told me that after they had removed his organs - was it sardonically? - hospital staff would float out on a boat to the bay and empty his remains in the water. I always felt bad about that, that I had no physical place to remember him, only my heart and my memories. And so when I moved to Santa Rosa a few years after he died, I made my own. On a walk to the top of Taylor Mountain, not far from where I live, I came upon an area where others had piled stones into sculptures. I gathered some small rocks and made a memorial to Gordon so that every time I walked on the mountain, I could sit with him.

Now it’s sixteen years after he died and though I’m no longer able to climb the mountain, Gordon still sometimes visits me in my dreams. He's always healthy and he's always loving and he's always got a slightly sarcastic comment like, His ego is the size of Chicago. He had the best sayings.

I still laugh at what he said on his deathbed to a volunteer who wandered into his hospital room with a small harp asking, “What would you like me to play?”

I wasn’t even sure it was appropriate; no one had asked for music. It seemed a little presumptuous to assume someone in the intimate throes of death wanted to hear music, let alone played by someone they didn’t know.

Gordon was too weak to respond, so Peter said, “He loves anything by Mahler.”

The volunteer began strumming a Mahler tune, and suddenly from Gordon’s bed came a groan, “Not Mahler!” as if his dislike of the music was his rallying cry.

Peter looked shocked. All those years they had been going to concerts together, at least several of them by Mahler, and Gordon had never said a word.

Even before I had insisted that Gordon let me take him to the hospital the chemo had clearly not been working, it made him even sicker as he lay dying. My wife and I asked him if he thought he should stop taking the pills, but he was still believing what his oncologist had said without revealing that it wasn’t going to work. I couldn't stand to see him suffer any longer and one night, about a week and a half after he was admitted, I found the palliative care doctor in a dimly lit alcove near Gordon’s room. I asked whether the chemo could be stopped so Gordon wouldn’t be in such pain and discomfort.

Under the dim night lighting, the doctor, a gentle-voiced man in his forties, said that requests to stop treatment had to be made by the patient.

“How can I persuade him?” I asked.

“Ask him whether he would like us to do everything medically necessary or to stop the chemo,” he said.

I went to Gordon’s bed and said softly into his ear, “Gordon, would you like them to do whatever’s medically necessary or to stop?”

Gordon barely missed a beat. With grace he said, “Tomorrow will be fine.”