You tried to color my hair at the kitchen sink the night we moved in together: a big man wielding a little brush with surprising delicacy, applying blond dye in practiced streaks. Too much, too soon. I washed it out after ten minutes over your laughing protests. In the night I tiptoed past your bed to our single bathroom, pausing for cold, barefoot minutes at two men’s naked bodies tangled in sheets.
We roamed the beautiful world together, letting magic wash over us. We crossed the Alps in your straining Fiat, snapping one another’s pictures by the side of the road as we entered the legendary passes, the clouds drifting so low they left their cold touch on our shoulders. Growing up in the flat Midwest, I’d never driven so close to the sky. At a ruined Loire Valley chateau at dusk, a peacock dropped from a tree—impossibly near!—and spread its jeweled feathers, lifting its load of spectacle. We hiked at twilight into a long ravine on a Navajo reservation where dwellings of the Anasazi were scored into rock, hoarding their story of lost life. On the canyon floor a small pasture remained, green against the sheer red walls. A young shepherd rang a bell just once, as his ancestors must have done for generations, and the small flock of sheep followed him into the faltering light.
We fed in secret together on junk we foraged at the Seven-Eleven, Hostess Ding-Dongs and Suzy-Q’s that we stowed in the freezer and then lingered over, licking out the cold layers of frosting, letting the cheap chocolate cake melt against our cheeks’ warm tenderness, laughing, until what we were eating was hardly food, what we were doing was hardly eating, what we were feeling was wild: wild, raw hunger.
And we came to share the dark knowledge of the chronically ill. The impossibility of counting on our bodies; the unwelcome sensation of chemicals beating deep in our blood; the unwelcome terms of survival, and their limits. We both hated the lingering taste—almost a spreading internal film—of bad hospital food, hated the too-small gowns, the gritty feel of unwashed hair and incomplete showers. You wept when you told me that you’d heard a nurse refer to you in the hall as “that old man.”
* * *
At Jaime’s last Christmas dinner, before AIDS finally took him, you and I laid out turkey and chestnut stuffing, fennel salad with bright orange slices. But he pushed away his plate, pushed his chair away from the table. We could hear the spaniel puppy Jaime had recently bought, scratching and whining alone in a wire enclosure in the back yard, and we both knew it was wrong, this acquisition of a creature that the closeness of death had already made it impossible for him to care for. But we remained silent, witnesses to his as yet undiminished appetite for hope.
“I wish for more life for both of us and I wish it keenly,” you wrote to me after my initial diagnosis. But I have outlived you, my friend.
At your memorial service I heard so many remember you as their brother, so many whom I didn’t know, whom I never heard you speak of. Who are all these men who call you beloved? I am surprised, now that you are gone, by how much you held back from me, how much you kept for yourself.
You confided to me many times how your mother claimed all the grief for herself when your father died, when you were only ten. And I’d wondered at your mother’s love for you, and your love for your mother; at the charged and tender place between need and generosity.
Perhaps every love is its own world.
On our return drive toward the Alps, a fog descended without warning on the autostrada. We were flying through white space, the hood of our car impossible to see, the side of the road where we might pull over a blankness that might hide another car invisibly halted. Our speeding capsule filled with your cigarette smoke, matching the cloud into which we were blindly dissolved and the hot-breathed fear that belongs to genuine danger. I lay my hand over yours, over the hand that was gripped anxiously to the steering wheel. And the world shrank to this hurtling thing, fragile metal and flesh, letting the world enclose us, only us, in mystery.
Joanne Jacobson’s most recent book, Every Last Breath: A Memoir of Two Illnesses, came out in 2020 from The University of Utah Press and was an Independent Publisher Book Awards Essay silver medalist. Her essays have appeared in such publications as New England Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Fourth Genre, Southwest Review, Florida Review, and The Nation, and have been cited in Best American Essays and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her author website is https://www.joannejacobson.com/.