David Diaz

You can guess that we were often believed to be homosexual.

A year ago, on February 17, 1986, at the height of the stormy seasons most merciless gale, I drove over threatening, waterlogged back roads from Berkeley to Santa Rosa to watch a man die.

Beban the Drinker has been allowed to fade.

David Diaz

He was the best friend that I have ever had. or will ever have, and that had been true for more than forty years. His name was Bob Beban. His obituaries told nothing of the meaning of his absence or of the importance of his existence, but then obituaries never do. This is not going to be one.

I was once in a war, a war of which people now in their forties have no memory. It is The War to those of us of a certain age and beyond, but to everyone else.it must be as remote as the First World War — in which my father served — is to me: a hazy composite of images and impressions from history books, from memoirs, from heroic movies. In The War, my war, men died — sometimes within my vision, sometimes men I knew.

But though I was there and though I knew their names, there is a sense in which they were not, and are not, real people to me. Most of us were in our late teens, and, whatever our real danger, most of us were caught up both in a sense of transition — a feeling of passing through something temporary — and in a sense of almost romantic fantasy.

Real people died in that war; in the aggregate, their deaths were carnage and horror; every individual death was a rending of someone’s soul. I know that, and I knew it then. And yet — though I can still remember names and even conversations — I never had the feeling that I had actually watched anyone die, anyone real, anyone with more dimension than, say, Anthony Quinn in Guadalcanal Diary.

“I’m going to die, and you’re not,” he said. “I love you — but I hate you.”

I ran through the rain across the parking lot and into the hospital lobby — they all look alike — at about 6:30 p.m. The phone call had given me the room number; I had trouble finding the elevators, as one always does in a hospital, but finally I reached the fourth floor.

I saw people standing in the hall and for a moment recognized none of them. The first to see me was Bob’s younger brother Wayne, a burly ex-cop whose warmth was always at war with his job. He put his arms around me without a word, and then Vivian — Bob’s wife of twenty-four years — was there. She took my hand and said simply, “Come on.’’

Vivian led me down the hall and through a cluster of people, with some of whom I had a chance to exchange a greeting. Vivian took me into the room, where Bob’s daughter Aline sat by the bed. She put a hand on Aline’s shoulder and said to me, “We’ll leave you alone.’’ And they did. He was still alive.

The idea of death no longer frightens me (except, of course, for my own, which, however wisely I concede its inevitability, is still incomprehensible to me). I am awed by death but not frightened by it.

The first dead body I ever saw was my grandmother’s. I was nine years old — I first met Bob Beban during that same year — and as I have always remembered it, I was far more impressed by the grief of those around me than by my own, or by the waxy, supine statue that vaguely resembled the starchy but feisty woman I had loved. I finally wept, out of weariness at being badgered by people who kept asking why I wasn’t crying.

I grieved when my mother died — I still do, when the sharpness of a memory strikes unexpectedly — but there was no shock, no feeling of despair. We knew that she was dying, but none of us was there when it happened. She died quietly in her sleep, and to me the moment of her death was a telephone call after the fact.

I have a brother, a sister, and a beloved brother-in-law, all in their eighties. My brother-in-law (who married my sister before I was two years old and who has always been there) is unable to leave his bed, though he somehow bears the attendant indignities with aplomb and even with humor.

I will probably outlive all three. With each death, I will know that I have lost one more of the resources on which, throughout my life, I have been able to draw for wisdom and strength. But there will be no shock. Perhaps more important, my life will not change that much. There is immeasurable love between us, as there has always been, but not for years, for decades even, has there been any genuine interdependence in our lives.

Bob Beban had been fighting cancer for several years, gaining a little here, losing a little there. He would not quit. In what must have been increasingly frequent moments of that despair that comes from the sheer fatigue of the fight itself, his gutsy wife would not let him quit. Not for a long time.

Three months before he died, when he was in Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco for one more go-round with one more inroad of the insidious stalker. Bob had waited until we were alone, and he said calmly, “The son of a bitch is going to get me. They got the one under my arm, but now they think there might be one in my head.’’

We knew each other far too well for me to make the usual fatuous comment. We looked at each other for a moment while I read his eyes, and I think that I grinned at what I saw.

I said, “But not yet, right?”

He said, “You’re goddamned right not yet.”

I sat by the bed, with Bob’s hand in mine, and I tried to think of what I should be thinking.

There was a tube in his mouth, to keep the airway clear for his breathing, which was coming in great heaving gasps that wracked his body. He was bald and clean-shaven but with a day’s stubble on his jaws; he had been blond and the subject of my envy for keeping so much of his hair, and he had only recently shaved off a beard. The chemotherapy, of course, had taken the hair, a side effect eerily frightening in itself. His eyes were sunk deep into his face. He did not look like anyone I knew, and he looked exactly like the man I had known forever.

I wondered whether I should be crying. No one else was, not right at that moment.

His eyes were open but unfixed and obviously unseeing, though they still reacted to light. Medically, he was comatose. Although we were alone, it felt foolish to try to talk to him when — though one always hopes, perhaps again from having seen too many movies — he obviously was not aware of my presence. I had nothing to say anyway; if I had not said it by then, it was too late.

The racking breaths heaved his body, and once in a while, a spasm would strike, and his body would jerk twice — never once, never three times — and then resume its grasping struggle for air.

I smoke and drink and stay up late at night — the words of an old blues, but accurate — and, alone for a moment beside the deathbed of my dearest friend, who was six months and five days younger than I, my only clear thought was the oldest of cliches in the presence of death: Why am I sitting here, hungry and wanting a drink after driving through a frightening storm with all the physical coordination I could command, my mind perfectly able to remember simultaneously that I saw the cafeteria on the first floor, that Wayne is wearing a green sweater, that Chopin’s Nocturne in E Flat has always reminded us both of a girl who spelled her first name Bobbe, and that the nurses’ station is six steps down the hall and a turn to the right — why is all this true of me? — while you lie there, your unknowing and suddenly primitive lungs fighting for every atom of oxygen despite the utter futility of the struggle?

That struggle had already been going on, unabating, for nearly eight hours. My answer was the same as everybody else’s always is. I got up and went out into the hall to join the family.

Over the years, the friendship came to seem, to some people, vaguely magical. Bob’s son Richard once said, “They were born joined at the hip.’’ And over the years, as you might guess, we both sometimes encouraged the fantasy, for our own amusement.

Bob Beban always dated our closeness from an incident in our middle teens, when we were sitting in adjacent booths, each with his own group, in what we used to call in San Francisco a “creamery” — half soda fountain, half coffee shop. At the time, I had a neighborhood reputation as a “brain.” I misused a word, and from the next booth Bob corrected me. I had been bluffing its use — and Bob was the first of my contemporaries ever to catch me in a verbal bluff.

I have met my intellectual equals. In a full life as a journalist, I have met some people, like Linus Pauling, whose intellects awe me. But I can call a dozen witnesses over forty years to attest to the fact that Bob Beban was the only person in my private life whom I have ever regarded as more intelligent than I am.

As an adolescent, however, he was reticent, even shy. His grades were good; mine were spectacular, because our personalities were different (and perhaps because we were differently driven by our families, who were not at all alike except in their capacity for love). At the same time, I had the knack of getting along with the other guys in a way that he did not. Only Bob ever knew that I was no more confident around girls than he was; only I ever knew what it cost him to make the first and most obvious adolescent moves in that department.

For those reasons, among others, we welcomed each other’s company, and we became inseparable. Because we were always together, we made the same mental associations, took in the same images and shared their impact, had the same experiences. Our minds worked similarly to begin with, and within a very short time, we had stocked them with a wealth of shared information — about each other and about the outside world — so that the effect was that of feeding virtually the same data into two quite efficient computers.

To the last day, there was nothing — literally nothing — that I would not have told Bob Beban had he seriously asked, and I believe that he would have said the same about me. You can guess that we were often believed to be homosexual. He was a sexy man, and he thought the same of me, and we were never afraid of admitting it or of physical contact — but we both knew that that wasn’t what it was about; it wasn’t our bag. We simply loved each other, when we were fourteen and when we were fifty-four.

It had been less than a month since I had last talked with Bob on the phone. His tone was light, dry, almost whimsical. “These doctors,” he said — his voice had become a croak — “they don’t talk to me, they talk to Vivian. When I went in yesterday, I told the guy, ‘Hey, my wife is acting a little different. People aren’t looking at me the same way.’ I told him I wanted to know whether I was going to have another New Year’s. So I thought you ought to know that he said no.”

Vivian knew, but she hadn’t told him yet.

He knew too, then; he was not resigned — far from it — but he accepted. Out of love, he gave me, too, chance to prepare.

Now I was talking with Vivian in the hall, with others in the family listening. “Fora few months,” she said, “he had had these little bursts of —’ she foundered, and someone provided the word — “of arrhythmia in his heart. He had fibrillations. He never told me. He ever mentioned it.”

Love is a funny thing. What do you say, what do you keep to yourself? What would I say? What would I keep from the women I love?

Bob Beban — the consensus of all who knew him at his death — was gentle and kind, he had always been gentle; he had by no means always been kind. In the last years of his life, even before the cancer attacked, he was so gentle that he died in some danger of beatification. That will not happen while I am still alive. Bob Beban was a human being deeply filled with resentments. He did not always treat his children as he would later wish that he had, but that is a statement that will sound familiar to any middle-aged parent. He was proud and stubborn, a combination that can lead to a bleak isolation in middle age, from which he was saved only by his intelligence and his sense of the absurd. Bob had never read Camus, but they would have gotten along like gangbusters.

Bob resented me, and I was his best friend. Burdened with a congenital imperfection of one arm, he could not serve in The War — and everyone younger than we should be reminded that that was the last war in which a whole population could believe, a war that took place before the atomic bomb, before jet aircraft, before rockets; and that we young men, thirsty, as Faulkner noted, for glory, knew nothing of mass bombings, of Dresdens or Hiroshimas to come, of the grubby politics and economics that underlay the clear trumpets’ sound.

And so he resented me for having been able to slake the heart’s thirst for glory and to some extent for having been able, as a result, to pursue the sort of education, through the GI Bill, that overcame the near poverty in which we had together been reared — that his superior intelligence was denied.

He resented other things, and he was bitter for other reasons as well. As we matured, his bitterness, for the most part, went away. His resentments never did.

And at the end, he resented his own imminent death. Without bitterness — grinning, in fact, with a sardonic charm particularly his own — he told me that he resented me yet again. I paraphrase, but what he said was this:

We have lived alike. We smoked and drank and stayed up late at night. We were married and divorced and remarried. We didn’t do our best by our kids, though we could have done worse. We held each other’s heads through a lot of anguish, some of which was our own goddamned fault to begin with, some of which wasn’t. We both did brilliant things and stupid things. We were both drunks, and we both got through the bottom worst of it and got it into some kind of control, back to at least the bare edge of respectability without ever kicking it entirely. We’ve lived side by side for fifty years, and we started even, and you did your gig and I did mine and neither of us is ashamed of his life.

And I’m going to die, he said, and you’re not. I love you, he said — from that hospital bed last October — but I hate you.

It was the truth from a friend.

What had happened was that, in his Rohnert Park home. Bob and Vivian and Bob’s daughter Aline, who was visiting in order to help Vivian with Bob’s increasing difficulties, had spent a more or less normal Sunday night, watching television and talking. On Monday morning, at about ten. Bob had had what appeared to be a stroke.

No one is ever going to give me an exact description of what must have been a terrifying scene. A phone call brought paramedics, who, from what I have gathered, may have kept Bob from dying on the floor of his house, and he was moved to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. The calls went out, and the family gathered.

I wasn’t home. Richard — Bob’s second son — had the good sense to give a San Francisco friend the job of trying my house until she reached me. I talked to Aline and to Richard’s older brother. Bob III, and I consulted Caltrans and listened to Jerry Dean’s reports on KJAZ. The storm was at its height. The direct routes were washed out. Sometime after four o’clock that afternoon, I took off for Santa Rosa by way of Vallejo and a series of back roads.

Later, at around eight, a doctor talked to all of us, gathered in the hallway outside the room. His best guess was that the thing in Bob’s head had pushed against whatever in the brain has to do with heart action. That had caused the arrhythmia and the fibrillations that Bob hadn’t told Vivian about and probably had caused on that morning what was, in effect, a heart attack.

Only a few feet away, Bob was lying comatose and heaving in the search for breath, but the doctor assured us that he was in no physical discomfort, was feeling no physical distress of any kind. He could not say for certain that Bob couldn’t hear us or was unaware of our presence. I believed that he was not conscious; I didn’t believe the thing about no distress, but I was very grateful to the doctor for saying it.

Why aren’t you all in here? I had asked myself, sitting alone beside the heaving and gasping and dying man when I first arrived. Why are you standing in the hall, talking, even laughing? I had been in the hospital for ten minutes. Vivian and Aline had been there for eight hours, and most of the others as well for far longer than I.

Within fifteen more minutes, I found I couldn’t sit there either, and that first stupid, if perhaps forgivable, reaction had disappeared. Bob Beban was not just lying there, like Lionel Barrymore in a movie with all the little Barrymores gathered around. He was probably unconscious, but his body was fighting for every ounce of life, racked with the effort, forced despite itself into the embodiment of desperation, of the desire not to do better or to accomplish one more goal or to speak once more of love to another person, but merely to continue to breathe, to be alive.

If Bob Beban was not in pain — and I hope that he was not — a far more primitive being was in the wrenching anguish of battling its own imminent nonexistence, and no one, however loving, could sit and watch for long.

At the age of forty-five. Bob Beban didn’t know a computer from an agouti. When he died at fifty-eight, he was in charge of the computer operation at an outfit in the Santa Rosa area that manufactures structural members. I still don’t know a computer from an agouti, but I like one story that Bob’s boss tells.

Having figured out whatever people figure out about computers, Bob was present when some highly paid outside consultants came in to evaluate the idea that a certain kind of program could be adapted to help the whole operation. The consultants, without dissent, said that it couldn’t be done. A couple of days later, the boss went into Bob’s office and found him doing not much of anything, and he began a conversation. Quietly but curtly, Bob said, “Shut up and go away. I’m thinking.’’

The boss had the brains to do what he was told. A few days later, Bob wrote the computer program that the highly paid consultants said couldn’t be written. It’s still running, and before he died. Bob trained his successor.

I’m not surprised. Bob was never one to accept the conventional wisdom. In the Fifties, he neither accepted nor rejected the idea that Communists are evil; he subscribed to The People's World to see what they had to say.

At about that time, the FBI burgled the PW office and stole part of the subscription list. Presumably because they found Bob Beban’s name on the list, they sent a guy around. Bob Beban said the FBI man’s line was, “We’re not trying to tell you what to read, but... ” Bob Beban’s line, no doubt delivered quietly but curtly, was, “Would you like to leave now or do I throw you down the stairs?”

There is a blur over the next two hours in my memory. The body on the bed, while I came in and then went out again, did exactly what it had been doing, the only difference being that at one point, two nurses shifted his weight from one hip to the other. Different people sat by the bed or wandered the halls. At times, one or another of us, myself included, talked to him.

We had to talk to him. We knew that he was dead, and in truth most of us wanted him to finish dying and get it over with, to end the desperate body-wrenching struggle for breath, those startling spasms that we all knew were futile. But we had to talk to him. We wanted desperately to believe that somewhere within this unlovely and terrifyingly basic form there was the man whom we all loved; we had to tell each other that maybe he could hear us; we had to overcome our clear vision of the hairless and writhing organism on the bed with every memory and fantasy and hope that we could command.

Later, we could face the fact that, during those last hours, what we were looking at was no longer Bob Beban. But at the deathbed, we wanted to talk to him, to pretend that he had consciousness, to see Bob Beban on that bed whether in fact Bob Beban was ever there or not.

I had a chili dog in the cafeteria. Richard took bowls of soup to Vivian and to someone else who had not eaten and rejoined me. We talked with some ease — of Bob’s children, Richard and I had been closest — of a few innocuous memories, and with less ease of a few of Bob’s faults.

I went back upstairs to a small and wonderful thing, a thing that might offend and perhaps horrify the people who ask newspaper columnists about proper behavior. I went upstairs and joined an exchange of jokes and laughter.

Bad jokes, mostly. With six or seven of us gathered around the bed, around the dying man, someone for some reason mentioned Gestalt therapy, and Richard irrepressibly said, “Peris before swine.” An old and tired joke, but we all broke up. Bad puns, excruciatingly terrible gags, some of which were in the worst possible taste, labored associations — the ratatat of minds bouncing off each other, looking for the topper.

Someone finally said that there wasn’t a straight man — using the show business identification — in the crowd. Every other male immediately gave him the look that Jim Rockford gives Angel; nobody had to say a word to get the laugh.

Vivian, clutching the hand of her desperately struggling and dying husband, shook her head in mock resignation and said, laughing, “The goddamned Beban family.”

Then someone said, “It’s an awful thing to say, but I wish he would die. It’s so terrible to know that he’s doing all that for nothing.”

I talked to him then; I hope he heard me. I said, “You always were a stubborn son of a bitch.”

Right now, writing this, and as old and as cynical as I am, I have a twinge of guilt. I wanted him to quit. We had always agreed, over the whole forty years: Don’t bust your ass over things that you can’t do anything about. You can’t do anything, I wanted to say to whomever or whatever was on the bed, about the fact that you’re dying. If you’re Bob Beban, I wanted to say, then quit trying to fight what you can’t do anything about.

I feel guilty about having thought that. Why not rage, however hopelessly and even unknowingly, against the dying of the light? Death’s not a flat tire or an income tax audit.

But it was the patent misery of all the others gathered that I wanted to come to an end. And of course my own.

Alan showed up. Alan is Bob’s next-youngest brother, older than Wayne, and I had wondered at his absence (he had in fact been there earlier; everyone who could be there was there). He came in carrying a paper bag from the top of which showed some exquisite sheaves of wheat. It fooled absolutely nobody. The rawest nurses’ aide would have known that there was booze in the bag.

It was E&J brandy, promptly dubbed “Everett and Jennings” by someone who had noticed, in typical Beban fashion, the name of the firm that manufactured the hospital’s wheelchairs. Someone found a store of paper cups, and the word toast drifted into the conversation. Everyone got a tot of brandy, save a couple of nondrinkers who found some orange juice. When we all had a cup, someone asked Alan whether he wanted to voice the toast. “Why?” he asked.

We drank.

If, as Bob Beban sometimes told me with love and humor and without bitterness, I was an occasional object for his resentment, Shakespeare may provide an example. He loved Shakespeare and knew the canon better than most — and he knew that I had had the opportunity formally to study it all when he hadn’t and that more recently I had had the good fortune to take up with a drama critic and so saw many Shakespearean productions that he could not see.

He would have liked a neatly staged Shakespearean death, whether in a bed or in a magical wood. He would have liked the chance to work out a quotable last phrase or at least a chance to grin wryly one last time and to say that the rest is silence. He didn’t get the chance. It was ugly for most of a day, and then it stopped.

Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital is a Catholic hospital, which in Bob’s case is an irony. There was a crucifix on the wall. On one of my many visits, over the hours, to the heaving and struggling being on the bed, I noticed the gown in which they had wrapped him, a pattern of dark blue on white. That was one of the times I spoke to him.

“A Catholic hospital in Santa Rosa is bad enough,” I told him, “but going out in a fleur-de-lys-patterned nightgown is absolutely no class at all.”

Bob Beban died just before 9:20 p.m. I had put on my cap and jacket and walked out onto a rain-strewn balcony to smoke a cigarette. Coming back in, I passed the officially designated waiting room, in which a television set was showing Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift in The Heiress. Alan and someone else whom I couldn't see through the window were desultorily watching.

Passing another room, I saw a man in his thirties, with a shock of dark hair, lying in his bed and reading a book; he looked perfectly healthy. I wondered suddenly about the effect on other patients of our vigil, a dozen or so people talking or laughing or sometimes crying, obviously not only awaiting but openly discussing a death.

Julie came by, Vivian’s lovely daughter, looking distraught and asking for Emery. Emery was the nurse assigned to Bob’s room. I took off my cap and jacket on the way, hurrying to the room. The heaving, the desperate striving for air, the spasms had stopped, but he wasn't dead. Everyone in the room knew that he wasn’t dead.

Emery got there and verified our conviction; there was still a pulse. A slender, fair woman, she emitted a seemingly endless stream of apparently memorized deathbed cliches designed, perhaps, to comfort nice old Catholic ladies. Though they surely grated, everyone was too polite to comment — or perhaps too compassionate; the Emerys have a difficult job.

And then there was no pulse. Vivian’s husband, Mary Lou’s brother, Aline's father, my oldest and dearest friend, simply does not exist any more. He is not.

There were tears, and we held each other and were held; and at one point, between the stoppage of breath and the stoppage of the pulse, Vivian cried out in grief and anger that Bob was only fifty-eight years old.

My fifty-ninth birthday had passed forty-eight days before.

Some years ago, assigned by a magazine to write about the problems of Vietnam veterans, I spent a night on Cape Cod with psychiatrist-author Robert Jay Lifton, and later I read several of his books. He is an authority on “survivor guilt” — indeed, he coined the term — dating from his own feelings about being a young Jew who did not die in a concentration camp and bringing his understanding forward through a number of other contexts. In a play about a Jew that later became a movie about a black man — Home of the Brave — Arthur Laurents had already dealt with it in a setting. World War II, familiar to me.

I had sat beside what was once Bob Beban and had found unavoidable the stupid question: Why are you there and I here? But that is not the source of the guilt that can so insidiously erode.

The guilt comes from the fact that a perfectly natural — indeed, predictable — reaction of a living person at the death of another person is not, in our detestably Protestant society, a reaction that one is allowed to have. It is never said at wakes, or in funeral orations, or at memorial services, but it is quite frequently true all the same. When two people are of the same age and gender and have lived in an intimate relationship for their entire adult lives, it is both virtually inevitable and, in social context, virtually unforgivable.

Survivor guilt does not mean that I feel guilty because he is dead and I am alive. It means that I feel guilty because he is dead and I am glad that I am alive. To put it in its least acceptable form: I did not want him to die, but the truth is that I would rather it were he than I.

At times, at the deathbed of a man whom I loved as much as I have ever loved anyone in the world, I know that I sat in the room, or prowled the halls, with some completely undeserved pride in my mere consciousness, in what appears at the moment to be my health. While grief and sorrow embraced me, a tiny core of myself, in awe of what I was seeing, was simply and primitively glad that it was not I.

I did feel it. For perhaps half an hour.

I felt too the guilt that in our culture accompanies it, and perhaps Lifton would say that a tiny core of that guilt is not so easy to get rid of. But I do not feel the guilt now, and it is not that I have rationalized it away.

At its root, I suspect, is a vague idea that if I really loved Bob Beban, I would have been willing to trade places with him, to die so that he might live. I can imagine it as an act of heroism (or impulse, or folly) on a battlefield or perhaps in a lifeboat. It is nonsense at a deathbed, where no one can trade places; had I ever proposed it to a sentient Bob Beban, that superb semanticist would have told me that I was out of my mind.

I am not ashamed of the fact that I am glad to be alive. I hope that Vivian Beban is glad to be alive and not ashamed of the fact. I cannot see that being glad that I, six months older, am still alive is any cause for guilt. My friend went first. I will follow, but I am in no hurry. I may owe God a death, but I do not owe Bob Beban one.

When we were adolescents, it was the profound conviction of Bob Beban’s parents that any trouble he got into was my fault. That was, in fact, the basic difference between our families; in my family, if you got into trouble, it was your own damned fault, however Machiavellian your associates. Both were Catholic families, but where his was doting, mine was existentialist.

In a subtle way, and I think unconsciously, a touch of this has carried over into the present Beban family, the family at the deathbed. There is the hint of an image of the rogue uncle, the never quite reconstructed rebel, the sometimes charming but not solidly trustworthy black sheep. I shall not even suggest the lie that I do not rather enjoy the role; like most amateur actors, I probably overplay it.

At one time in our lives — approximately. though not precisely, the same time — Bob and I were serious drunks, the sorts of drunks who terrify those who love them and who give rise to those pitiable pictures of little girls with tearful eyes on the late-night alcoholism center commercials.

Myths survive in families, and because I do not see most of the Bebans often, myths about me have survived longer. Everyone seems to think that I am a far better piano player than I am. Most persistent, though, is the myth of Marine the Drinker. Beban the Drinker has been allowed to fade — not Beban the guy who until he died liked to drink, but, to eschew the euphemism, Beban the drunk — while Marine the Drinker lives.

It is true that, given an emotional crisis, I would like, please, to have a drink and maybe a couple. Privately, confronting a crisis alone, I may still postpone facing the sober truth by hiding for a time in a drugged haze. But it has not been true for some time that I cannot undergo emotional strain without getting bombed out of my mind.

Indeed, and ironically, only Vivian of all the Bebans has ever actually seen me in an all-out sloppy, frightening drunk, and that was a long time ago. As a matter of fact, on the night of Bob’s death, I got just a little sloshed,and I went to bed. On a reclining chair at Vivian’s house, as it turned out.

Vivian’s house. That hurts a little.

In the hall, Julie clung to Bev and stamped her foot and through her sobs cried, “Goddamn! Goddamn! Goddamn!” Bev is Wayne’s wife, an aunt to Julie only by stretching several definitions — Julie’s stepfather’s brother’s wife, technically. I had held Julie briefly — she has known me for as long as she can remember — but she had had to leave the room, and Bev had compassionately followed.

We held each other and wept, and of course it is blurred. It was official; it was over; we could let it out.

The doctor came to make it officially official, and Emery ran us out so that they could “fix him up’’ — meaning that they took the air tube out of his mouth and laid him on his back. I didn't go back in immediately; when I did, only Aline was there. She had been there when the stroke, or the attack, hit nearly twelve hours before; she had been most often at the bedside, most visible in her grief; Bob’s youngest.

There were railings on either side of the bed — because of the spasms — and I sat and leaned on one and looked at something that I knew was not Bob Beban and that I simultaneously knew was all of Bob Beban that I would ever see again. I was wearing a medium-red cotton shirt, and my memory is of the sight of my own crossed arms on the railing. I did not see any point in crying, but quietly — no sobs, no visible anguish, just tears — I was crying.

I don’t think that I thought anything. I did not go back over memories. I did not think about what might have been. I did not make private jokes to myself. I just sat there and looked, and I know now — though I stupidly did not realize it then — that the tears were not for the death of Bob Beban but for the un-fillable emptiness in the rest of the life of Gene Marine.

And then I did indeed want a drink. I looked around for the telltale sheaf of wheat, found the bottle of Everett & Jennings, and poured a healthy slug. I was standing up by then, and I turned back, with some vague idea of ceremony or farewell, to lift the paper cup, a gesture out of any one of the hundreds of movies we’d sat through together in the now-torn-down Noe Theater.

He had had no Shakespearean death, no last phrase. Maybe, just for us — just for me — I could come up with one. But it wasn’t a movie, and he wasn’t a Warner Brothers dead comrade. He was Bob Beban.

“I was going to say that this drink is for you,” I told the corpse, aloud, “but you’d only snort, because we both know who it’s for.” At least that’s what I started to say. I couldn’t get to the end of it through what was happening to my mouth, so I just drank the drink.

Among his far more important legacies. Bob Beban had left an almost full bottle of Jack Daniel’s; when we arrived back at her house, Vivian dug it out and presented it to me, almost ritualistically. I could no more have gotten drunk that night than I could have waded the rampant Russian River upstream, and oblivion was in any case the last thing I sought, but ritual exists for a reason. I poured myself a shot. Others were doing something that involved brandy and hot tea.

Vivian told me to play the piano, and for a while I did, toying with a blues line that involved descending major sevenths, but that took more concentration than I had available, and after a few moments, I realized that she had wanted not to hear me play but to provide a therapy that she thought I might need. In the other room, a television news program showed flooded towns; somebody turned it off. Mary Lou said with pretended petulance that she had been forced to miss Kate and Allie; Alan deplored her taste. I sat in the big sprawling chair in which I would eventually sleep, and I looked around.

Vivian, freshly widowed, bustled about, being sure that everyone had whatever he or she might need, though she disappeared for brief intervals. For the first time, I counted: there were eleven of us, as different and as alike as tribes.

We talked for a while, with the inevitable interspersed one-liners, about embarrassing moments, revealing ourselves each in a small way to the others. We neither talked specifically about Bob nor avoided mentioning him. Finally, we reminisced, not for the most part coming up with anything the others hadn’t heard before but rather reminding each other of stories we all knew. No one said anything profound or wise, and no one would have had the gaucherie to try to say anything comforting.

For the most part, they are day people, and they had undergone the agony of the deathbed for most of the day. I am a night person, and my watch had not begun until the phone call in late afternoon; my time at the deathbed itself, though subjectively long, had been relatively brief.

In a corner of the house, away from the sleepers. Bob III sat up with me for a while longer — a thoughtfulness, a courtesy — and we talked of the earlier years and a little about my perceptions. The Jack Daniel’s worked its merciful anesthesia, and we too called it a night. I slept in the chair.

Bob had instructed that his corneas be used, if practicable, to help someone who might need them and had asked beyond that that his body be cremated and the ashes strewn in a particular bay in Hawaii that he and Vivian had visited and loved. At home after his death, Vivian professed some concern about the legality of the action; Rick went so far as to call a friend in Hawaii — it was of course earlier in Hawaii — to research the local law, while the rest of us urged Vivian simply to do it without telling anybody.

Vivian said that she didn’t want the ceremony marred by some official intervention.

Alan said, “Tell them you’re emptying the car ashtray.’’

The next morning, after a brief discussion of a memorial service and of obituaries, some of us went our separate ways, to pursue our separate, bleaker lives. The rain had stopped; I drove home in the sun.

I drove with grief but not in agony. Had Bob Beban died at the moment of his attack, then for me the instant of his death would have been, as with my mother, the instant of a phone call. I would have been alone with rage and despair and shock, with only Nancy to bear the entire load of my private terror. I might indeed have added shame to the indescribable mixture of emotion by reaching for booze and retrogressing to sodden stupor.

But I was at the deathbed and watched him die, and it was not a phone call. I was there with all those others, to live through the silent pleadings and the unspoken hopes, to be a part of the exchange of wry, hopeless looks and tentative touchings, of the tasteless jbkes and the helpless hand-holdings, of the unavoidable awareness of the heaving, primitive struggle.

When I remember, I shall remember not a voice on the telephone presenting only an inescapable fact. I shall remember the absurd sheaves of wheat failing to disguise the brandy bottle, the irrelevant glimpse of Montgomery Clift in nineteenth-century dress, the ridiculous fleur-de-lys gown of which no one would ever have told me.

Of the moment of death I shall remember not my own brief despairing tears but that there was someone to hold, someone to hold me, someone in whose eyes I could see reflected the aridity in my own. Afterward, I shall remember not a private battle with a bottle,but a place to go and people to be with, a piano, a shot of booze given in love, a round of reminiscences — a gentle easing and draining of the worst of the pain from the solitary wounded heart into the common pool of grief. Until my own turn comes, I shall remember that I was privileged, on that storm-drenched night, to share those hours, that awful intimacy.

For had I been alone, my shock and rage and despair would have struck because my friend, my companion, a man I loved, is no more. But I was not alone.

It is not that my friend is no more, has simply ceased to exist. It is that I could be present when a human being — a person of infinite dimensions, husband, brother, father — died while we watched, in a particular place at a particular time, wearing a particularly ugly nightgown with the hand of a particular nurse on his throat to seek his pulse. In all of my life until now, every death has been only its impact on me alone; my sharing with others has come only later. Because I shared the moment of Bob Beban’s death, I share its impact.

When I was driving home, the healing had begun, because when they are together, the living heal each other.