Frank

	The day is a blur; an emotional smear as vivid as his friend Peter's paintings. My emotions had slowly built up over a period of months and more rapidly in the last few days as my holiday reached it's conclusions. I hadn't gotten any correspondence from Frank in a couple of weeks and knew that he was going into his office less and less often so I wasn't sure if my last "I'm in Europe" message had gotten to him. Frank's health is erratic and prone to dips and plateaus, but of course, never peaks. That is the nature of cancer: it only goes from bad to worse and Frank reminded me, no one speaks of "cures."
	After some confusing back and forth on the phone as to where I should meet them. When he got out of the passenger side, he was much taller than I expected, almost as tall as me. Then he hugged me, longer and stronger than I expected from someone who might be on their death bed any day now. At the end, I smelled something sweet and clean but I couldn't quite place the smell. He apologized for the smallness of the place -- he had gotten the apartment in the post-student squalor, and never really found another place to replace this one. He had plans to buy a house when he got his professorship, but cancer had tanked all of those plans. His apartment was packed full of neatly organized books. Two, huge industrial bookshelves held the huge design collection, every row packed two books deep. There was surgical tubing looping from the kitchen to the bed-den room, trailing on the floor like a neglected water hose. The bed was a plain, narrow mattress with a wadded up comforter piled on one side, making the right side for when he was cold and the left side for when he was hot. (Which turned out to be the sides of his body; something about the radiation treatment for the cancer in his brain had altered his sensations so one side was cold, numb or sweaty while the other side of him was fine.) The conversation started and lurched through the mundane.The rhythm picked up easier than I expected having spent our entire communication (save one or two phone calls in 1996) via e-mail.
	This is where my recollection of the afternoon gets muddled. We talked about the complex pill regime switching from four pills to two pills for three days and then back to the four. The pills cause instant "heartburn" (a word we had to look up in the thick German-English dictionary). He put the oxygen tube plugs up his nose to supply enriched air into the chunk of his lungs that was still functional after movement or emotion winded him. He held in his palm the back pain pills that work quite nicely and were a pretty blue and white. We drove to a near by restaurant a few blocks away because a half flight of stairs winds Frank for 5 minutes, wheezing like an 80 year old man. I found out that he was 39. And then we got to talk about the more substantial issues. Death isn't a topic that you can talk about straight on and non-stop, but we dealt with it by circling around it, taking jabs at it, then taking a step back to retreat. He was starved to talk about it; aside from Caroline, he didn't really have many people who could really discuss it with. His parents are a big emotional blank spot; refusing to talk about the illness or death. His father broke down, sobbing on the floor, when his own mother passed away. And Frank's mother is in denial about it all, not telling close friends and relatives that Frank is even sick. When they come to visit, they try to do something (as most parents, I am sure would) and one of the few things they can do is vigorously clean Frank's tiny studio apartment while he just lays on the bed. He said he wanted them to stop, sit and talk to him about his death. But they just kept moving and didn't listen.
	We listened to the two songs he wants to play at the funeral and he wanted to make sure that they were appropriate. The lyrics are in English, and to make sure he wasn't misinterpreting them, he wanted me to just check. The last one, Bruce Springsteens If I Should Fall Behind left Frank silently crying. Caroline came over and held his hand, as he continued to cry in silence of the room. He apologized and I said there was nothing to apologize for, and he said that he wasn't crying entirely because of the music but because this is the first and last time he is going to see me. That hit me in the stomach, I had been approaching today as what to expect as the first meeting never really thinking through that this would be the last. I was mute as to how to go about saying my goodbye. I wondered aloud at the morbid question about how people would know when I was dead. Frank said that he had a similar question and taken matters into his own hands, printing up cards headed with the phrase "All is Not Lost," a list with names and his fonts on it. We talked a little about how he felt about dying and trying to prepare for "that which awaits me" as he phrased it.
	I explained my perverse theory on the subject of dying. What scares me is having died a failure and screwed things up. But the antidote to the fear is the knowledge that my life doesn't matter. I take a geological or cosmological perspective, and if you measure my life (be it 28 or 98 years) doesn't even show up on the timeline. It isn't even a paper thin layer in a sandwich of sediment. The sun will still shine, the earth will still spin, and so my dying is okay. (I have always fantasized about my end, but the way I get there is by going through all the twists of my life and figure out how the story will end. And in the grim versions where things get twisted painfully wrong, changing the timescale changes what counts as the ending. The universe -- despite the imaginary tiny horrors of my potential futures -- will still be the same. It will all still turn out all right. I figure this is the anti-existential alternative to making things mean something is to make everything mean nothing and that the cosmological destiny is always the same.) Somehow, I don?t think that Frank was comforted by this approach. But I do think I did comfort him. I saw it in his eyes: a connection with someone else that wasn't afraid of stacks of medication, of bleeping shrieks of the oxygen machine when you inadvertently block the oxygen by stepping on the tubes, and of human breakdown when the body fails and the right eye sees dimmer than the left and looking at items close up don't match up any more. Today was a good day so it is easy to forget the really ugly mess that a terrible disease makes, and the more you get close -- to either the person or to the end -- the more the loss aches. My bravado is really just hubris and that being there for the whole show would break me down too -- how can you not die a little when something you love dies too?
	Every time someone dies it is unique and sad, but I hope that I am not afraid of being close to someone when they need someone to sit and hold their hand. The last few minutes before I had to go back to the train station, Frank asked if I could come back sometime in October. My stomach and heart fluttered, as I felt helpless. I could see in his eyes that panic of letting something go. By then, he expects that to be far enough along for a hospice where he hopes the doctors can stabilize his condition enough for people to come and visit dependably. But of course, by the time he is in there, he will be on pain medication which will put a hazy fur on everything. Death can come in phases. When he hugged me goodbye, it was the same type of hug as when we met. I tried to place the smell and on the train ride home I finally figured it out. He smelled like a sparkling baby.