Afterword: Post 6: Service

My friend and teacher, Charlie Robert Silano, died on May 23rd, 2011, outside in his hammock, on a warm afternoon.

We had of course, been expecting it, and yet it was a surprise. He had been cycling through good days and bad days, crises and rallies, with no discernible pattern or rhythm, for weeks. It had seemed at first that he couldn't survive another day, and then he could and did and then when he finally didn't it was a shock because there was nothing different about that last bad day than all the others.

I wasn't on campus that day, had not been, actually, for a few days. I found out an hour or so after the fact when Allen sent out a group text alert--"he's gone."

June saw me check my phone and didn't need to ask what the text said. She took me in her arms.

A few hours later, Allen sent around a more carefully thought-out message, sharing what information he had about Charlie's last days and hours, and inviting all who wanted to come to a meeting to discuss next steps.

Charlie himself had left no instructions as to funeral services and so forth, insisting "I'm too busy still living to bother with figuring out what you all should do after I am dead." He had not needed to tell us that his body could not be embalmed or incinerated using fossil fuels or sealed into an expensive, rot-proof sarcophagus, or anything else of that nature. We'd all been his students long enough to be as offended by such prospects as he was. But there are laws that more or less require expensive and environmentally destructive funeral practices, and so we not only needed to plan a meaningful farewell service but also to figure out how to break the law on his behalf.

I will tell you what we did, but not how we arranged to do it. I do disguise our identities in these stories, but there are limits to what I can hide and precautions that I must continue to take.

A few days after his death, a group of us gathered in a partitioned-off section of the Martial Arts Studio with Charlie's corpse, which was already starting to smell faintly of rot. There were six of us, all men--me, Rick, Steve, Breathwalker (a former student and ally whom I had only recently met), and two members of Charlie's family--all met to prepare his body. Allen was there, too, holding space for us, wordlessly paying attention.

We stripped and washed the body, dried it, and then wrapped it, confronting the physicality of his illness and death in the most direct, uncomfortable way possible, confronting reality, as he would have wanted. We took our time. There were moments in that process that the body seemed very much to be Charlie. Seeing him naked and ruined hurt, and we held his hands, touched his face. There were moments when what we worked with was very much an object, an animal corpse, and we worked efficiently, with faint disgust or detachment. Allen watched all the moments without comment, accepting the unendurable, his existence its own continued teaching.

In what did we wrap the body? Layers of wax-infused cloth, to begin with, then clean cloth, like a mummy, though we left the face, hands, and feet bare, and a plain white t-shirt. The layers replaced some of his lost muscular bulk, made him look a little more normal, but that's not why we did it--we left his exposed skin unadorned, waxy-looking, his face frozen in a somewhat unnatural expression, though we did close his eyes. We were making of him a fire-starter.

We intended to cremate the body, but to do it ourselves, in a bonfire, and human flesh has way too much water to burn easily.

Once we had him wrapped, we placed him on a clean, white sheet on a hand-made stretcher and placed another sheet over him, tucking it around him as though he were in bed, leaving his arms, his head, and his feet free.

The six of us lifted the stretcher--it had six, not four, handles--and stood wit our burden by the door, the back door that led right outside. Allen went to the door and knocked on it. Karen opened it from the outside. She wore her samurai sword and her ceremonial knife.

"We are ready," Allen said, formally. "We request a guard."

"Come. We will guard you," she replied, and stepped to the side.

We came out, awkwardly negotiating the narrow door and then walking formally, Allen processing at our right, Karen at our left. Our guard consisted of women, each of them carrying a staff of the sort used in one form of Japanese martial art (a weapon traditionally used there by women), except for Karen and her sword. Sarah and Charlie's sister marched before us. We were flanked by Nora and Raven G., and four more women fell in behind us. Together we processed around the building to the part of the Central Field where we hold the Burning Man Ceremony and where the soil is already scorched and wouldn't mind being scorched again. There, the rest of the extended school community awaited us besides a massive pile of kindling and wood and a row of recently-acquired low cast-iron tables of the kind used for garden furniture.

We laid Charlie's body on the row of tables and held a kind of viewing there for an hour or so. Then we prepared the bonfire.

We faced a serious logistical problem, here, for Charlie's friends and family and admirers extended well beyond the campus community and included people who could not be trusted to know the laws we were breaking. We had considered having a private cremation followed by a separate memorial, but somehow that did not seem right. Instead, we opted for something far more difficult and dangerous, holding a public cremation but not allowing the public to know what it was.

We covered Charlie's body, including is face, with another sheet. I expected that to be very hard--the last moment I would ever see his face--but it wasn't his anymore and I was glad to be able to stop resolutely confronting it. Then we laid fuel under the tables, so the flames would come up through the iron and claim the body. Then we covered all of it with a layer of wet plywood, then laid bundles of sticks over top--there were to be two fires, one under the body, claiming it, and the other above it, with the plywood in the middle. We would feed both, adding more plywood as needed, maintaining a kind of temporary oven until the object cooking inside it could be rendered unidentifiable. We even added bundles of sage and other aromatics to disguise and complicate the scent of burning flesh.

The strangers arrived at dusk, hundreds of them, in time to see the fires lit without knowing what they burned.

We had set up a low stage and a small sound system, and we circulated sign-up sheets for anyone who wanted to speak or perform. Once night had settled and the fire was burning brightly, Allen went first, sitting on the stage on a simple stool, and speaking calmly, intellectually, in his capacity as a psychologist, a philosopher, and a minister of sorts--he welcomed everyone, explained how the memorial would go, invited everyone to watch the performances or wander around campus, socialize, or sleep as they liked, and then he explained an idea of his that everything has an end and a beginning in both space and time. He held up one of those glitter wand things, an item reliably visible in the glow of the bonfire and the tiki-torches surrounding the stage, and said "we can see that this wand has two ends, and that after its ends it is not there--and yet the wand clearly exists. If the end of a wand in space does not invalidate or cast doubt on its existence, why should the end of a man in time invalidate or cast doubt on his?"

Then he paused and drew a ragged breath.

"I really believe that," he said, "and the idea is comforting to me, far more comforting than ideas about afterlives that seem so resonant to others but that fundamentally do not work for me. I offer it for anyone else who find themselves emotionally ill-prepared to believe what their intellects cannot accept--and yet, intellect itself only goes so far. I have no reason, no dogma, no credo to support it, but I find I cannot believe that my friend is really gone."

His voice suddenly broke.

"Charlie!" he called, looking out above our heads and into the night, "where are you? Do you see us gathered here, do you know that we all love you?" And the firelight shone on the tears on his face.

It is that moment that embodies for me, more than any other, the essence of being a master, of being of the Six--at no time is Allen ever purely professional, in the sense used in the outside world--he never pretends not to be a human being for the sake of his job, and if he needs to contradict himself, to admit to doubt, to weep, he does so. And yet even at his most personal moments he never leaves behind his role. That night he wept in public not because he could not help it, though I believe that was true also, but in order to role-model grief, in order to give us permission to do the same.

He sat a moment, weeping quietly, and then without another word left the stage. Joy read the name of the next person on the list.

The bonfire and the performances continued all night--our intention was to go from sundown to sunrise. I don't remember them all, and I don't intend to describe all of those I do remember. I did not go up myself, though I was considering it, and had my tin whistle in my pocket just in case, but it didn't feel right. Instead I watched the others and at times I mingled with the crowd, talking to the others, finding out who had come. His entire extended family seemed to be present, as were many former students, and probably the majority of those who wear the Green Ring, maybe sixty of us--some lived too far away to attend, and others have died, but those who could come did.

There were others, too, people who knew Charlie from the classes he taught at the community college, people who had read his writing, people from the AA groups he'd attended. Some of the eulogies were unintentionally funny as people who knew Charlie from one area of his life made clear they knew nothing about areas. Some made jokes about alcohol because they didn't know Charlie was in AA, and some AA members peppered their speech with 12-step truisms, apparently unaware that many in the audience wouldn't understand--none broke Charlie's anonymity openly, meaning that people who didn't get the references simply ended up confused.

Some people just delivered straight eulogies. Others sang or danced. Some did both. Allen came up on stage a second time about an hour into the event and brought his guitar. Without introduction or comment, he sang and played "The Boxer," a song I'd never paid much attention to before but have always loved since, honoring, perhaps, a time in Charlie's life and an aspect of his personality that most of us never saw, the scrappy, worse-for-wear, yet indomitable fighter.

Hours later, Sarah (the farm manager, not Steve's wife) took the stage. She, as I've said, was devoted to Charlie and had helped with his care in his last week or so. She sang "The Garden," a hymn I have heard at other funerals, but never so appropriately, since no one else found God so deeply in gardens.

And he walks with me and he talks with me
And he tells me I am his own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.

As she sang, I noticed Kit standing near the stage, yearning towards it somehow. She wanted, I'm sure, to join Sarah and sing. I thought of what I'd learned the day I'd overheard her beg Charlie for forgiveness, and I knew why she wanted to get onstage and why she didn't go.

Sarah surely meant the song in its obvious way, but there is another, vaguely blasphemous way to read the words--that the "me" in the song was not Charlie but Sarah, walking in the garden not with God, or not especially with God, but with Charlie.

Either way, there was something solitary, something that not widely shared, something Kit, anyway, could not have. As Sarah came down off the stage, she and Kit embraced and held each other for a long time.

As the hours wore towards dawn the people tending the fire judged it time to stop replenishing the plywood and let the inner and outer fires merge. They kept refueling the outer fire for a while and then let it begin to burn down. I had returned from mingling to watch the end of the fire and to see the final performances before an audience much dwindled by the need for rest and sleep.

Dawn was starting to color the sky but the air still seemed dark when Steve Bees took the stage to sing, unaccompanied, "Bridge over Troubled Water."

He had, by that point, become a very accomplished singer, if not quite to the level of Art Garfunkel, but his performance of that song on that night pulled him out beyond himself, articulating a promise he had been living, the essence of his own mastery, for the whole world--but for Charlie specifically as well.

Towards the end, Charlie had needed help, first with keeping track of his meds and fetching things, cleaning things, self-care details he wasn't always strong enough for, then help with more basic things when he could not get get out of his hammock for days, when he couldn't bring himself to eat. Mostly he sought help from women. Charlie was not what I'd call sexist--he respected his female colleagues as his equals and supported his female students as fully as his male ones--but he was somewhat traditionalist in certain ways. I think he believed that nurturing is a woman's role, not a man's, and he was not comfortable being looked after by men. He relied on Nora, on his sister, Mary, on Sarah, and on Joy, and did his best to keep men from knowing how weak he really was. And yet, there were things he needed a man for, both for bodily strength and for propriety--and he chose Steve Bees.

Please go watch a performance of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" so you can get a sense of what this was like, how the song grows gradually, building to a crescendo, a promise, to be there in the face of difficulty, selflessly.

And when the song was over Steve stumbled and his face went slack a moment as the thing that had song through him let go. He coughed a little, taking a little while to get his bearings again, and the growing light of dawn shone on the lenses of his glasses.

The bonfire behind him was dying down. There was no sign that there had ever been a body among the ashes.

Afterword: Post 5: Vigil Begins

April brought us a new puzzle.

As you'll likely recall, in early May, the school traditionally would send all the yearlings to camp on a certain island. All the Six except Greg would go as well, but they would camp separately, on retreat. Each would come out for a day or two to teach a workshop, but the real point of the trip was a group vacation for the masters and a group bonding experience for the students.

But that year, Charlie clearly could not go.

It was not exactly that he was too ill to go--he was weak, and probably could not lead his traditional hikes for students, but he could certainly have participated in the retreat, and I and another former student could have led the hikes for him. But going would have meant missing a treatment, and that he could not do.

The others did not want to go without him. He argued back, told them they were all stupid and crazy and neglecting their obligations, and then when they would not relent he at last said "thank you," in a small, reluctant voice.

But what was going to happen with the students? I and the other allies teaching that year were in on that meeting. We discussed various possibilities, from skipping the retreats utterly to sending the students on some kind of local retreat. Eventually Greg pointed out that the yearling students were adults and were perfectly capable of going to the Island themselves. He did not say, but it's also true and also relevant, that the yearlings don't know Charlie and will not mind being away from him for a while.

So, that's what we had them do.

We gave them a debit card, directions, camping equipment, and the use of the vans. We also gave them an assignment--a series of scavenger hunts (photos to be collected, not items) in teams, with the teams changing for each hunt so that everyone would be on a team with everyone else at least once. They were to use the photographs to put together a presentation for campus afterward. Charlie wrote the scavenger hunts, though he did not sign them.

It was well none of us had gone, because the first week of May, a shift occurred; Charlie, who had been living with cancer, instead began dying of it.

I'm not sure how to explain the difference--I was never told any details of his treatments, test results, etc., so I'm not sure how cold, hard facts might have aligned with subtle intuition, but we all felt it. He was more tired, more easily distracted, more frighteningly thin. He seemed, perhaps, more thoughtful. Whatever had changed, he felt it, too.

Once, while checking for scale insects on one of the hanging plants in the car port, he told me, "You know what pisses me off, Daniel? Those stories and such about people being told they have a month to live so they go sky-diving or whatever. By the time you get that news, you're sick. Really sick. It's too late for the bucket list." His attention was on the plant and his voice sounded calm, almost professional. I asked him whether there was anything he regretted not doing. At first he simply ignored my question, but after a minute he glanced at me. "Oh, come on, you know me better than that," he said.

But what did I know?

On another occasion, we walked together down along beside the sugar maple avenue and stopped, sitting in the grass so he could rest. I had little to say, but he seemed unusually talkative, telling me things about his life I hadn't heard before.

"You know, if anything happens, and the stories I tell you prove useful, you have my permission to repeat them. Anything, even the alcoholism stuff. Use your judgment." Of course, he meant if anything happened to threaten the school--at the time I thought such worries somewhat paranoid, though of course I didn't say anything. I was touched by his trust, but didn't say anything about that, either.

He told me of the founding of the school and his role in it, how he had become the Charlie I knew him to be. I'd heard parts of the story before, even from him. He was repeating himself a little, not remembering what he'd told me already. Of course, people rarely do remember--they're always surprised when I recall what they've told me better than they do.

"I never expected to spend the whole rest of my life celibate," he admitted, "but that's what I've gone and done."

"You're life's not over yet," I told him, urgent. He looked at me, amused.

"'Elderly cancer victim seeks willing woman for final fling?' I think not." he said.

But that wasn't what I meant. I could not tell him what I meant.

Charlie had not exactly retired, though he was no longer teaching classes. His life was his work, and vice versa. He spoke with and gave crazy assignments to the various students he already had, for although everyone had chosen new masters by that time, he had insisted on not giving up his role while he could still breathe. He explored and inspected campus and, to a lesser extent, the woods, giving instructions to Raven and Rick to enact on his behalf. He had a walker, a fancy one someone had found for him in a specialty shop, with purple tubing and wheels with hand breaks and a little fold-down seat. He took to using that walker, not just to keep from falling when the weakness took him, but so he could rest as needed. There he'd be, sitting calmly in that fold-down seat, halfway between here and there, getting his breath back. He'd wave or nod as people passed by him. He refused any help.

How much of his calmness was illusion I don't know, but at least some of it was. One morning, when I biked in to campus, a student who knew me shared an interesting bit of gossip he could not explain; the night before, there had been a huge crash from somewhere in the Mansion. He and the others, suddenly woken, had come out of their dorms onto the landing in time to see Security Joe hurrying downstairs, tying his bathrobe closed over his pajamas as he went.

"Go back to bed," he'd said without stopping. "I'll take care of it."

"We'd expected some kind of announcement at breakfast," the student told me, "but there was nothing."

"That's very strange," I agreed. Then, when the student had gone on his way, I hurried over to Charlie's room in the Herbarium and found what I knew I would--Charlie slowly returning somewhat wrinkled books to shelves and cleaning up broken knickknacks. In the night, alone with his helpless rage, he'd pulled the shelves over.

When he felt good, he'd go to his doctors for check-ups or permit various alternative healers, most of them presumably graduates, to come consult. When he was feeling especially bad he allowed nobody to examine him. He was serious about not wanting to be hospitalized. He had a horror of dying under a roof of any kind, and on particularly bad days he would not go inside at all, sleeping instead in a hammock slung between blue spruces next to the Mansion--I'm not sure why those non-native trees had been spared Charlie's axe, but they returned the favor, since the group of them defined an interior private space, a little room where interior branches had been pruned away and he could rest outdoors but away from prying eyes.

The trees could not contain sound, however, and on two occasions, as I approached for our arranged lunchtime visits, I heard things I was not supposed to.

The first time it was the sound of a woman crying and, over that, Charlie's voice, shouting "I am a teacher! I am not a goddam learning opportunity! And I'm telling you to take the ring!" I crept away and came back later. He did not mention the incident, and I would not have known what happened except that Nora, Charlie's primary caregiver and the owner of the sobs I had heard, spontaneously told me, without even knowing I'd overheard.

Charlie had tried to give her her ring.

As you might recall, Nora was a mastery candidate working with Joy. She was already a medical doctor, and on Charlie's suggestion had taken over his care so that she could learn from the experience of losing him. She could not earn her ring until he died, nor until she had passed the job interview or gone through the rituals at Brigid. I'm not even sure how he had procured a ring in her size in May, it was very much not how we did things. He had decided not to care. She'd tried to refuse, which was when he shouted.

"Of course I took it," she told me, looking at it on her hand. "What else could I do? But it's not like it's mine, yet."

"I don't know," I told her. "What's the wording of the ritual? 'Why do you want it,' 'Because it is mine?' Mastery is ours before we step on that stage, but who knows how much before?"

She nodded, accepting my reasoning, then said "I hate this. I hate it, and he hates it, and I hate it for him."

I could only agree.

The next thing I overheard, some days later, was Charlie's voice, quite calmly, saying "Katie. I was wondering if you'd show up."

I had been walking by, not planning to stop in and see him just then, but I stood still then, wondering who Katie might be. He could not hear anything else, just the occasional low, incomprehensible murmur, so I waited, confident I would breach no privacy, to see who might come out.

To my surprise, Kit did.

"You're Katie?" I exclaimed. of course a lot of people in our community use names that aren't the ones from the original birth certificates, and I'd always gathered that "Kit" was a Craft name, meant to honor the red fox that red-haired Kit identified with. But I'd never given a thought as to what she might have been called before.

She looked at me with tear-reddened eyes. For a moment she seemed furtive, angry.

"I didn't hear anything," I assured her, "just the name."

"Yes," she acknowledged. "Go get the story from him. I know you want to. I can't talk right now." And she hurried away.

I could not figure out whether she actually wanted me to know or not, but in the end I went in to Charlie anyway. He looked up at me as I came through the branches.

"Are you here to exorcise your demons, too?" he asked me.

"No. What that...?" I pointed behind me indicating Kit.

"She was here among others. Everybody and their mother's cousin seems to want to have a death-bed scene today." He was not happy.

"Who else?"

"Sarah. This morning. She came to beg me to return to the Church. I should have expected it. She's always worried about my soul."

"What did you tell her?" I asked, having trouble imagining Charlie in a church of any kind, let alone the Catholicism of his youth, a faith I've always associated with stone, with stained glass, with the works of human hands.

"I told her to send her priest, why not?" At my evident surprise he grunted in amusement. "I never left the Church in the first place," he explained. "Except during my drinking, when I left pretty much everything. Other than that, I've spent my life pursuing truth. The search has taken me in heterodox directions, but if anything I've ever done has offended my God, then I am heartily sorry."

He did not sound repentant, but his humility was entirely genuine. I waited, to see what more of the story he wished to tell.

"Kit...Katie...wanted my forgiveness," he said, after a bit.

"For what?"

But he looked at me as though I really should have known, and indeed she has treated him badly the whole time I've known them, and doubtless before.

"I was her teacher," he explained, and it explained much. I'd heard the same from Sarah, years earlier, but I had not known any of them well enough at the time to understand.

"What did you tell her?" I asked.

"I chewed her out, of course. This wasn't for me, if it was, she could have come to me years ago, when I wasn't sick. Now she wants to avoid feeling guilty when I die." His opinion of such an order of priorities dripped from his voice. "I told her that if lets go of the nonsense that caused her to act like a spiteful child, she may consider herself retroactively forgiven by me, even if I'm already gone. One last assignment from me, I suppose, to be graded by the student."

We spoke a little longer before I realized that Charlie, despite being amped-up by anger, was tired. I let him rest.

Later that day I saw Kit and asked if she wanted to talk. She walked towards the Formal Garden and I followed her. She stopped and so I stopped before we got there, beside the magnolia at the corner of the Mansion.

"You did ask him," she said, not looking at me.

"She I not have?"

She shrugged.

"Did he tell you what a spiteful child I've been?"

In those very words. But what I said was "Frankly, Kit, he didn't need to."

She started to smile, embarrassed, but then turned towards me suddenly and flushed.

"Did he tell you why? I bet he didn't. Did he tell you how I did everything he asked me to do, every single fucking thing, and it had exactly the effect he said it would have--I transformed, I found my way to a truth you can't find in a book or a fantasy, or an entheogenic drug, only direct experience and a reasoning mind, and I've based my life on that experience. And everything that I've learned, everything that I've taught, everything that I am, it's all just so much fluff to him. I'm like you--one of the most dedicated, successful students he's ever had. And he will never, never notice."

I had nothing to say--or too much to say for any of it to ever come out. She'd been stupid in her anger and her hurt, far stupider and more cruel than I'd ever thought her capable, but I could not be sure I would not have reacted just as badly were I in her shoes. Stepping into Charlie's shoes at that moment felt harder--though it's true I've taken very few of Kit's teachings to heart. Her kind of witchcraft has not called to me, and I have difficulty believing it. How much of that is Charlie's doing, and how much is simply me seeing what he saw, because it is there to see?

But I did not speak. I put my arms around her, folding her head to my chest, and she, for the first time treating me wholly as an equal instead of as a student, wept in my embrace and took some measure of comfort from me.

Afterword: Post 3: The Sword Dance

After Charlie’s diagnosis, I made an effort to come to campus more often than I had in months. Partly I wanted to get to know the new students so that I would not seem a stranger when I began teaching the next year, but of course I wanted to spend time with Charlie while I could. He resisted my attempts, saying he didn’t need my neediness to remind him he was dying. A fair point, especially as I saw plenty of other people seeking his attention for the same reason, but I’m embarrassed to admit he had to tell me more than once.

On one of those occasions, in a rare moment of more obvious kindness, he explained to me that what I was trying to do wouldn’t work anyway.

“What I’m trying to do?”

“Yeah, you’re trying to save me up for later. But there is no saving up for later, just as there is no making up for lost time in the past. There is only only this moment we’re in now.”

Eventually we returned to our old habit of lunch once a week, most weeks.

Being on campus often also allowed me to spend more time with the other masters and to check in with Steve, who was then on track to claim his ring next Brigid—and I could see why. He seemed, not wiser in any definable way, but happier, more up-beat, more solid. Even his sadness, his anger, his fear, had developed a relaxed clarity.

I had no particular role on campus, so I spent a lot of time wandering around, exploring the progress of the autumn, and bumping into people and chatting. Often, Rick and Raven G. would be there also, bringing themselves up to speed to take over Charlie’s forestry, hunting, and landscaping duties. In fact, Rick had taken over hunting already. The three of us, too, would have lunch once a week.

From the others, from Allen and Kit, Greg and Joy (Karen and I continued to barely talk, though there has never been anything acrimonious between us), I heard stories. I learned that Joy had been the one to insist Charlie go to the doctor when she noticed him turn yellow—the first major metastasis was in his liver, which is typical for pancreatic cancer. I also learned that Greg, who, remember, no longer had any classes, had volunteered to take Charlie to all his appointments and treatments and so forth. It perpetually surprised me that Greg could drive (past-tense now only because Greg doesn’t drive anymore—he’s still with us), he’s so all but literally monastic, but Charlie’s driving was bad at the best of times and he needed company.

Allen told me of coming upon Greg and Charlie just as they were coming home from the first of these outings, seeing Greg drop Charlie off near the front of the Mansion before taking the car back to its lot. Allen hurried up to ask how things had gone and found Charlie in something of an emotional tizzy. They started to talk before Charlie realized that somebody might be able to over-hear him.

“Get me out of here!” he pleaded, so Allen took him out to the Edge of the World, where there is no cover behind which someone might lurk unseen without meaning to. But once out there, he wouldn’t unburden himself either, insisting that he had no time left for self-pity. Allen disagreed.

“This is grief,” he explained, bluntly, “and grief is a necessary form of psychological adjustment. Under the circumstances, I’d say you have no time left to avoid it.”

Charlie stopped quite still.

“I’m glad,” he said, “that my best friend is a psychologist and can think for me.” They had been walking slowly along, and Charlie started walking again, but Allen didn’t. After a moment, Charlie looked back at him.

“I didn’t realize I was your best friend,” Allen said.

“You’re not. I meant some other psychologist around here,” Charlie grumped, and Allen laughed and they walked on together. But Allen—what he told me later was:

“I really didn’t know. I should have. We work together, we all but live together—I don’t think we’ve gone more than a day without talking since sometime in 1987—he’s helped raise my kids—of course I’m his best friend, me and Greg, and he’s mine, along with Kit and Lo. But I didn’t think about it because I didn’t have to think about it. He was always just there. And now?”

Allen could be of no help to the rest of us in our grief processes. He needed us to help him instead.

Another person joined the team in those months—Nora. I don’t mean my friend, Nora, the bee-keeping witch, I mean Nora the medical student. I’ve mentioned her, back when she was a novice. She was close with Charlie then, which I noticed and puzzled at, as she wasn’t his student, but she and I had never really talked much. In the years since, she had graduated, first from our program and then from medical school. Midway through the residency process, though, she had stopped, saying she was exhausted and something was missing. She had returned as a candidate in order to find out what that “something might be. She had come as Joy’s student, but Joy was not giving her much in the way of direction, having decided that Nora’s own ideas for her future needed to be allowed to bubble up. Charlie disagreed.

Nora had been talking to Charlie about her ideas and her options when he suddenly said “I think you need to lose a patient.”

It took her, she told me, about a minute to realize what he was talking about. Pedagogically, he meant that she needed to go through the trauma of seeing a patient in her care die, and she needed to do it within the caring environment of the school so that the experience could be transformable rather than merely survivable. She would be set up to fail, much as Eddie had been. Practically and personally, of course, Charlie meant himself as her patient.

She did not become his doctor—she’s not an oncologist, for one thing—but she became his primary caregiver. She learned of all aspects of his treatment and kept track of his progress, asked questions of his doctors that he didn’t know to ask, made sure the efforts of the entire team stayed coordinated and sensible, and fought his insurance provider when he was too tired to do it himself. What home nursing care he ended up needing, she agreed to provide. She learned a holistic approach to healing, not in terms of methodology (she tends still to refer to most forms of alternative medicine as “woo”) but in terms of treating the patient as a whole person, an entire organism, a system, rather than as a collection of inter-related and sometimes broken parts.

And Charlie talked with her about his experience as I believe he talked to no one else. He had to, to help her, and I think that made it easier for him.

For the rest of October and into November, Charlie seemed normal, albeit physically weak and easily tired. Those who had been around him over the summer said he actually seemed healthier—he was no longer yellow, for one thing, and when he wasn’t fresh from a treatment he seemed more energetic, more focused, even happier. He felt better, clearly.

Around the middle of December, though, he started to slide ever so slightly. He started losing weight again and complained of strange pains. He said he could not sleep well. A yearling told me she’d heard a noise on her way in to the Mansion through the Green Room and found Charlie sitting on the stairs looking surprised. She wondered if he had fallen. He never said anything about it to anyone.

We heard that his chemo had stopped working. They switched him to a different chemotherapy agent and he sprang back, but not to where he’d been before.

I missed Samhain on campus—June and I had a small celebration on our own—but I made a point of attending at Yule, and for the first time joined the all-night party up on the masters’ floor. By chance, I was the only one up there who wasn’t either of the Six or immediate family of the same. Even the various non-teaching masters all had somewhere else to be, though they all planned to join us the next day. It was a very cozy gathering. I’d always wondered what those Yule parties were like, and I wasn’t disappointed, though mostly it was pretty low-key. There was a lot of good food, good drink (most of it non-alcoholic), and music, some of it recorded, much of it live. Mostly we sat around and talked or played Pictionary. They had a little Yule tree up there, a live balsam fir in a pot that I learned spent most of the winter outside in a little courtyard garden they have. Its ornaments were a mix of beloved holiday heirlooms from the families of the masters themselves.

As the night began to shift from late to early, though, Charlie stood up and everyone got quiet. I remembered having heard that he made it a practice to go out to greet the dawn much earlier than the others—the Six are always up on the mountain before the students get there, and it is they who play “Here Comes the Sun” over and over and over as the sun comes up, but dawn comes in stages and sun-up is only the final stage. The gradual lightening starts much earlier, and the first stage has already begun by the time most begin their climb—most of the Six don’t arrive more than a few minutes before the students do. But Charlie had made it his practice to go up much earlier, to be in place before the beginning of “astronomical twilight,” which is when the stars barely start to dim before the coming sun—which won’t be up for almost another two hours. And since Charlie wanted to be in place before that, he’d go out even earlier, leaving the Mansion to climb the mountain sometime around five A.M.

Only—and this was clear in the sudden silence—no one was sure he was strong enough to climb a mountain in the dark and the cold, nobody liked the idea of his attempting to do so alone, and no one had any idea what to say to him about it.

Except me.

I opened my mouth and said the first thing that came to me; “Charlie, can I come with you? I want to see what it’s like.”

And I did. I was still in some sense his student and maybe I’ll always be. If he was going somewhere, I wanted to follow. And while I had another motive for asking, and I saw in his face that he knew it and understood what I was trying to do, but I was not being disingenuous. And so he accepted and let me look after both his person and his pride.

“It’ll be silence after we leave this room,” he warned me.

“I figured. I just need to change my clothes.”

Before we could make our way out of the little group of couches and people, though, Kit stood up. I had been peripherally aware that she’d been breathing heavily and staring fixedly into space ever since Charlie stood, like someone trying to nerve themselves up to do something scary. Now, she stood up abruptly, violin in hand, and Charlie and I both sat down, expectant.

She played “The Sword Dance,” the musical component of a Morris dance associated with the winter solstice. It’s on the “Christmas Revels” album, which despite the name is mostly about Yule, and it’s an album all of us were thoroughly familiar with, since we on campus play the recording often and perform selections from it more often than that. And we all knew that the tune is preceded on the album by a few spoken lines:

“First comes Christmas, then comes spring;

Like winter I must die.

Then to life again, like spring!

Dance, men, the Sword Dance now for me!”

It’s a curious thing, this Sword Dance, since it ends with a simulated decapitation, a voluntary sacrifice presumably meant to identify the tribal chief with the cycles of the Earth and Sun, thing thing that dies and yet comes back, and in dying and coming back lives forever. In playing the song, Kit suggested the lyric and with it a whole complex of metaphysical ideas and emotional association that none of us needed to have explained—we all knew it. The experience was as immediate for us as if a Christian preacher had held aloft a Cross, meaning to invoke everything the Cross represents.

The dance involves the clashing of swords, heard on the recording as periods of rhythmic percussion. We spontaneously added that sound by clapping in time at the correct points. None of us said anything, we all just clapped along, and Charlie did nothing at all except listen and look slightly stunned.

When we were done, he stood, looked at Kit and then the rest of us.

“Thank you,” he said.