Eric Leber wrote this biographical and autobiographical memoir of Boris and his own life:
Early years
My brother Boris is five years older than I. There is a picture of us taken when he was eleven and I six. He was performing a chemistry experiment in his basement laboratory; amidst the test tubes and beakers he is sweetly serious, intent, quiet, calm, in control. I am gazing, not at the fascinating equipment but at him-----in an attitude of utter adoration.
When we played Batman and Robin he was, of course, Batman. As Robin I wore a bright red remnant of some former costume; he had the mother-made pale blue cape with the spiral snake clasp. I always envied him his finery but by the time I finally inherited the glorious blue cape, I wasn't interested in being a comic strip hero. A flock of more memories.....
I contracted a stiff neck when I was fourish and complained stridently: "It hurts!" to anyone who would listen. After telling Boris just how much it hurt, he looked at me solicitously and asked how far I could turn my head toward the hurt side. I gingerly rotated my head two inches to the right, wincing noticeably. He frowned sympathetically. "Tch, tch," said he, "I'm so sorry…and how far could you turn it before?" "About this far," said I, swiveling my head over my right shoulder.
I was seven, Boris twelve when he hosted a party at our house-with girls! There was music and refreshments and chatter and great gouts of laughter---and raging electricity generated from the current that passed between girls and boys.
I sat on the floor in a corner and did my best to become invisible; they were so, so worldly-wise, so sophisticated-so grownup. "Oooos" and "ahhhhhs" rang silently through me and I stayed unnoticed for most of the party until finally crumpling into sleep.
To memory, it was my brother rather than my parents who unwittingly introduced me to the exciting, frightening realm of sexuality, even then awakening a longing for that fruit at once most delicious and forbidden. Then there was music…..
Through the early years music consisted of hearing my mother, Frances, singing lullabies, listening to classical music on shellac records---and hearing Boris practice, for soon after I was born Boris began taking piano lessons. Many times I fell asleep listening to him playing the J.S. Bach Two and Three part Inventions.
Of course I wanted to emulate him and, though not consciously, I also saw playing the piano as another way of competing with him for the attention and love of my parents and relatives. It was a competition that I had probably won at birth, for somewhere, somehow, I always knew as did he, that, of the two, I was the favored son.
This we both suffered for far too many years…..
Excited by the possibility of their sons becoming a violin and piano duo, my parents bought a kid-sized fiddle and urged me to begin violin lessons. I took the violin out of its case, plucked the strings, drew a few wails out of them with the bow, then put it back, never to touch it again. I wanted to play the piano, not the violin and at age six I began lessons.
Shortly before my eighth birthday we moved from Leonia, New Jersey, a then-small town just across the George Washington Bridge from New York City, to Toms River, where my grandparents had a chicken farm.
For another five years I followed the glowing arc of my brother's growing proficiency and recognition as a pianist. He was highly talented and when he was a junior in high school took third place in a state-wide piano competition. After he left to enlist in the Air Force, then to go to Rutgers University, I became the "best" pianist in our hometown of Toms River, New Jersey-that is, until an ego-shattering recital convinced me I was the worst, rather than best.
Boris loved folk music and in his teens brought Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, et al to our ears. He bought an acoustic guitar and taught himself to play both folk and classical. I followed his tracks some two years later, when he, my father and I drove to New York City to spend the day prowling the pawn shops, searching for a good cheap guitar.
Eventually we found one for twenty five dollars with just a few dents and scratches, the metal strings worn but the neck only slightly bowed. Driving home I sat in the back seat with Boris, who taught me how to finger two chords: E and A minor. I played these over and over, even after my fingers began bleeding. (There are a surprising number of folk songs that only need two chords.)
In so many ways Boris was trailblazer, guide and companion. His passionate love of music and musicking ignited mine still further when he introduced me to jazz and we went to Birdland, the famous New York City jazz club, to hear Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Jackson, George Shearing, et al.
In high school we both took chemistry and physics from Don Davis. Now my yearbook says Don Davis was "Well-known for his dry sense of humor." But really he was still a kid, and Boris and I, reminiscing years later, discovered we shared the same highlights of those classes, which came when Mr. Davis pulled down the black window shades and locked the door before mixing mysterious substances together that inevitably produced window-rattling explosions, great gouts of light and pungent odors that lingered long after we opened all the windows and doors to dissipate the evidence of our shared naughtiness.
Boris ranked high in both chemistry and physics; his interest in chemistry persisted and he graduated from Rutgers with a degree in ceramic engineering, though he never worked in that field.
I enjoyed the explosions and other dramatic experiments Mr. Davis conducted and he liked me. As the student with the highest grades in chemistry and physics, I received the Bausch and Lomb award for Science Achievement.
My parents couldn't afford to send either of us to other than the state university, and when the Rutgers recruiter came by in my senior high school year, he asked, "What are you going to major in?"
I said I didn't know. Emotionally, I was already a dropout, though it would take several more years and three college experiences for me to realize this. I was going to college primarily because my parents, aunts and uncles expected me to.
"Hmmmm," said the recruiter, as he glanced over my records. "Bausch and Lomb award, eh? Why don't you go into chemistry? It's a growing field. You'll make lots of money." And so I became a chem major-----for a year.
I did just' fine in chemistry, but at the end of the final semester I was 175 pages behind in a very slim calculus textbook. The final test was close to incomprehensible to me, and though the instructor gave me a C for the course, I knew my career in chemistry had ended.
(Perhaps the Rutgers recruiter, when interviewing Boris, had said, "Hmmmm; high marks in chemistry and physics. Why don't you become a ceramic engineer?")
Following Boris to New York City
Now let's backtrack to World War II, when Boris enlisted in the Air Force. Though he looked quite dashing in his uniform, the war was to end before he went into action. (When the Korean war erupted, we met in a New York City café and agreed to flee to Canada if one or both of us were drafted. We weren't.)
During his service he used his first name, Alexander and became "Al" for awhile, then reverted to Boris when he returned home, soon to move to New York City, where he had always yearned to live. There he eddied into photography and for a while worked as a professional photographer in partnership with his best friend from high school. Meanwhile, my career in chemistry aborted, I obtained a scholarship to Antioch College, where I spent the next two and a half years, this time as a Creative Arts Major, a designation which allowed me to take a minimum of required subjects and a maximum of electives. After being expelled from Antioch, Boris took me in and I lived on Jane Street in Greenwich Village, New York City with him until I found work and built up enough equity to rent an apartment.
His then-friends were, mmm, yes, different. Each one was a unique character (as we all are); together they were a band of non-violent outlaws, unwilling, really unable to disappear into a society that offered conformity as the price for supposed security. They rarely had steady jobs, which left a lot of free time to hang out together and do the Village dance of talking, drinking, doping and sexing.
Once again I was at my brother's party, still observer and self-declared stranger rather than participant. The party lasted for years…..
One of Boris' friends was studying to be an architect and worked sixteen hours a day for three months completely remodeling the Jane Street apartment. Originally composed of the standard living room, bedroom, kitchen and bath, it evolved into two rooms with bath: a narrow kitchen and a long living room with a sleeping loft. The entire apartment was painted dull black and was lit primarily by homemade hanging lamps fabricated of black-painted tin cans dropping down from the ceiling on black cords. During the day it looked like a set from a dark play. At night the lamps created narrow shafts and pools of light that accentuated the darkness between them. In a strange way it seemed that the darkness shimmered while light became dull and opaque. It was a perfect setting for the drama that unfolded there.
The ongoing drama came alive at night when Boris' friends gathered in his apartment. They too seemed predominantly dark, cave dwellers neither illuminated by the shallow shine of conventional society nor, as yet, by their essentially bright hearts and keen minds. Black crows on a winter day, they were the color of despair, resignation and doubt of Love. They felt-and acted-as aliens in an alien country, unwilling to submit to social custom yet afraid to dance naked in the public eye. No one wanted to risk being Christ so they gathered in the catacomb of the Jane Street apartment and talked and talked and talked. Though I mainly looked and listened, just as I had when I was eight years old, I knew them well.
I was the same as they.....
School again---and then…..
Guilt arose anew as I heard the reproachful, cajoling voices of my mother and various aunts and uncles saying silently: "Eric! Go to college! Make something out of yourself!" Once again I had to declare my major. This time I chose literature and enrolled in City College of New York.
I had attended CCNY for two weeks and was sitting in psychology class when the door opened, a young man came in and walked over to whisper in my ear: "The dean wants to see you." I didn't even know where the dean's office was and I couldn't imagine why he wanted to see me. Directed there, I entered the office to find him sitting behind his desk, his face as expressionless as his desktop.
I looked at him questioningly. There was a short silence, then he breathed out a sigh before saying, "Your father had a heart attack this morning and died."
I went into shock, put my feelings into deep freeze and acted "normal."
"Do you want to use my phone?" he said. I called Boris and an hour later we were on a bus to the farm in Toms River where our mother awaited us.
Birth and Death
Neither at home nor in school were the two most transformative events of life: birth and death ever discussed. Yes; I knew that something had to happen between a man and a woman for a baby to be born, but just what that was remained cloaked behind a wall of silence. That invisible but very palpable wall came inscribed with an invisible sign: "Don't ask!!" And though I was burning with curiosity, I didn't.....until I was in sixth grade.
Lunch time and recess: boys gathered with boys, girls with girls. One day I heard and felt the girls unusually animated and I sauntered by, hoping to hear what they were talking about. Seeing me near, they lowered their voices, so that all I gleaned was the whispered sound "tex." Coming home that day, I went to my mother and said, "Today the girls were all talking about "tex"; what does it mean?"
The color drained from her face. Then she visibly gathered herself together and in a very strained voice gave me the Kotex or menstruation lecture. What stood out that day was the high charge radiating first from the girls, then my mother. It was the same charge I had first experienced at my brother's party. Behind the wall of silence was no-boy's land, a vast, mysterious play of energies, a most attractive, even compelling fire I knew I shouldn't play with. Once again I had encountered the taboo that attempted to hide the workings of sex and sexuality, coupling and conception, and for decades that followed I vibrated with that highly charged mix of fear and excitement I experienced so strongly when I was eight, then eleven, then on throughout my life.
In my family (as in most then) dying and death were as taboo as sexing and birthing. Before Harry, my father, transitioned I had experienced the deaths of my grandparents and an uncle who had died in his late forties. More accurately, I hadn't experienced these deaths, but, with the aid of parents and relatives, had avoided participating fully in them. In a sense Grandpa, Grandma and uncle Mac just disappeared. They were whisked away to the mortuary and I wasn't invited to the funerals. Did they think I was too young? Did they want to protect me? There is no longer anyone to ask. Memory says I felt relieved that I didn't have to see the bodies or go to the ceremonies. Now there was our father…..
Boris and I got off the bus at our driveway, still swollen with unshed tears. As always, we walked in the back door, through the short entry and into the kitchen. Mom was there as she was so often, yet something had changed. She looked taller, even regal, and I now see her changed posture as evidence that she had already taken on being father as well as mother. It was a bearing of strength and will which, though she tried, couldn't hide the immense sorrow that had always been present in her, the heartache of being Jewish, uprooted, alien and homeless in a world still at war----and even more the ongoing sacrifice of her passions as dancer and writer to assume her primary role as housewife.
Now the bright blade that was my father was gone, and though she would often joy in her family and friends, sorrow dominated the rest of her life.
We embraced in silence, and she said, "Come to the living room." She sat down in the
puffy armchair in the northwest corner by the bookshelves. We sat on the floor at her feet, one on each side of the chair. Dry-eyed, she told us Harry had been working in the big chicken house when he had a massive heart attack and died instantly. Already the body had been taken to the mortuary. Dry-eyed, we listened. She finished speaking, and there was an eternity of silence that lasted for a few seconds. Then she said, "Now you can cry"---and the dam burst. At first, just Boris and I cried, clinging to her and being held as little children might.
Then with a long, keening wail her monumental control finally gave way and we wept as one grieving body.
I know now that we cried, not only for the loss of father and husband, but for all the sorrows of our separate and together lives. When the flood subsided, I felt washed, clean, raw, quiet, new-present. The torrent of tears had swept away all the hurts I had gathered, held onto and hidden for a lifetime. For a space of time we were freed from our roles, our identities, free to be, free to reveal how far beyond much we loved each other and the one we mourned. There was such sweetness in sorrowing together and we three received each other as never before.
I say "we three" because at that time I believed those who died were no longer present. It was my brother's death, years later, which dismantled that belief.
When my father's body was returned from the mortuary, I went into shock. Wax injections and makeup had turned him into stranger, a solemn clown, a clumsy caricature of the man I knew. I was angry, and after one look in the coffin in our living room I never looked again. What had I thought? That death would leave something recognizable of him, that somehow he would still be here? I only know I was offended by the makeover that presented an idealized image of him. I didn't see, then, that this just continued our society's common practice of presenting idealized versions of ourselves while alive and after death. And though I was offended I did not then see I was doing that very same thing.
The funeral eulogies continued this well-meant charade. Not only was the body in the coffin a crude mockery of the man, most of the words were spoken about him, rather than of, or even to him. Only years later when compassion had more of her way with me did I see that those who spoke were shyly doing their best to honor a man they truly loved even while feeling bound by society's taboo against freely expressing that love.
I, too, had capitulated completely to the taboo and remained seated and silent. Many years would pass before I spoke my heart to my father.....
On the way down to Toms River, Boris and I agreed we would move back and help run the farm. After the funeral we drove back to New York to pack up our city lives. A week later we returned to the farm each had thought he had left forever. So much for "forever" which, yes, continues to continue, but rarely according to our hopeful and fearful predictions.
We stayed on the farm for a year and a bit. During that time Mom took on Dad's functions as manager, bookkeeper and bill payer, while continuing to cook and clean house. As so many women do, she ate everything that Life put on her plate and continued to care for family, friends and Nature. She was a great gardener…..
Yet that strong streak of sorrow that had always colored her being now widened and deepened at Dad's death. They too were outlaws and had lived very unconventional lives, separately and together. Both Jewish communist atheists, Harry had helped found two local farmer's co-operatives, then considered dangerously radical by many. Frances had studied with Martha Graham then drawn together a modern dance troupe called Rebel Arts.
("Rebel" is "Leber" spelled backwards, in case you hadn't noticed.)
Yet they had also taken on the conventional roles: he as provider, she as caretaker of the hearth. And though they had once come close to separating, death had left them still lovers---and her still dependent on him, for his transition left a void that was, for her, never filled. It seemed that a piece of her heart went with him, and from that time forth, the naturally fierce light of her dwindled inward as she slowly withdrew into a self-imposed solitude. And I?
I was self-occupied, consumed with the problems and possibilities of "my" life.....and I didn't want to feel and acknowledge her sorrow and her need. As with my father and brother, I only spoke my heart freely and fully to her after her transition. Deep regret----- coupled with great gratitude for her unfailing love.
Turning toward the City again
The year we spent on the farm gently shepherded Boris and me into the next major phase of each of our lives.
Boris became interested in making jewelry and set up a workbench in the basement where he began making pieces, primarily using silver, ebony and semi-precious stones. When he moved back to New York, he got a job as an apprentice in a Greenwich Village jewelry shop. Over time he began using gold, platinum and precious stones and finally made the enormous leap from Greenwich Village to Madison Avenue, where he established his own store, called, simply: "Boris."
I resumed piano lessons, driving to New York for weekly lessons. Harry Cumpson was a short barrel of a man with black, bushy eyebrows, a wide smile that revealed broad teeth and soft, dark-brown eyes that shone with his passion for music. He was a professional musician who performed on and taught both piano and harpsichord, and his one room apartment with kitchen alcove had little space for anything other than the Steinway grand, the harpsichord and multiple shelves stuffed with music books. He loved Bach and he loved me, and our hour-long lessons often stretched to two or three.
Though I had heard Wanda Landowska records, this was the first time I heard and played Bach on a harpsichord. I wanted one! and after some research, found a German maker that would build and ship a two-register harpsichord for $800. I ordered one and three months later a stout, triangular wooden packing crate arrived at the farm, studded with stout nails.
Many extracted nails later, I gingerly prized the top of the crate off, to find a thick layer of excelsior beneath. Under that was another case, this one made of lead tightly soldered along the seams to keep out the salt sea air. Now what?!
Stewing in a frothy mix of anticipation and frustration, I puzzled over the problem of how to open the lead case without damaging the harpsichord which might lie very close beneath. Two hours passed---and then the solution appeared out of the fertile void, in that usual miraculous, magical way. Whose voice was it that said, "The harpsichord is canned. Use a can opener."
I sprinted to the kitchen, scrabbled through the odds and ends drawer and found one of those now old-fashioned single blade can openers that work by levering the blade around the can top. For the next hour I levered, very, very slowly and very, very carefully, then Boris and I extracted the harpsichord from the case. I removed the several layers of thick paper wrapping and there it was: brand-new, blond and gleamingly polished, all ready to set upon its three screw-in legs.
Opening the keyboard cover, I played my first chord on my first harpsichord. It went "chhranngggg" for of course it was completely out of tune----and I didn't know how to tune it. I did my best by ear, which left it just badly rather than completely out of tune. Next lesson Harry Cumpson showed me how to tune, and after a bit of practice, both harpsichord and I sounded much better.
Now, twenty some years after I first heard Boris play Bach on the piano, I could play those same two and three part inventions on the instrument Bach used.
The Promised Land, gone forever
The promised land of many Jews who emigrated from Poland and Russia was a chicken farm in New Jersey. My grandparents on my mother's side faithfully followed the prescribed route to the promised land by emigrating to New York City's lower East Side, moving uptown to the Bronx and then to thirteen acres of New Jersey country, with plenty of room for the chickens to be ranged as they grew, then housed when they began laying.
Chicken farming around Toms River had begun in the l920's and 30's and flourished during World War II. So it was that my grandparent's farm supported six members of three generations with a flock of 3,000 White Leghorns. Until I was fifteen I thought I'd be a chicken farmer for the rest of my life. Then, after the war, the advent of corporate farming generated the huge egg factories that drove egg prices down as feed costs rose, making it impossible to feed a family of three and stay solvent even with a flock of 6,000.
When this became undeniably apparent, we put the farm on the market-Dad had once been offered $80,000 for the farm-but of course no one wanted to buy a chicken farm.. Eventually my mother sold it for $28,000 to a developer who razed the buildings, leveled the hill which used to draw our friends to winter sledding, cut down the little forest on the property and turned the farm into a small housing development.
Then she too returned to New York City, where she worked as a secretary and lived-where else?-in the lower East Side in a low rental development, one of those beehive buildings with concrete courtyards where the few trees and patches of lawn look out of place and no one knows their neighbors.
School---yet again
We hired a man to do help around the farm until it was sold, and I began researching music schools, applied to Mannes College of Music in New York City and, on Harry Cumpson's recommendation, was accepted into next fall's semester as a harpsichord major.
Boris also moved back to the City to begin his apprenticeship as a Greenwich Village jeweler, but though we both lived in New York, we gradually saw less and less of each other as our lives unfolded and forked. He moved from Greenwich Village (the lower west side of the city) to the upper east side. I moved from the lower east side to the upper west side. We both played out the common dis-ease: being obsessed with "my" life, and so our intimacy seemed to wither from lack of exercise. (I think of Mole in The Wind and the Willows, who was so enchanted by his "new" life with Ratty that he forgot all about his beloved home, until----but do read the book, if you haven't.…..)
During that period I fathered sons Lorn and Jeremy with Jennifer, and he daughter Deirdre with Madeleine. As before, his interests and talents in music, photography and now gourmet cooking continued, and those too-infrequent times we visited their apartment were
always delicious affairs, with fine music, fine food, fine wine, fine conversation and, most of all, a renewal of that unique intimacy only brothers experience. And yet I was still unwilling, even afraid to feel how very, very dear he was to me…..
We touched primarily through the telephone, and even this touch became less frequent when I moved to Maine with my family, to take up my new vocation as dropout, while Boris continued his presentation as Successful Madison Avenue Jeweler. I felt his struggle strongly: the enormous energy that he had to put out to maintain his presentation, his position, and I felt his stressing strongly even as I turned my heart-eyes away from him, preoccupied with my own drama.
And yet our phone conversations always stirred my heart, and the infrequent times we visited were overflowing with humor, delight-and a slow-growing gratitude for his loving, de-Lightful presence that was yet to flower fully.
Death---again and anew
Once again we were drawn together by death, this time our mother's.
I was playing a concert in New York City, to which I had invited Boris and Mom. The concert had gone very well, and I was euphoric when he came back stage to congratulate me and the ensemble---yet he looked grave, troubled…….
"Wonderful concert," he said---then he told me Frances had had a heart attack that day and was in the hospital. She had made him promise not to tell me until after the concert. She died soon after, and, perhaps still affected by our father's funeral, we decided not to have one for/with her, a decision I came to regret, especially after attending the celebratory wake of a Maine woman who had planned and carried out her wonderfully wide-awake transition.
More years living as a freelance musician in New York followed for me, while Boris became more widely known as a fine designer of fine jewelry. Then, one 3:00 am morning after coming home from concertizing, I felt the full force of the fear, hurt and anger of millions of New Yorkers, some living within a few feet, others only a few miles away. At that moment the cycle of city life turned again toward country living and my family agreed that our time in New York was over.
That summer and fall we looked for farmland, first in Vermont (too expensive), then in Maine where we found, bought and moved to a farm with a red house, attached shed and barn, three hay fields and forest land, all on 113 acres on top of Tory Hill near Phillips, pop. 500.
Boris and his family visited us there, and there he photographed the Red House, surrounding landscapes, mountains and the various animals and humans then living on the farm. As always, these pictures were luminous with his sensitivity to shape, movement, light and feeling. Seen then and now, they remind me just how very talented he was. Wholly given to his passions he was boyish, expansive, overflowing with humor, strength, sweetness and delight in Life. Thus he helped restore me to that brothering which was and is such a strong root of my life…….
……and still I felt his struggle, that common conflict so many of us experience when our heart's passions are cooled, even frozen, and so much energy is given to ego-survival or the ongoing attempt to "prove" we are lovable.
We were such shy lovers, he and I…….
In an October that had become highly charged, I traveled to New Jersey to teach at the bi-annual Hudson Guild music workshop I had directed for many years. The charge that had so energized me was a deliciously long letter I had just gotten from Boris. He and his wife Madeleine had separated, he had moved into another apartment and was living alone for the first time in many years. He wrote: "I'm really scared but excited at the same time. I don't know what's going to happen but I want to find out."
Reading, eating that letter I felt him more vulnerable, open and available then ever before. I called him immediately, and we made a date to hang out together on the Monday after my workshop. Joy…………….
The workshop began on Friday evening and continued through Sunday afternoon. On Saturday his daughter Deirdre called me there, to tell me Boris had had a heart attack and died instantly, just as our father had. Writing now, I still feel a faint aftershock of that shock which brought me to New York City the following Monday to be with Madeleine and Deirdre, but not Boris.
All I could feel then was the immense grief of irreversible loss……..
Our extended Maine family of twelve dwindled, and the cycle of country living once again turned toward city life, this time San Francisco. Daughters Bev and Margy had gone on ahead; Ginny, two year old Cassie and I followed, driving leisurely across the country, camping wherever we stopped for the day. It was a wonderful hiatus, a luscious time to be a threesome, traveling between homes.
"And Death shall have no Dominion"
The face of Love grows wrinkles,
while Love remains unchanged.
When I vanish from sight,
will you still hold me sweetly,
even as you miss me?
About a year after moving to San Francisco, I found myself thinking about Boris more and more. I felt I had never said goodbye to him, so I planned a ceremony to do just that. I had several jewelry pieces: rings, bracelets and earrings he had made for our mother, and a collection of photographs he had taken, including those beautiful pictures of farm and family he had taken in Maine.
I would go to the sea, half an hour from our apartment on Bartlett Street in the Mission, walk the beach and say my final farewell at sunset.
I made a packet of the photographs, put the jewelry in a velvet bag, got into the car and drove toward Fort Funston beach. As I shut the door and started the engine I realized, with a sweet shock: I wasn't alone. There was a palpable presence-----and it was Boris. Suddenly I was freed from my life-long belief that the dead were gone, gone, permanently removed from all possibility of contact, conversation and communion. The veil of belief dissolved in the brightness of Being and I was restored to being with my brother and knew he had never left.
Joy fountained forth as I was liberated from the illusion of separation and loss: my brother was here, I could feel him, his presence so obvious, so completely palpable I wasn't surprised, only delighted that we were together again.
We drove to the ocean and I babbled out everything I had never said to him. I told him how much I loved him, how grateful I was that he had big-brothered me and played such a major role in awakening me to music and music-making-to Life Itself. I told him how much I admired and enjoyed his questing mind, his great artistry, his humor and the perseverance which so often carried him through immense self-doubt.
When we reached the beach I parked the car, and carrying the photographs and jewelry, began walking the sands, alternately laughing and crying as I talked to him. I reminisced about our adventures together, those times of great intimacy when I was given to him who loved me so much. And I told him how very, very sorry I was for competing with him for love, that I deeply regretted not writing, calling and hanging out with him more.
I talked for hours, always felt him listening and, yes, speaking to me in a tongue that was at once unfamiliar and absolutely real. It was the language of raw feeling through which he told me he loved and had always loved me.
While I was so grateful to be with Boris, I decided I would be brave, stick with my plan, say my final goodbye and let him be free to go wherever he might be going. Dusk gathered, and I stood on a high dune to watch the sun sink into the sea.
And as it vanished a great wave of grief poured through me, and I said, "Goodbye, Boris; I love you." But, contrary to my expectations, he didn't leave, and I laughed and laughed as we drove home, together.
Where is he now? I see him in the mirror, I see him shining through Deirdre's face, I find him always here in the Heart of hearts, a love to be loved.…..