The Bond Between Two Men When the One Is Gone

I had meant to begin this post by finding a quote that neatly and accurately described the book I recently finished reading. It seemed simple enough; run a quick google search, scour few dozen sentences by famous writers, and somewhere therein find some perfectly rendered phrase that seems profound, wise, and all-encompassing.

However, if a reader takes only one thing away from Bill Valentine's A Season of Grief, it is that coping with the death of a loved one, a life partner, is a deeply personal process. No metaphors for love and grief, desolation and despair, can ever capture the textures of the empty coat hanging in the closet, or the remembered smells of a favorite food, or the consoling tones of a record collection left behind. William Carlos Williams once remarked, "No ideas but in things." There is no grieving but in what remains: memories, possessions, connections, words spoken and not, family, loves, faith.

On November 12th, 2001, Americans once again found themselves clinging to images of devastation on their televisions. A scant two months after September 11th, American Airlines Flight 587 went down over Belle Harbor, New York. The initial fears of terrorism quickly gave way to explanations of wake turbulence and faulty rudders. A grimly relieved nation soon returned its attention to the war in Afghanistan, to the funerals of fire-fighters and policemen who had died in the collapse of the World Trade Center.

For author Bill Valentine, November 12th was the day when Joe Lopes perished with 264 others on Flight 587. Valentine's life partner, Lopes had been a flight attendant for American Airlines since 1983. Together for 21 years, the couple survived September 11th and discovered a renewed closeness after that tragedy, only to have the unlikeliest of disasters brutally tear them apart.

A Season of Grief is Valentine's tribute and memorial to the life he and his partner shared. Part memoir, part eulogy, and part journal, the author traces the days and months preceding and following Lopes' death and gives the reader a detailed, heart-breaking account of the aftermath.

Beginning with the bottomless abyss of pain and loneliness brought by Joe's loss, Valentine finds in his grief the spirit of his partner expanding to fill the lives of those all around him. Though it is only two hundred pages long, the book is remarkable in how one life well-lived can touch so many people and issues, reflect so many different facets of our society and culture, grasp so many scattered strands of history and draw them together in a unified whole.

There is grief here, yes, but also the stories of Joe's family, immigrants from Hong Kong who survived the beginnings of the Mao regime to live and prosper in America. There are memories of their life together, as they traveled from city to city, place to place, to take as much of this country in as they could. There are details of Bill and Joe's inter-racial relationship set against the greater narrative of our own evolution in thinking as a people. There are the infuriating moments during the weeks after Lopes' death when Valentine is faced with the fact they could not legally marry, and all the complications, hurts, and denials of simple things, such as worker's compensation, that gay couples face when one partner leaves the other behind.

Valentine is a talented writer who effortlessly weaves the days and weeks following his personal tragedy in journal form with autobiographical chapters about his own life, the history of Joe and his family, their relationship, their love, their arguments, their friendship, their problems, their families and friends, and their connection with each other, even after death.

With startlingly beautiful prose, Valentine accomplishes far more with this book than even he may have originally planned. After reading it, the reader comes away with not merely a memory or tribute, but an animation of Joe's spirit, a life given form and motion beyond the page. When I finished reading, I came to feel as if I knew Lopes, that I might very well have just spent the last few hours sharing a drink with him.

While it goes without saying that A Season of Grief is a gift to anyone enduring the loss of a loved one, especially gay men, it may be that in immortalizing the vitality that Joe Lopes brought to the world, Bill Valentine may have given the greatest gift to himself.

Comments

[Tommy]

Great book in my book - (Does that work for a dust cover?) Seriously, good read.

[Deschanel]

It sounds really good, thanks..

By coincidence, Im reading "A Single Man" from 1964, by Christopher Isherwood.

It's about a middle-aged professor who's lost his life partner, and dealing with a world that refuses to recognize his loss..pretty ahead of its time. Today it's considered a classic, but in 1964 the reviewers trashed it out of sheer hatred of gays.

[Den]

Heaven's Coast, by Mark Doty was much better, I think. And there is always the classic, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, by Paul Monette, and AIDS before AZT.