Today it is three years since my friend of over two decades passed away peacefully in his sleep in his Noe Valley home of over 40 years. This is a little essay I wrote remembering him at that time.
I was Roy’s longtime friend, his caregiver for seven years, and now his estate executor and trustee. His death was a little overwhelming, and it took me a while to get fully up to speed in dealing with my last responsibilities to him. I am writing this memory both to pass on the circumstances of Roy’s passing to his family and friends and to give some insight into how Roy lived in his last years.
I was Roy’s best friend for about 25 years. We actually met in a dog park, sitting on a bench watching our several dogs play, and disobey when it suited them. Roy had just retired from UC Berkeley, and I was in the later stages of my doctoral career there. Although almost 30 years separated us in age, we quickly became fast friends, sharing our mutual love of dogs, theater, history, world events, American politics, and sports. Our friendship was a long conversation that slowly ended only when, in the last two years of his life, Roy’s increasing dementia made it difficult.
Within a short time of meeting, Roy and I established a pattern of meeting every weekend. At first we just met in the dog park, but soon we met at my place for pie and coffee. And soon enough, we started a 20 year practice of meeting every weekend for brunch. We soon settled on a place in Noe Valley, near where Roy lived for over 40 years, called Le Zinc. Roy was a librarian, and like many librarians, he liked things “regular”. So we always sat at the same table, in the same seats, at the same time, on the same day. Friends knew they could join us whenever they pleased. We were such regulars that I would phone the staff in the event that we could not make it so they would not be concerned. Several of the staff of Le Zinc, which later became Chez Marius, became our fast friends. Even when Roy could no longer leave his home, I went to Chez Marius every Saturday to pick up breakfasts for the two of us, and sometimes also for our mutual friends Dana and Joe who had become regulars at brunch and continued to visit Roy to the end.
Roy was a man of simple tastes, but endlessly generous to those around him. So it is with a little amusement that I tell you that it was very difficult to pick up a check on him! In all my years of dining with Roy, I only managed to pay once … and that almost went wrong when Roy secretly tried to pay anyway, so they almost got paid twice! Roy did not spend much on anything, but he truly enjoyed taking his friends out to eat. I think it was his greatest pleasure and simplest indulgence.
Roy loved live theater. When he retired, he volunteered as a librarian at the American Conservatory Theater (ACT). He completely re-organized their library catalog, and when he finally retired from there, they threw him a big party in appreciation of the difference he had made in their work. Soon after Roy and I met, ACT reopened after years of rebuilding following the devastating earthquake of 1989. Roy invited me to attend the first show, The Tempest, staged by ACT when it reopened. That started an uninterrupted streak of going together to every production at ACT until finally Roy could no longer manage to leave the house. Even then, as I continued to go, I would bring him the program and we would discuss the performance in detail.
As with many who live into very old age, Roy had lost most of his friends. He was a very private man who did not reach out much to others. He rarely answered the phone, rarely returned messages, rarely had visitors. He told me many times that he had what he wanted and enjoyed more than anything reading and studying, living quietly with his partner of 20+ years, Jim Gaither. When not at the ACT library, he spent hours on his computer at home cataloging their library. Jim and Roy took many short trips together around California, and I sometimes joined them when I was able. Jim did the driving, and he could be, shall we say, a little erratic. It was always an adventure, and I kept my eyes on the road to warn him of dangers I perceived! Jim was a very fine photographer, and I have kept his Flickr site active since his death in his memory.
My friendship with Roy was, as I said, a deep and endless intellectual conversation, done at leisure and with joy. But all that changed in a moment when Jim died very suddenly of a massive heart attack in 2012; he went to sleep one night and never woke up. Roy was bereft. It was characteristic of Roy’s consideration of others that he did not call me until he knew I had come home from work; I rushed over immediately. I promised him then and there that he could rely on me, that I would not abandon him, and that I would ensure that he would be cared for as long as he lived. Because, by then, Roy was already in a condition such that he could not entirely look after himself. He needed help with groceries, meal preparation, and household matters. The help that he needed slowly increased, and as my role in his life grew greater, we always talked it out. Sometimes he was a little resistant; we all know it is hard as we age to give up the things we have done for ourselves. But Roy and I worked together to smooth the transitions, and I know that he was deeply grateful for the service and love that I showed him even if it was not his style to express it in words.
So we set up a regular pattern … remember again, that Roy liked things “regular” … I called him every night. I visited on Mondays just for a conversation and check-in. We did pizza night every Thursday … I have to add that after seven years of the same pizza, I had had just about enough. But I did not have the heart to change a tradition that gave such joy to Roy. And on Saturdays, we went to brunch, and then did all of Roy’s shopping as well as my weekend errands together. I took him for a drive around our beautiful San Francisco those Saturdays to change his sightlines because he spent most of his time in his home. I deeply believe that vision is important, and seeing different things enlivens the mind and enriches the spirit.
Roy loved his home, and he wanted more than anything else to stay there until the end. It is a source of deep satisfaction to me that I was able to make that happen. As Roy’s condition very slowly declined, I organized home health care for him. At first it was just a few hours in the morning to help him get up and get ready for the day. Later we added some hours in the evening to help him go to bed. Roy didn’t really like strangers in his house, but we employed a very reputable service provider, and I worked closely with them to make sure we had good people. Again, some of them became friends whom I still see now. In time, Roy warmed to them and they became a source of entertainment for him in the long days he spent at home. We slowly increased the hours until there was someone there 17 hours a day. Roy had an emergency button to press if he needed help in the night, but he never used it. At the time when he passed, I had just asked the agency for 24 hour care.
As he was clearly getting weaker, the agency required that I provide a hospital bed and so I found another agency which organized that as well as home hospice care via Medicare. Roy did not want to be confined to bed. Our last deep conversation, only a few months before he passed, was eye-to-eye, me explaining that this was how it had to be, but that he could still rely on me to ensure that he would be comfortable and pain free. He was briefly lucid in that last deep exchange; he laughed and said, as he many times had said before, that getting old was not something that he would recommend to anyone. I remember seeing the old Roy in the twinkle in his eyes as he laughed.
Roy died early on the morning of February 21, 2019, in his sleep in the company of one of his favorite caregivers. Although it was inevitable, it still took me by surprise. He had been smiling the last time I saw him, even though he had ceased to speak for a week or so. Had I suspected that would be his last day, I would have been there with him, and I regret that I did not know. This I do know, though: Roy died as he wanted, in his own home, peacefully, and without pain.
As I went through Roy’s house now that he is gone, I think of him at every pass. To be frank, the house was a dense jungle of stuff. It was not a big house, but I cannot give you a complete impression of how packed with the decades of accumulations it is. Jim was a bit of a hoarder, prone to buy many items in multiples. Roy had a huge library, and piles and piles and piles of papers. Every cupboard, drawer, box reveals more stuff. It took me a long while just to figure out a strategy to deal with this. Part of the problem is that anything I discard feels like I am discarding some part of my old friend. So I have eventually hired someone to help me because I needed to move forward with resolving the estate, and we made much faster progress.
Roy was a huge part of my life. Our friendship started as a funny accident, meeting in a dog park. But what made us such fast and unshakable friends was conversation, endless conversation. No topic was barred. We talked about the kings and queens of England, we talked about his brother’s teenage baseball career, we talked about Anton Chekhov and Mozart, we talked about D-Day and about his naval experience in the Pacific, we talked about gay history ancient and modern, we talked about Cal sports, we talked about his contributions to the art and science of library cataloging, we talked about my work in ancient Malay manuscripts, and we talked about whether our dogs were waiting for us on the other side. We talked about everything. That’s what I miss as I sit here writing this note. I miss talking with Roy.