We lay in bed together, hip to hip, holding hands now and again, mostly just talking.

This had to have been in one of the later rounds of chemo, when the neuropathy made it hard for her to stand and, eventually, sit. Everything was easier lying down. So I got in bed with her, and we kept doing what we did over most of my visits out west, which was fill the hours with a haze of words: about friends, kids, old breakups, old books, money, gossip, sex, anything.

For such an odd pair—one mortally ill and in pain, one clenched with dread—we made chatty, companionable bedmates.

Spend so much daylight time in bed and you’ll wander up lots of conversational cul-de-sacs. And so, for reasons I cannot now recall, I found myself posing a question.

“Dude,” I said. “When do you think you were hottest?”

“What age?”

“Yeah.”

Then, without even an instant’s pause or deliberation, she turned to me.

“Thirty-one,” she said.

“What? You know, like, for sure?”

“Totally. Thirty-one. I’ve got pictures!”

And she did, right there on her phone. “Look at that face,” she said. “It says, This will be messy but you’ll enjoy it.” She sighed. “Honestly, that’s about all I knew how to say at thirty-one. God, though, would you look at her?”

And there she was: big black eyes, unmistakably youthful brightness of complexion, a glint of flirty mischief gathering at the corners of her mouth, her arched brow. Totally her. Totally hot.

I wish I could tell you in simple terms what it is we make together, she and I. The names there are tend to be a bit off-key. We’ve cared for each other, durably and devotedly, for decades, but we are not “family” in the eyes of any relevant authorities, and certainly not a couple. (She’s a lesbian; I’m a straight man.) We’re not roommates or lovers or coparents. We are not co-owners of a condo, a couch, a dog. It’s true that we’re both professors and so maybe, on somebody’s HR spreadsheet, we go down as “colleagues.”

What we are is friends—“just friends,” as I said to dozens of inquiring hospital personnel over the last years—but that’s right only to the degree that you can infuse that pale and minimizing term with something considerably more full-spectrum and radiant, something that transpires nearer to the scale of, say, the known world.

Not that this untitled status has much mattered to us. If anything, it’s been our element. Years ago, when I became an ex-stepparent, of all unheard-of things, to two little girls I loved very much, but to whom I was suddenly no longer attached by any legal relation or binding title, she held me together through the frantic and devastated worst of it. Whatever the altered circumstances, she insisted, the girls and I would NOT lose one another. And then, with cajoling gentleness and an entirely characteristic ferocity of mind, she made me believe it. Who could be more convincing? A grown-up queer person out in the unpropitious world, she’d had long and galvanizing experience in nurturing loves that were ardent, life-defining, and did not rest easily in conventional names. Did she lie to me about such things? She did not. And anyway, what else had we been writing about and living through all these accumulating years?

What she meant, I should say, is that we’re both scholars of something called “queer theory”—she is, in fact, one of the best ever to do it—which is an academic discipline that, among its other graces, fortifies you with ways to think expansively about all the uncharted, errant, underheralded kinds of attachment that knit together our lives. The whole swirling world of fractious and sustaining intimacies that travel under no dignifying title, go by no official name: this, precisely, is the terrain of so much queer theoretical inquiry and imagination. And it’s also exactly where my friend and I had lived, along with most all our dearest compatriots, for a long, long time. Who the fuck needed names?

When that handful of us gathered around her last spring in the hospital—coparents, partners, siblings, children, friends—names and titles were, I can tell you, not much on anybody’s mind. Other tasks predominated. We adjusted her blankets. We helped her with her phone. Her feet were cold, so we took turns warming them with our hands. We read out passages from her favorite children’s books, told sex jokes, recollected about trips, breakups, dresses, parties, bars.

That’s what our togetherness looked like at the end. We were there, all of us, just to help her—our funny, our famously generous, once-upon-a-time messy, deliriously brilliant, and all of 57-goddamn-years-old friend—in the mystifying labor she had before her. This was the labor of somehow leaving us, leaving everything, as gently as was possible.

I stood in the glare of the overlit hallway, shell-shocked and ashen, and ran into a friend heading out. “Oh, Pete,” she said. “It’s awful. But …” She put her hands on my shoulders. “To be surrounded by so much laughter? All that love? Sweetie, we should all be so lucky.”

Maybe. I was in any case not prepared for it—let’s draw a curtain of decorum over how not prepared for it I was—though perhaps I should have been.

Any even moderately attentive student of the literary of history of sexuality can tell you that the archive of queer deathbed scenes is, dismayingly, replete. Traverse only the smallest corner of that archive and you’ll come away with an extensive dramatis personae. Walt Whitman’s hovering ministrations at the bedsides of the infirm and mortally wounded, Audre Lorde in the cancer ward, the numberless scenes of tenderness, rage, and devotion that came with the AIDS crisis, made indelible by Essex Hemphill, Derek Jarman, David Wojnarowicz, Thom Gunn—on and on. Even that slender collection is more than enough if what you want, as a reader, is for your heart to break and break and break.

I’ll say that, for me, nothing in the whole of this mournful canon lands with quite the nuclear-grade power of devastation as that über-canonical monument to promise, deception, and ruin, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. In seminars, I soft-pedal it to my students. “This,” I like to say, “is by my count one of the maybe seven or eight most perfect artifacts of human culture in the history of the species.” Teaching: an art of subtle persuasions. But hype it though I might, teach it as often as I do, still I am never sufficiently braced for the handful of chapters near the end, where the novel somehow drops into a new gear, finds still another register for sorrowfulness.

Our battered heroine, Isabel, her bright life blighted by a catastrophically ill-chosen marriage to one of the worst men in Europe, has rushed back to England, and to the bedside of her cherished, her tall, ugly, witty, doting, dying cousin Ralph. It’s the pivot, really, that kills me. In a novel so fixated upon the perils, coercions, and not infrequently the miseries of matrimony—for women especially—you can hardly miss that the great dramatic climax, and indeed the novel’s principal tragedy, arrives precisely here, in the death of a person so conspicuously removed from the machinations of the marriage plot.

But there’s more. For at just the moment when the full malignity of Isabel’s marriage has at last revealed itself (“the truth of things,” we are famously told, “their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness”), James treats us, in almost the next breath, to about the grandest, oddest, sweetest convocation of queerer kin you could hope for—a makeshift gathering of intimates brought to poor Ralph’s bedside by nothing more binding than the gregarious generosity of their friendship. There’s awkward and decent-hearted Lord Warburton, Isabel’s failed suitor; Ralph’s mother, starchy Mrs. Touchett, who has spent the better part of her life living a continent apart from her spouse; the venturesome, sometimes vulgar American Henrietta Stackpole, along with her occasional companion, the comic Mr. Bantling, to whom she is evidently now betrothed. (In case we’ve missed any of the contrastive point, we are given Isabel’s first response to the news of engagement: “There was a want of originality in her marrying him—there was even a kind of stupidity; and for a moment, to Isabel’s sense, the dreariness of the world took on a deeper tinge.”) And of course there’s Isabel herself, wounded and baffled, more or less the whole of whose life has by now been poisoned by sinister duplicities of Continental life.

So the suddenly freer air of this small convening—emerging as it does from out of such confounding cruelty, the wraparound dreariness and stupidity of Isabel’s life as a wife—feels for all the world like something larger, something altogether weightier than a mere respite for Isabel’s afflicted spirit. Call it, if you want, a utopian horizon. Or, if that seems a shade fanciful, a counterplot: a current running crosswise to all the novel’s genteel matrimonial brutalities.

Like a lot of Jamesian ideals, though, it is one whose promise is accessible only through a tremendous ordeal of grief. “Touchett was just the same as usual,” Mr. Bantling informs Isabel, “except that he was in bed, and that he looks tremendously ill, and that he can’t speak.” “He was immensely friendly all the same,” he adds, “just as clever as ever. It’s awfully sad.” Sad it unrelentingly is. But nestled even here, inside the hushed awfulness of Ralph’s death, there is restoration, a final dropping of masks, a communion in loves at last fully avowed. Isabel understands that even in the lowest depths of her misery she “never lost the sense that they were still together.” “I don’t care for anything but you,” she tells him:

Here on my knees, with you dying in my arms, I am happier than I have been for a long time. And I want you to be happy—not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I am near you and I love you.

Ralph does die, yes, but not before offering to Isabel his own bedside moral: “if you have been hated,” he tells her finally, “you have also been loved.”

And there you have it. Marriage may well be a tomb, a species of living extinction. (“We are as united,” Gilbert Osmond says with ominous precision of his marriage, “as the candlestick and the snuffers.”) In queer friendship, at least—like a lamp in a windless place, as James say elsewhere—the inextinguishable flame of devotion burns and burns.

I do my best. Like the bereaved everywhere, I keep turning over the pages of our story together.

That’s the story, anyway. But you never know, once you’re out in the storm, what’s going to unravel you.

It was in the first months of the pandemic when my friend called to relay the news to me (colon, liver, stage four), which she did in the calmest, steadiest voice you’ve ever heard. A couple of weeks later I found myself striding through the cavernous horror-movie silence of the San Francisco airport. To my right, clustered in the departure gate, a family of four sat in matching zip-up cotton bodysuits, like marooned cosmonauts. A sense of unreality hung over everything.

We met up in a sun-swept park on the top Potrero Hill, out among the other masked-up quarantine walk-takers. I can remember how even then her equanimity about everything—diagnosis, the grind of treatment, the prognosis—astounded me. It’s not that she wasn’t frightened. But she was so poised, so even and unaltered. She was so entirely herself that it was easy, then, for the more frantic parts of myself to ignore the ground shifting beneath us.

And so, imitating her equanimity, I told her I was just the same too: that I would be in it with her, in all phases, no matter what. I told her I knew the story of our togetherness was long and involved and far, far from finished.

I meant it. But an inner alarm starting ringing, and would not stop. I worried that, knowing me as she did, she could tell how scared I was. I worried that, loving me as she did, she might start devoting herself to the labor of trying to protect me from all the things that, all too evidently, I couldn’t bear to let myself know. In this, too, she’d be entirely herself.

I suppose I found another gear, another register for dread: I worried that, in obscure but consequential ways, I had already begun to fail her.

After she died, this all sat heavy in me. Those subsequent hours and then days and then months were wretched but they were also, more nearly, strange. I don’t just mean sorrowful. A great billowing fog of bewilderment enveloped me. I’d cook, but forget to eat. I’d talk, manically and at unregulated length, then descend into prolonged sulks. Anger, at the tiniest provocations, tornadoed through me, then evaporated. I missed appointments, exits.

Strangest of all: by disposition an operatic crier (as my friend could have told you) I did not weep. The weeks piled up and there I was, dry-eyed and baffled. Where a lacerating anguish might have been—like a corrosive drop of acid upon an open wound, as James puts it—there was instead only hollowness, a dull ache. I kept thinking of Emerson, numb in the aftermath of his beloved son’s death: I cannot get it nearer to me, he says, with leaden despair.

Some unsurrendered part of myself persisted in the fantasy that she was on a trip—Scandinavia, maybe—and when at last she returned we’d talk about it all, the laughter, our marvel-making friends, her wonderful brother, the memorial. I stalked through the long summer days and around every corner of thought a single question sat in wait: What is wrong with me?

Eventually, my mother back east grew concerned, the way Italian mothers do. “You don’t seem all right,” she said on the phone, and who could argue?

It turns out, I could. A prickly, peevish childishness took hold of me. “Yeah, Mom,” I shot back, “I mean, it’s hard, you know?”

But then, from out of some unexplored territory of self, a sentence bubbled out of me—whereupon everything stopped for an instant, held its breath, and changed.

“She was one of the loves of my life,” I said.

A silence fell between us, and I swear to you it was like a key turning in my chest.

“That’s right,” she finally said. “She’s one of the loves of your whole life, Peter.” What followed from this—periodic descents into ragged tearfulness, at the coffee shop, on the train, in the lonely expanse of office hours—I would again prefer not to say.

It’s Freud who reminds us, in “Mourning and Melancholia,” that grief is especially debilitating when we do not know, and cannot name for ourselves, what it is that has been lost. That incertitude, he says, baffles and paralyzes us, makes us jagged and forgetful. How strange!, I thought. Could it be that our namelessness, our semiattenuated status in the eyes of the world, somehow induced me to mislay the most basic facts of our devotion to each other? To misremember the steady certainty of her love for me, and mine for her?

Maybe. But then, I think, this was perhaps just the next of my accumulating failures—another thing that, even after months and then years of bracing for impact, I could not bear to acknowledge, not really. Sometimes, I think back to the days on Potrero Hill, or to the sparkling toast she gave at my wedding, or to that final week in the hospital, and my mind dissolves into a bright white blank. She was one of my life’s great loves—alongside Julie, and also Mark, Dana, John, Nasser—and now what is there left to say, other than that her absence is a silence, huge and heavy, lying across all the days?

I do my best. Like the bereaved everywhere, I keep turning over the pages of our story together. I go back to those long cozy hours in bed, the jokes and confessions, the meandering chatter. I roll my tongue around another cherished bit of Jamesian effusion, this one from his death-stricken late-life triumph, The Wings of the Dove, which is by the way also very much about the various ways you might conspire to go to bed with your gorgeous friends. “It had come to be definite between them at a primary stage,” we are told of two thwarted lovers,

that, if they could have no other straight way, the realm of thought at least was open to them. They could think whatever they liked about whatever they would—in other words they could say it.

So I bring it up a lot now, at parties, dinners: When were you hottest?

I was a late bloomer, I’d told her, probably reaching my hotness peak right around 44. “The moment I met Julie,” I said. “A bad deal for her, really—straight downhill since.”

She laughed again, took my hand. “I don’t know, baby.” She turned to me—weary, wrung out, also totally hot, totally her—and gave me her flirty grin. “You’re hanging in.”