Barry Boyce
19 May 2007
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Yesterday, I visited with my friend Robin, who was staying at the Lord Nelson, which he grandiosely called "The Lord Nelson Arms." He has been afflicted for the past several years with a severe form of cancer that attacks the lining outside the stomach. He contracted it apparently from working briefly in construction when he was a teenager. Robin is a brilliant translator, teacher, writer, scholar and bon vivant. I've known him for more than thirty years. It was late afternoon and he sat in his pajama bottoms and an elegant kind of overshirt. In the early stages of his disease it was very grim, but a little while ago, his condition improved greatly as a result of some surprise chemotherapy successes, but now there's been a setback and he is on chemo again. He has to travel with his doctor. She does translation work with him, so it's somewhat convenient, but there's nothing convenient about Robin's condition. He winces--more than winces--in pain every few minutes or seconds. He's used to this; he elicits no self-pity from himself and solicits no pity from his visitor.
Pills and potions are all over the place. He takes a couple while I am there after searching for his box, the kind that has compartments for each day and each time of day. At one point, he excuses himself to go into the bathroom where unpleasant growls and groans ensue. I stand and look out at the Public Gardens from this eighth floor perch. It is suffused with mist and looks almost Brigadoon-like, but with Robin's pain so filling the room and my mind, that beautiful garden has never seemed so lovely by contrast or so irrelevant at the same time. As Robin's absence lengthens into indefiniteness, a feature I recall of my own teacher, I am permitted a reverie standing transfixed at the window. I am often encouraged these days to rally round something, to get excited, enthusiastic, supportive, about this new development or that. The golden age is arriving it would seem. How to explain my not turning cartwheels? I am of a generation that overdid our excitements and enthusiasms. With what we now face--I hear Robin retching--we shall have to get by on the enthusiasms we have been granted thus far. Permit us this much.
Robin returns and searches the room for a sock. He needs to get dressed eventually for the evening abhisheka that has brought him to Halifax. He's mildly disoriented and can't quite find the sock. I locate it for him. Labored, he returns to his chair. As we discuss topics high and low, he fades in and out of morphine sleep. At times he is brilliantly lucid and at others he slips briefly into what he calls "a morphine dream," producing an utterance that is half intelligible and yet beautiful, like Coleridge. He tells me of his many projects and then forgets briefly what we were discussing, but it's not hard to get him back on track. All of the students of Trungpa Rinpoche hold the lineage collectively, he says to me. We have to carry it on without credentials and the secure recognition of grand institutions--nomadically, or so he says. Impending death has made this jolly rake a driven man.
Robin is Falstaffian, Brobdingnagian, and despite his weight loss one still feels that. Hanging in the open-air hotel closet are lovely clothes, made affordable to the continually struggling Robin by asbestos industry litigation rewards, an ironic twist--fibres giving way to fibres--that we laugh about. A notorious sybarite, when I knew him when, Robin could eat a whole meal as an appetizer. He had a large, jolly wit and a prodigious appetite for life. Some found him appalling, offputting at times, but his revels never occasioned any shame. He lived full, and the discourses and yarns he could spin would usually be well worth the wining and the dining. He would sing for his supper. A good friend of his who died of cancer left him a not-insignificant amount of money. Feeling that death loomed but in a phase of feeling a little better, Robin repaired to New York and set himself up in a hotel with a valet and a liveried chauffeur and took his sister and friends out to dinner and a show or opera every night. He used up the money in a week. No regrets. Some might not get that. I do... Robin, I'm sure made better use of his week of luxury than Donald Trump has in decades of excess.
Robin is failing before my eyes. He needs to sleep now and it is time to go. The short visit has used up all his energy. He tells me that he hopes this round of chemo may knock it down and he could live for a long time...or not. Apropos of being in the Lord Nelson, and Robin is always apropos (except when his appetite and expansiveness overwhelms any hope of tact), he tells me, in his ever-squeaky voice, "I'm bloodied but unbowed, old man." I emerge into the wet gray day with heavy thoughts.
I could separate myself from Robin by the simple thought, He is sick and I am not, but that kind of cheap separation seems tissue thin just now. What a farcical notion that one is secure from ill or harm. We think, no, no, that way lies depression and despair, not life. When the reality game show host prattling on in our mind asks us to choose from door # 3, hope, and door # 2, fear, we always prefer them to good old door number 1, the real thing, straight up, no ice and soda, beyond the pettiness of hope and fear. Comfort is crap. To live, to die, is to peel back the skin of the heart. It hurts a lot. It's very tender, but it's also tough. It can take it. Kiss me Hardy.
-Barry Boyce, 19 May 2007, Halifax
Barry Boyce
19 May 2007
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Yesterday, I visited with my friend Robin, who was staying at the Lord Nelson, which he grandiosely called "The Lord Nelson Arms." He has been afflicted for the past several years with a severe form of cancer that attacks the lining outside the stomach. He contracted it apparently from working briefly in construction when he was a teenager. Robin is a brilliant translator, teacher, writer, scholar and bon vivant. I've known him for more than thirty years. It was late afternoon and he sat in his pajama bottoms and an elegant kind of overshirt. In the early stages of his disease it was very grim, but a little while ago, his condition improved greatly as a result of some surprise chemotherapy successes, but now there's been a setback and he is on chemo again. He has to travel with his doctor. She does translation work with him, so it's somewhat convenient, but there's nothing convenient about Robin's condition. He winces--more than winces--in pain every few minutes or seconds. He's used to this; he elicits no self-pity from himself and solicits no pity from his visitor.
Pills and potions are all over the place. He takes a couple while I am there after searching for his box, the kind that has compartments for each day and each time of day. At one point, he excuses himself to go into the bathroom where unpleasant growls and groans ensue. I stand and look out at the Public Gardens from this eighth floor perch. It is suffused with mist and looks almost Brigadoon-like, but with Robin's pain so filling the room and my mind, that beautiful garden has never seemed so lovely by contrast or so irrelevant at the same time. As Robin's absence lengthens into indefiniteness, a feature I recall of my own teacher, I am permitted a reverie standing transfixed at the window. I am often encouraged these days to rally round something, to get excited, enthusiastic, supportive, about this new development or that. The golden age is arriving it would seem. How to explain my not turning cartwheels? I am of a generation that overdid our excitements and enthusiasms. With what we now face--I hear Robin retching--we shall have to get by on the enthusiasms we have been granted thus far. Permit us this much.
Robin returns and searches the room for a sock. He needs to get dressed eventually for the evening abhisheka that has brought him to Halifax. He's mildly disoriented and can't quite find the sock. I locate it for him. Labored, he returns to his chair. As we discuss topics high and low, he fades in and out of morphine sleep. At times he is brilliantly lucid and at others he slips briefly into what he calls "a morphine dream," producing an utterance that is half intelligible and yet beautiful, like Coleridge. He tells me of his many projects and then forgets briefly what we were discussing, but it's not hard to get him back on track. All of the students of Trungpa Rinpoche hold the lineage collectively, he says to me. We have to carry it on without credentials and the secure recognition of grand institutions--nomadically, or so he says. Impending death has made this jolly rake a driven man.
Robin is Falstaffian, Brobdingnagian, and despite his weight loss one still feels that. Hanging in the open-air hotel closet are lovely clothes, made affordable to the continually struggling Robin by asbestos industry litigation rewards, an ironic twist--fibres giving way to fibres--that we laugh about. A notorious sybarite, when I knew him when, Robin could eat a whole meal as an appetizer. He had a large, jolly wit and a prodigious appetite for life. Some found him appalling, offputting at times, but his revels never occasioned any shame. He lived full, and the discourses and yarns he could spin would usually be well worth the wining and the dining. He would sing for his supper. A good friend of his who died of cancer left him a not-insignificant amount of money. Feeling that death loomed but in a phase of feeling a little better, Robin repaired to New York and set himself up in a hotel with a valet and a liveried chauffeur and took his sister and friends out to dinner and a show or opera every night. He used up the money in a week. No regrets. Some might not get that. I do... Robin, I'm sure made better use of his week of luxury than Donald Trump has in decades of excess.
Robin is failing before my eyes. He needs to sleep now and it is time to go. The short visit has used up all his energy. He tells me that he hopes this round of chemo may knock it down and he could live for a long time...or not. Apropos of being in the Lord Nelson, and Robin is always apropos (except when his appetite and expansiveness overwhelms any hope of tact), he tells me, in his ever-squeaky voice, "I'm bloodied but unbowed, old man." I emerge into the wet gray day with heavy thoughts.
I could separate myself from Robin by the simple thought, He is sick and I am not, but that kind of cheap separation seems tissue thin just now. What a farcical notion that one is secure from ill or harm. We think, no, no, that way lies depression and despair, not life. When the reality game show host prattling on in our mind asks us to choose from door # 3, hope, and door # 2, fear, we always prefer them to good old door number 1, the real thing, straight up, no ice and soda, beyond the pettiness of hope and fear. Comfort is crap. To live, to die, is to peel back the skin of the heart. It hurts a lot. It's very tender, but it's also tough. It can take it. Kiss me Hardy.
-Barry Boyce, 19 May 2007, Halifax
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