This is a story about glory, not mourning, but there'd be no story to tell if Avrom Hirsch didn't lose his best friend, his only close friend, to cancer. Cancer of the everything. Slow, so slow it seems he can barely remember the time before (though it was less than a year) and Avrom lives in terror for Ben, terror of the pain, as he's always feared pain for himself, so it's not just in sympathy but in shame, as if it's Avrom's own physical cowardice that made life choose Ben for the torture.
But the pain is kept down. What happens instead is that over the next six, eight months, more and more of Ben Seigelman's life is closed off. Now he can't walk fast, now can't walk at all. He sits; now he can't sit; he's propped up in bed, and now he has to lie down. He can't write anymore, but he can read, and knowing he's likely to die, he takes to the books that meant the most to him — Middlemarch, The Tempest, the stories of Chekhov and the poetry of Williams and Yeats and Blake. Ben is a computer scientist, but he studied literature at Reed, and it's always been his passion. Sunday mornings, Avrom and Ben used to go out for bagels, and the two families would brunch together, and afterward, the men would take a walk and often talk about what they were reading. So now, afternoons, Avrom stops over after work to sit by Ben's bedside and read aloud. Until one day Ben shakes his head.
"Ave, the thing is . . . " (and then a pause ; the pauses get longer week by week) " . . . when you read me a page or when I read a page, it's as clear to me as it ever was, but the page before, I can't remember . . . . God is finally making me live in the fucking present," he says, and they both laugh. "And how do you follow a novel in the present?" Ben's head floats slowly from side to side in the sea of his cancer. "In a sense, it's a gift. I can read everything I love over and over again like it's the first time."
"Maybe we better stick to poetry," Avrom says. . .
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