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A long time ago, so long ago that it was part of a different life, I was married. We were all in our twenties, a small group of fans that ran a convention in Iowa City called Icon, and belonged to a student group called SFLIS. My husband, Nigel, his brother Brandon, Les, Lynnette, Jim, Eleanor, Jeannette, Linea, Arthur, some small number of others. Everything was intense and fraught and there were many four in the morning conversations about love and sex and world peace and communism. Everyone slept with everyone else unless they didn't. There was an informal sort of communism, from each according to his student loan, to each according to his bank balance. If you didn't do this when you were in your early twenties, you got gypped. This is part of the charm of growing up, that five or ten years of out-running your theoretical headlights, slamming into reality again and again and sometimes breaking straight on through to the other side.
All these years later, three lives later, those years remain a green gap, like a beautiful ravine in my life. It's deep and wide, and there is no bridge. I can hear the river down at the bottom, and the trees are amazingly green, but the ground falls away almost straight down. No way back.
When Nigel and I broke up, I was kicked out of his family. That made me sad. Twelve years later, when I went to an Icon, he was too unhappy at my presence to be able to come out and hang around the convention. My "date", Neil Rest, managed to mortally offend my ex-brother-in-law by saying something that he considered completely normal and pleasant, but which Brandon could not interpret as anything other than a vicious, personal attack. (Mind you, explaining Neil to anyone else is always a challenge.)
Once, later, I got to have a long chat with his wife Eleanor. Eleanor and I had been friends before she married Brandon. Some years after she'd been married and had one son, she'd gone batshit. I don't know what the technical term is, but she lost her mind and her therapist and she went in search of it. I believe she's now disabled. I really liked talking to Eleanor, and I've wished that I could do so again.
Today, my mother called me. Brandon Ray had died "peacefully" in Salt Lake City, UT on June 21st. He was 46. (I'm 44.)
I don't really know how I feel. I haven't made any overtures to the Ray family in ten or fifteen years. I've been wanting to. I've wanted to talk to my ex, see what his life is like, talk to his wife, talk to Brandon and Eleanor and be introduced to their son. But I haven't done any of that; I couldn't sort out in my own mind how much of this was genuine, benign interest in people who were once my friends and how much of it was a residual desire to get even with them by discombobulating their lives.
But now Brandon's dead.
And I really don't know how I feel. I think I will feel very sad, later, but at the moment I'm watching doors of possibility shutting and wondering what it means.
All these years later, three lives later, those years remain a green gap, like a beautiful ravine in my life. It's deep and wide, and there is no bridge. I can hear the river down at the bottom, and the trees are amazingly green, but the ground falls away almost straight down. No way back.
When Nigel and I broke up, I was kicked out of his family. That made me sad. Twelve years later, when I went to an Icon, he was too unhappy at my presence to be able to come out and hang around the convention. My "date", Neil Rest, managed to mortally offend my ex-brother-in-law by saying something that he considered completely normal and pleasant, but which Brandon could not interpret as anything other than a vicious, personal attack. (Mind you, explaining Neil to anyone else is always a challenge.)
Once, later, I got to have a long chat with his wife Eleanor. Eleanor and I had been friends before she married Brandon. Some years after she'd been married and had one son, she'd gone batshit. I don't know what the technical term is, but she lost her mind and her therapist and she went in search of it. I believe she's now disabled. I really liked talking to Eleanor, and I've wished that I could do so again.
Today, my mother called me. Brandon Ray had died "peacefully" in Salt Lake City, UT on June 21st. He was 46. (I'm 44.)
I don't really know how I feel. I haven't made any overtures to the Ray family in ten or fifteen years. I've been wanting to. I've wanted to talk to my ex, see what his life is like, talk to his wife, talk to Brandon and Eleanor and be introduced to their son. But I haven't done any of that; I couldn't sort out in my own mind how much of this was genuine, benign interest in people who were once my friends and how much of it was a residual desire to get even with them by discombobulating their lives.
But now Brandon's dead.
And I really don't know how I feel. I think I will feel very sad, later, but at the moment I'm watching doors of possibility shutting and wondering what it means.
