DEAR JOYCE'S DEATH, A REMINDER

Joyce was perhaps the most influential person in my adult life. She died on January 3, 2019. She was close to her 91st birthday. One of her two daughters was good enough to notify me. Joyce and I had been out of regular contact for a variety of reasons.

Joyce lived 120 miles away. Her other daughter returned to live with Joyce about 10 years ago. That daughter, a lesbian with a mood disorder, was openly hostile to me. Once she had accused me of being an interloper in their family because I intervened when she was abusing Joyce verbally and threatening her physically. 

My friendship with Joyce was one of those rare connections that survive outside of time and space. I have had a few in my life, and I count myself very fortunate for that. Many people never have that kind of interpersonal connection outside their family of origin ... or inside of it, for that matter.

I met Joyce thirty-one years ago. She rented two small cottages to me on her property. It was a package deal. They had been garden sheds, used for various seaside tasks, like cleaning fish and storing fishing equipment. I lived in one of the one-room sheds. The other remained rather empty. Joyce lived in one of two apartments in the main house, a 19th century American Gothic. When I met her, her daughter, the one who developed a loathing for me, lived in the other apartment. 

My move to Provincetown, MA, back then was an escape. But I jumped unwittingly from the frying pan of losing my small antiques business and partner in Boston's South End into the fire of off-season Provincetown, which was then largely inhabited by the unemployed and drug addicted. 

My first rental in the remote Truro home of an alcoholic cook ended with a high-speed car chase. I overheard the laid-off cook and several fellow deadbeats plotting in the kitchen to tie me up and rape me. I quickly packed and exited through my bedroom window. 

I thought I was free as I drove away in my pickup until I saw the cook's car, packed with the drunk wannabe rapists behind me. Unknown to me until later, they had pulled out onto a major highway after me and hit an oncoming truck head on. The cook was killed. His companions were badly injured. I occasionally saw them hobbling around Provincetown. They would regard me with dread. A psychic once told me I have a gladiator as a spiritual guardian. That event almost made me a believer. 

I slept one night at Herring Cove Beach in my truck. The following day I checked into a small B&B which functioned as a boarding house off season. Several weeks later I found Joyce's ad in the local paper. I drove to her place on my motorcycle, which I had unloaded from the back of my truck to make getting around Provincetown easier. I remember her waiting at the appointed time between the two cottages as I pulled up.

Joyce was diminutive. About five-two. She had pure white hair in a classic page-boy cut with bangs pushed to the side. She regarded my motorcycle with a sly grin after I dismounted. I looked at the cottages and wrote her a check right then and there. She later told me she just knew I was trustworthy. I felt remarkably lucky. I liked her from the start.

I lived there for just about two years. I worked two days a week outside Boston at a prestigious mental hospital. In good weather, I commuted the 260-mile round trip on my bike. The rest of the week was mine to spend as I wished in Provincetown. There I began practicing Japanese Buddhism with the local Buddhist group. My second cottage became our temple for a while. 

Joyce became a friend quickly. She regaled me with stories of her life in and around show business in Chicago and Manhattan during the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's. She and her husband had come up with actors who became world famous. Her husband became an art director on movies which became classics. They lived in a Brooklyn brownstone. They traveled. They raised their daughters to be very cosmopolitan. 

Joyce had moved to Provincetown not long before we met. She had fallen on tight times financially when her husband died. To get by, she relied on the rents from her cottages and her resurrected lifelong skill as a seamstress. This brought the town to her door. Her small apartment hosted an endless parade of customers. Curtains, altered hemlines. repairs, broken zippers ...she did it all. Her favorite customers were the town's drag performers. 

Somehow I managed to live anonymously in Joyce's shadow, despite towering over her in height. She was recognized everywhere. She boosted her local profile by working at Town Hall for a few years as a way of mitigating her property tax bill. Her life in Manhattan had been lived in her husband's shadow. But Provincetown was her little pond where she became a big fish.

When I nearly died from AIDS in 1996, I was forced to sell my first house In Cambridge, MA, because I could no longer physically maintain it. Joyce and I had remained friends over the intervening years, a couple of which I had spent working as an AIDS hospice nurse in her beloved Manhattan. When I told Joyce my predicament, she told me my old cottage was vacant again. I jumped at the chance.

Joyce was in her sixties then, as I am now. When I agreed to take the cottage, I explained to her that I was probably going to die there. She said, "I would be honored if you let me help you out." She drove the 120 miles to Cambridge when I was ready to move so she could help me pack. 

Not long after the move, I woke at 4 AM in the cottage unable to breathe. I was subsequently hospitalized twice, once in an induced coma for two days. I surprised my doctors by surviving that serious bout of pneumonia without a measurable immune system. Six months of moving from a walker to crutches to cane, combined with the first readily available AIDS "cure" drug, Crixivan, led to my being functional again. That was 21 years ago.

Once again, I moved out of my cottage and away from the joy of Joyce's company. This time I moved to Boston for ongoing medical care as my recovery took hold. Provincetown then was not well equipped for the Lazarus bunch that came back from the brink of AIDS death. Joyce did not expect me to do anything else, despite my repeated expression of how indebted I felt to her for sticking with me.

Our friendship consisted of occasional visits and regular phone calls for the following decade or so. We each sensed when the time was right for a call. "I was just about to call you." That was a conversation starter time after time. Usually we chuckled in appreciation of our mystical bond, since we were both rather unlikely believers in such things.

Joyce's eldest daughter returned to Provincetown with her long-time partner after decades of moving all over the place. Joyce was around 80 then, and she saw the advantage of having her daughter downstairs for support. The mutual antipathy between the daughter and me, combined with my own physical limitations on travel caused by cancer treatments, meant I seldom saw Joyce. I stopped calling after her daughter appeared to be monitoring Joyce's calls. I explained to Joyce that I had no intention of causing any grief between her and her unpredictable daughter. 

I last spent time with Joyce in 2010. She had wanted to visit her younger daughter's B&B in upstate New York. Her two daughters had been estranged for twenty years or so due to a number of circumstances. Her younger daughter and I were always friendly. I drove Joyce to her daughter's farm. We had a couple of wonderful days. 

Perhaps that trip led to the eventual reconciliation between Joyce's daughters. I speculate that the unpleasant older daughter was not to be upstaged by me transporting Joyce to New York State. She took Joyce to the farm not long after. The sisters worked out a truce that held through Joyce's last moments. I was happy to hear it.

It takes some aging to have relationships of this duration and complexity. I see my friendship with Joyce as a substantial pillar of my own life's history. It shaped me. It supported me. It nourished me. And my thoughts of Joyce's many hugs and laughter will always be laced with a deep hope that I contributed something she continued to value in her life.

But our friendship has ended. My personal history, in which Joyce played such a special part, will also end soon enough. This isn't a statement brewed in grief. This is the impetus I use to embrace the moment, over the past or the future. The combined joy, gratitude, and sadness of Joyce and others is the engine of my life in every moment.

Death reminds me. Death cautions me. Death educates me.