A Eulogy I've Been Wanting to Write

IN THIS WILD life I have known wild loves, and now one of those wild loves is gone, too soon.

Writing about him launches an important question—how do you write about an old love who has suddenly died, without hurting his new love? The answer I have arrived at is simply to tell the truth, because truth can’t be denied, although it’s complicated, it’s layered, it’s textured. We want to make things simple, and so we skirt the truth, and life cannot be made simple.

The story I want to tell is this: A few months after I arrived in Missoula, Montana for graduate school, I met a man who would become a friend and wilderness companion in a too-brief life.

“Friend” is the safest word to use, but we were not friends. We were lovers. And I’m on a mission to be less Victorian—less fixated on jealousy—more truthful—more willing to look at the landscape of desire.

From the beginning I fell in love with Liam, although my friend Glendon said it wouldn’t last.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Because he doesn’t challenge you,” Glendon said. “He doesn’t make you laugh and he’s not a poet. How could you be with someone who’s not a poet?”

I wanted desperately to prove Glendon wrong. Liam loved poetry. He’s the one who introduced me to the Scottish verse of Sorley MacLean, and the poem “Hallaig” to this day remains one of my all-time favorites. Liam also was a guy who actually made haggis on Robert Burns Day.

He was a Brit, from Sheffield, England. His dad ran a chocolate shop—his dad would do things like create an enormous chocolate bunny at Easter and fill it with chocolate drops, then have people guess how many drops were in the bunny. The one who got the closest got to take home the gigantic bunny filled with chocolates.

Liam was a homesteader, an organic gardener, exactly my age, only four months older. He wanted to be a professor of sustainability, and he was writing an environmental history of a place in Scotland. He called himself a born-again Druid. He actually wrote that on forms on the line that said “religion”: Born-again Druid. He watched his first football game when the Grizzlies (the U of M team) won the national championship. He lived in a very neat house with high ceilings and blue Christmas lights that looked like stars.

It was winter solstice when we met. Venus was very blue in the sky and the Christmas lights were blinking.

I could tell he really liked me. He called me his “junkyard elf.” He thought I was pretty.

I had seen him two or three times at contra dances in Missoula, but he danced often with one woman, and I assumed they were attached. I had a couple of short conversations, enough to know what he studied. When I caught a glimpse of him in the health food store, I approached him. I asked him about the Borderlanders and he referred me to a book, said to call, that he'd meet me at the city library. (I was researching the Scottish influence in the South for my first book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.)

I did call him. He'd already been to the library but I asked him out, to do something fun, said I had free time, my young son was visiting his dad.

“Let's do a coffee,” he said. “Bring me some of your writing and I’ll bring you some of mine. Friday afternoon.”

Then he called on Thursday and we met a day early, and afterward he invited me to his house for beet soup, and I accepted. I liked the place, liked his two roommates, liked his kitchen, his tidiness, his down-to-earthness, liked it all. We ate. Then we sat down on opposite ends of a sofa to talk, on and on.

It was as if life stopped and started up again on another track, headed in a new and good direction, just like that, normal as oatmeal, easy as pie, sweet as snowfall, warm as wool, natural as weather. It was a right-hand turn for both of us.

You probably know that I have been married for 22 years. I am writing about an ex-lover. If this story makes you uncomfortable, think of it as fiction. I am creating a fascinating character, because how could such a man be real—a born-again Druid raised in a chocolate shop?

He had joined the Royal Air Force at 17, where he became a fell-runner. These are search-and-rescue folks who run the formidable and remote peaks of England’s Lake District searching for crashed planes and rescuing people hurt or stranded in the mountains.

Once as we were entering a neighborhood grocery a boy spoke rudely of Liam. "Speaking of crazy hippies,” the teenager said to his friends. They laughed. Liam asked the young man to step outside. He told him he wasn't a hippie, he had spent seven years in the Royal Air Force, didn't like to be labeled, would punch the kid if he were a different sort of man. His adrenaline was pumping so hard he was shaking.

Liam was tall, the strongest man I’ve ever known, with long legs meant for running mountains, and it was this trait that most enamored me, I think. Even in Montana Liam led a mountain search-and-rescue team. He really seemed invincible.

We began to take wilderness trips together, and I always felt safe. I felt as if no one was more knowledgeable about wilderness than Liam, and that wherever I went with him, I would get back alive.

My little boy Silas had come home from his Christmas trip. Liam was game, anything for fun. He was the kind of guy who would fill a thermos with hot chocolate, load sleds into his orange VW van, and head to a sledding hill. We’d sled all afternoon. And he was falling in love with Silas. He loved children, he said. He’d be a single parent if he could.

We hitched Liam’s dogs Liza Jane and Coco to harnesses and then to a sled and mushed them. Silas was in the sled. Liam and I ran alongside.

But soon enough I was making lists in my journal of why the relationship wasn’t going to work.

He was poor, as poor as I, and though I was opposed to debt, he didn’t mind using student loans to live on.

He wore glasses, he burned cookies, he misspelled “tomorrow” so he wasn’t good enough.

He wasn’t a poet.

He wasn’t staying, anyway. He wanted to go study with Herman Daly, the economist who proved that steady-state economics would be a good antidote to capitalism. Liam would be leaving for the University of Maryland in late summer.

In March all three of us headed to the desert for Spring Break. I have pages in my journal about that trip, going to Arches, going to Four Corners, sleeping in the canyons, watching bats dive around us. I remember one evening sitting with Silas in the red rock as he drove his toy trucks around. At sunset Liam climbed a flank of rock to sit and play his penny whistle as the desert went silent and cold. Was there anything the man could not do?

That summer he built a cedar-strip canoe in my yard, so I saw him almost daily. When he was done we drove to the Missouri Breaks, launched the boat into the Missouri as if we were Lewis and Clark, and floated downstream for a week. I haven’t written about that trip. It was as wild a journey as I’ve ever taken through as wild a country as I’ve ever seen. One evening in camp I felt as if my soul were leaving my body. I guess being in a rocking boat so many hours a day for so many days had upset my equilibrium. Liam rushed over and held me down. “You’re okay,” he kept saying. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Silas was bereft when Liam left. Silas badly wanted me to marry so he could have a live-in dad. And he really loved Liam. “What was wrong with Liam?” he kept asking. “Why couldn’t you marry him?”

I really had no answer for that.

We kept in touch here and there over the years. Liam got a Ph.D. and then a professor job. One day he sent me an email and told me he was married, that he had a little girl, that he wanted more than anything to make his marriage work.

I congratulated him and said okay. I thought we could still be friends, no matter what.

The last time I saw Liam I had been given a huge award at a university where he was a professor of sustainability. He was at the ceremony. He gave me a hug. He was proud of me, I could tell. But nothing was changing. Even as he talked he kept looking over his shoulder.

Afterward he sent me an email letting me know that he would never—under any circumstance—be in any communication with me. I was to never be in touch with him, ever. Any communication of any kind was strictly forbidden. I was to eliminate his email address from my computer. The email was so painful that I deleted it permanently, and I deleted my reply to it, so it would never show up again and leave me again as devastated as it left me.

In early June of this year a mutual friend emailed me to let me know that Liam had “passed.” He was working in his shop when he suddenly fell dead. Likely he suffered a heart attack. As I’ve said, he was 62, 4 months older than I, his daughter still a child.

His death hit me harder than I imagined it would. I grieved a man I had not seen in 17 years, how he was almost the right one, how he had to write me a mean email to create separation, and how the journeys we share can not be erased. Also how life has to end and it can be too short. How loss always hits hard.

His name was not Liam, as you’ve probably guessed. I’m using that name to protect his identify. Not that it matters now.

If you have been able to guess from any of these details who he was or if you remember him from Montana, please do not reveal his identity. There are people grieving harder than I, and more pain is the last thing I’d want. But I also think that it’s fair to acknowledge wild love, the kind that camps and canoes and backpacks, the kind that tries, then gets confused, then quits trying, then gets hurt and backs off permanently.

Even if a person moves on or dies, that doesn’t mean that loves follows suit. Love is this thing that never dies. It just grows wilder and wilder. It grows out of its container. It grows madly and recklessly.

There’s nothing a person can do about that. Love is beyond our control. It follows its own course, getting bigger as it goes, until finally it reaches the ocean.

Therefore, big love to you, dear Liam, running the fells on the other side.