Copyright 2000
by Rebecca Jo-El Rees

This book is dedicated to Gilbert John Lopez, Beloved Friend Forever, and to our community of friends.

Life is always bigger than art. There are many stories I could not include in this story, and many friends who go unnamed, but are deeply appreciated.

Excerpts from the book:

If you can envision a radical contemporary Jesus, big-bellied and brown, who loved football and dancing and was surrounded by women instead of men disciples, you can begin to imagine Gil Lopez.
--from the Introduction

"Hooray! That's my Spiritual Warrior Bear!"
I hugged him hard, pressing his cancer to my heart. At that moment at the noisy bus stop on Fillmore Street I felt blessed. I heard angels singing. They sounded like the Supremes.
--from Chapter 1

Ever since Gil's diagnosis, I had been in a vulnerable and hypersensitive state of what I could only call Dark Radiance. A veil had been lifted, and all around and within me I felt the matrix of interconnectedness that underlies reality, that is Reality. Ordinary events seemed portentous, and every contact with another semed to carry a messsage.
--from Chapter 2

"Gil, Bonnie and I have decided to call a meeting of the Gil Lopez Buddy Support Network. Do you want to come?"
--from Chapter 3

Gil looked around at the circle of sorrowful faces.
"My son called me up at five o'clock in the morning and asked me if I had made my peace with God," Gil said. "I told him I didn't know She and I had had a fight!"
--from Chapter 4

We talked about destiny. Gil's destiny was big and magnificent as the moon, mine not so obvious. Was my destiny to be the side-kick of his destiny? Married or not, time was proving that it was our destiny to be together, until death did us part.
--from Chapter 5

"I've discovered a whole new mission," Gil said to me with a twinkle in his eye. "Inspiring middle-class white women to heal!"
--from Chapter 6

"I saw the Lady of the Lake," Gil whispered. "She was all white."
--from Chapter 7

My second am-I-crazy? phone call was to Bonnie, who last year helped a close friend through his death.
"Oh, yes, that's how it is," she said matter-of-factly. "After people die, all the barriers are down, and you don't have to call them on the phone to talk to them anymore."
--from Chapter 8

"Don't deify Gil," Roy said. "Instead look for that thing that you admired in Gil within yourself. And don't worry about carrying out Gil's legacy. Look for that place where his vision and your vision overlap, and put your energy in that place."
--from Chapter 9

"Gil knew that community was the answer," Fran said. "And Gil is not dead. Gil is everywhere! Gil is everywhere that we are!"
--from Chapter 10

PREFACE

This is a radical love story.

It is the love story of two people, and the love story of a community.

I am one heart in the circle of hearts, and this is my story.

I am writing this book because I needed it. I needed to read a book like this when Gil was sick, and I didn't find one, so now I am writing it for others. I am writing for anyone looking for a way to face death with heart, for any community wanting to support a dying friend, for anyone who grieves and hopes to give meaning to her suffering.

I am writing especially for those who are close to someone who is very ill, as I was close to Gil who was my beloved friend and companion for many years. You too need support and healing, although you are not the identified patient. You may be questioning the purpose of your own life, the validity of your relationships, the value of existence itself in a universe where death eventually swallows everyone we love. You may find the role of hero or caretaker thrust upon you at a time when you wished to be taking care of your own business. You may be weary of being kind and caring. You may be horrified at the demons inside you and others that emerge at this time of crisis. You may rise to new heights, or let yourself and others down. You may wish someone would take care of you, and listen to you.

I am writing this book because I believe that telling the truth is healing, but nobody who had been there before me had told me these truths-- or else I wasn't listening. Maybe people just think it is in poor taste to talk about emotional pain at a time when someone else is in obvious physical distress. But when I told others my experiences they said, yes, that happened to me, yes, I felt that way too, and the space around us lightened up. In this book I have no conclusions, only experiences to share, but I have learned that sharing is healing.

And I am writing this book for Gil, because as a teacher, peacemaker, and community organizer, he wanted to leave a message to the world. It was a message he lived all his life, and especially in his last years of healing and dying.

The message is that with community you can do anything. In this story I want to show how being with Gil in community as he lived into dying was a transforming experience for all of us. I want to demonstrate that sorrow and suffering that is consciously shared can become almost a blessing. I think Gil would want me to add that I need to let folks know that if you are with your buddies, you can even have a wonderful time while you're dying! The experiences of Gil's last days also gave a clear message to me and others who were close at the bedside that death is merely the doorway to new spiritual adventures.

Finally, I am writing this book because I am a writer, and I must turn my experiences into stories, something I can give back to the world. If you have picked up this book in a hard time, I hope I can give something to you.

INTRODUCTION

If you can envision a radical contemporary Jesus, big-bellied and brown, who loved dancing and football, and was surrounded by women instead of men disciples, you can begin to picture Gil Lopez.

It's hard to write about Gil without sounding sacrilegious. He was spiritually larger than life, one of the Big Souls who show the way. He was a natural leader, a man who evolved from a black radical defending his people to a wise peacemaker among all peoples, a man with a royal presence and an inherent nobility of character. And yet he was completely earthy and unpretentious, always ready to laugh at himself and the world, always eager to learn from others and to cheer them on in his broad Boston accent. I have never met a man so utterly without personal vanity or a sense of self-importance, and yet so filled with self-confidence about his larger mission.

Gil had a saintly quality of selfless dedication, and yet he was also endearingly human. We couldn't have stood him otherwise. He could be as cuddly as a teddy bear or as powerful as a grizzly. He was given to long periods of melancholy. He told great dirty jokes. His room was a mess. He ate and drank and smoked too much. (And he later gave up smoking and drinking, overnight, with absolutely no fuss.) He danced on the tables! His hugs were Olympian. Both kingly and comforting, he reminded me of the fuzzy purple African violets he raised so tenderly. He was Our Funny Valentine, the most loving and loveable man I have ever known.

I met Gil when he was almost fifty years old. I write this portrait of the young Gil based mostly on fragmentary memories of what he told me over the years, stories filtered through the limitations of my white woman's perception of a black man's world.

I see Gil as a chubby little boy, the protector of his little sister Margo, in a family struggling to make it in the whiteman's world. Gil grew up and spent most of his life in Boston's black ghetto, his community. His parents were children of Cape Verdean immigrants, a people of African and Portuguese descent who were the first Africans to come to America voluntarily. Gil's father, a man whose strongly-accented English was hard for his son to understand, was a numbers runner who died of tuberculosis and left his little boy with a legacy of guilt that he hadn't taken care of him well enough when he was sick. He said his mother was sometimes driven to prostitution to make money to hold the family together. "Keep on pitching till you win!" she told young Gil on the baseball team, and when he was a teenager she asked a friend to initiate him into the ways of love.

Idealistic young Gil was a Catholic altarboy with a tenor so sweet some thought he was destined for the opera. Gil wanted to be a doctor, but was steered by a school counselor instead to vocations the counselor thought more appropriate to a black boy. Gil went to baking school, became a janitor, drove cab, joined the army, worked two and three jobs to support his growing family.

But Gil was a Big Dreamer, despite all the messages to live small that the white world was giving him. He didn't take two of the limited pathways allowed for success to a black male--sports and crime. He did excel in music. His sister Margo wrote the song "Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby!" and Gil and Margo recorded it together. When the song hit the top of the charts, they took their show on the road with the Tuneweavers. They sang with James Brown in the Apollo Theater in Harlem and met many of the greats of Rhythm and Blues music.

And along the way, almost inevitably, Gil became a political activist, a by-any-means-necessary black radical. Always a pioneer, he organized the Malcolm X Foundation in Boston and the Topographical Research Foundation, which researched and analyzed statistical information relevant to black people's political situation. He formed a gun club to teach black people self-defense, and was involved in some political activities he discreetly told me very little about.

Gil's success in music and in politics made him an outstanding man, but not a great man. A great man is not an exemplar of his time, but a visionary ahead of his time. A great man thinks not only of his people, but of all people. Gil began to manifest his greatness, I believe, when he came to San Francisco in his late forties and began to educate himself to become not just a political activist, but a peacemaker. He had seen enough liberators become oppressors to begin to realize that effective change had to be internal as well as external. He studied and worked with many community organizations and finally set up his own organizational training and dispute resolution business. Always a fighter for the rights of psychiatric patients, he also became an advocate for elders and a supporter of feminists and gay people, and he formed alliances with other people of color. And some of his best friends were straight white men!

Gil was a tribal man whose community was Planet Earth. He loved people. And people loved him. Faces would light up at the mention of his name. I have never met anybody who had so many friends, and so many different kinds of friends, of all colors, cultures, ages, sexualities. And he kept making new friends and new community until the day he died.

One of the amazing things about Gil was that he was always involved in some kind of political struggle, and yet everyone grew to love him, even the people whose ideas and policies he was opposing. He always approached problems through the heart, and assumed that it was the problems needed to be fixed-- not the people. The problem was miscommunication or isolation or meetings that put people to sleep, but the people were good people. Gil's warmth and humor helped people work through difficult situations. And when he did get mad, folks paid attention!

If there was one way to describe Gil, besides Lover, it was Changer. He combined the two definitions, and facilitated change in a loving way, so that it became not just a power shift with somebody new on top, but a true transformation. Gil was a man who demonstrated the power of Creative Love; he showed us that peace-making was a lively process of engagement and intimacy, as active and joyful as home-making or love-making. Gil had the vision, he walked the talk, and he passed on to others the tools to change the world in a loving way.

To put it simply, Gil was a great man because his presence changed our world. I see Gil Lopez as a Radical Peacemaker, one of the greats in the lineage of the historically great non-violent activists: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez. And Gil took the work of these great leaders one step further. Gil incorporated into his transformative peace-making the new skills and insights of feminist analysis, mediation and communication techniques, and a whole-hearted multi-culturalism, way beyond tolerance. Gil gave me hope for humankind, hope we could solve our most urgent dilemma as a species-- how to resolve conflicts peacefully and creatively.

In almost all my pictures of Gil, he is hugging someone, usually a woman, sometimes several women. Women loved Gil. We felt safe with him, respected by him, honored by him. As a woman, a feminist, and a soulmate of Gil's, I want to honor another side of this Big-Soul man: Gil Lopez, a man who respected and supported women, a man who truly loved us. Gil's love of women was not sentimental and paternalistic. He recognized women's situation as one of the oppressed peoples of the earth, and was our supporter in a way that was deeply heartfelt and rare even among men with a political consciousness. For these qualities alone, he will always be my hero.

I believe that many of the great radical peacemakers are unsung heroines, and that part of Gil's greatness was that he recognized the long tradition and hidden power of women as non-violent activists. To me, the clearest indication of Gil's respect for women's capabilities is the large number of women with whom he worked as mentors and students, co-facilitators and comrades. Gil was my collaborator in many creative projects, and I am gladdened by a feeling of ongoing creative inspiration from him. He once made a tape for me of Virginia Woolf's feminist essay, "A Room Of One's Own," a demonstration of his support for me as a feminist and a writer, and I continue to feel his influence as I write.

"Your bear is becoming a butterfly," Gil said to me as he grew sicker. The butterfly was Gil's symbol for transformation. All his life he had demonstrated an amazing ability to transcend and transform himself, and his death was his last great act of loving change. Gil lived big and he died big, as I hope this story will show, and all our souls got bigger as we made the last journey with our Big Soul Buddy. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Gil was a great man because he made you feel that you were great, and made you want to do great things.

As one woman said at his wake, What this planet needs is more Gil Lopezes!

This book is part of my living legacy of Gilbert John Lopez. I hope I have captured some of Gil's spirit and his rich juicy life in this book, to share with all readers, both those who knew and loved Gil, and those who meet him for the first time in these pages.

Chapter 1
DO YOU HAVE A HAHP?

I fell in love with Gil before I met him.

My friend Sandi was always talking about her wonderful friend Gil. She said he was the most feminist-supportive man she had ever known, and wonderfully huggable.

"Gil isn't like other people," Sandi said. "Gil is a special being. From another planet."

Gil was an activist and community organizer, and I finally met him at a meeting he was facilitating. Gil didn't remember me from that meeting, but for me it was love at first sight. He was a big black man with a big chest and a big belly meant for hugging, a fuzzy halo of grey hair and beard, and soft brown eyes in a nest of curly lashes. His voice was rich and sweet, his Boston accent thick.

It was a meeting of mental health workers defending the rights of mental patients, and Gil told stories of working as a aide at Boston State Mental Hospital, where he defended the rights of black patients and started the first union of hospital workers. In telling stories of mental illness in his family and eliciting the feelings of members of the group, Gil conveyed wisdom and tenderness, and a rare quality of dedication and selflessness. He was a combination of masculine and feminine, soft and strong, comfortable and delicate. A gentle bear of a man. I wanted to hug him and sit on his lap.

I knew I wanted Gil in my life. I knew it as I had never known it about anybody before in my thirty-odd years. He didn't pursue me or surprise me or grow on me. I chose him. And not even especially as a lover. I just wanted to be with him, his companion, his friend. And somehow I knew that I could be his friend, sensed that he was a man that many people admired, but few really understood. I knew intuitively that although much beloved, he was often sad, and felt deeply lonely.

As for me, all my life I had been looking for a noble warrior. My adolescent fantasies-- in the then-segregationist South where as an outspoken white girl I was a political and social outcast--were not of Elvis and the Beatles, but of Albert Schweitzer and Gandhi. As an idealistic college girl I read everything I could about Gandhi, that great spiritual warrior, and was deeply moved by the story of the young Englishwoman who joined him and devoted her life to his cause. In my adult years my idealism had eroded, especially in the arena of male dominated politics, where I had seen many silly roosters posturing on political podiums. But Gil was the first true leader I ever met, and he re-awakened long forgotten dreams.

When Gil's household, who were all friends of Sandi's, had an opening for a roommate, I presented myself as a candidate with a sense of my destiny unfolding.

Gil called to invite me to the interview--with a warning.

"We are all people of color," he said, "And if you live in our household you must have respect for diversity."

"Of course," I said meekly.

Gil sounded gruff on the phone. He would have scared me away if I hadn't already seen what a teddy bear he was.

At the interview I met the other members of the household: tall lean handsome sly-witted Roy and spicy little East-Indian West-Indian Althea, the belly-dancing sculptor. We gathered in the big living room of a sprawling apartment on the third floor of an old Victorian building on the inner-city end of Haight Street, far from burnt-out addicts disguising themselves as hippies, and across the street from the projects. From the living room window there was a sweeping view of the city. A huge poster covered one wall of the room, a blown-up black and white photograph of a union picket line, the faces of the strikers fierce with determination. The furniture was old, mismatched, and comfortable. From the kitchen wafted the homey aroma of gravy and potatoes.

Gil took the lead in interrogating me. One of his questions seemed a little strange.

"Do you have a lot of furniture? Do you have a hahp?"

"A hop?" His strong Boston accent was throwing me off.

He made a strumming motion across the air.

"Because I'm not sure we have enough space for a hahp in the living room."

I tried to keep a straight face.

"No, I don't have a harp."

With my fair hair, snub nose, and earnest expression, I'd been told before that I had a Pollyanna face, a Sunday School face, but nobody had ever asked me if I had a harp. I wondered if Gil didn't have angelic fantasies about me, just as I had heroic fantasies about him. I felt, with a confidence unusual for me, that all we needed was some slow time getting to know each other, and he would see me as a kindred spirit as clearly as I saw him.

Part of the interview was partaking of the community dinner, made by Gil. Meat loaf and mashed potatoes and gravy, an old-fashioned dinner like my mom would make. I ate enthusiastically. Perhaps my appetite got me in; I never asked.

The sun woke me early on my first morning in my new household. I followed the sounds of singing to the door of the living room.

Gil was sitting in the chair by the bay window, strumming on his guitar and singing softly,

I've grown accustomed to her face.

She almost makes the day begin.....

I tiptoed away from the door. I was touched by this secret glimpse of Gil's tenderness. I assumed he was singing about his girlfriend Gena who had just moved out--the woman whose bedroom I had taken.

"You didn't tell me how sweet Gil was!" I exclaimed to Sandi later.

She gave me the knowing look a friend gives a friend.

" I had a feeling you would really like him," she said.

I was accepted as a roommate, but I felt I didn't really fit into the household. Regular meetings of the People of Color Support Group--many of whom later became my friends-- met in the living room, while I retired to my room, imagining accumulated centuries of justifiable rage unleashed on my kind. As I privately joked to Sandi, a Philipina-Colorful-Person, I needed a Colorless People Support Group.

The colorful people liked different music than I did, and louder. They liked to party, and I liked to curl up with a book. One night I did retire from a house party to read in my bedroom, and Gil never let me forget about it. Gil accused me of not joining "the community," and he was right. We spent endless hours analyzing our feelings in house meetings conducted in Radical Therapy jargon--"resentments" and "paranoias" flew through the air--but the household didn't seem to get any closer.

Gil and I did, though.

We went to the beach to watch the sunset together, me clinging onto Gil in the tiny space left on the back of his moped. In years to come, Gil and I would have many good talks at the beach at sunset. That first night Gil told me about his encounters with a spirit. It was the spirit of a living person, his sister Margo's astral body, which she often projected to look out after her kids when she was out on the road doing singing engagements. She had projected her spirit-body to thump Gil awake as he slept on her living room couch. In typical Gil fashion, he had first stood up to the "ghost," and then tried to negotiate with it. Over the years Gil and I would spend much time talking about the spirit, and one day Margo would come for him again.

Gil came with me to a meeting of my activist anti-nuclear power group, which was showing a film on the horrors of nuclear war. My concern for the fate of our earth must have made me eloquent, because Gil told me he was impressed by my sincerity and enthusiasm as I addressed the group. He later told me that this meeting was when he first became interested in me; he envisioned us leading groups together.

My room was the former back porch, a small room with a view of the Bay, where my loft bed caught lots of Southern light. After six months, Gil started spending a lot of time there.

Gil was an easy man to love, earthy and sweet. He rubbed my back for hours. Cuddled and comforted me when I was sick with the flu. Played me mushy music. Read me corny poems. Told me he had never felt this way before.

One night Gil popped into my dreams with a goofy angelic smile and soft fuzzy curls.

You didn't know it would be me, did you? he said in the dream. No, even though I had wanted him in my life, I had never known that Gil would turn out to be my Big Love.

At the time I met Gil I was a single childless woman in her mid-thirties, in some ways emotionally much younger than my age-mates who were married with children, in some ways much more sophisticated. A descendent of Welsh farmers and schoolteachers, I was born into an Eleanor-Roosevelt-liberal family of genteel poverty. I had a carefree and uneventful childhood in numerous small towns in Ohio and a miserable and embattled adolescence in then-segregated Bible-belt North Carolina. I finally escaped by way of college to California. I arrived in San Francisco the year after the flower child revolution began. Marriage and career seemed small and confining goals unworthy of an independent heroine like myself, and I basically worked part-time in good-paying psych nursing jobs to give myself time to create my real life, which consisted of alternating tides of feminism and romance, of summers hitchhiking around the country and quiet inner periods of reflection and writing. I spent most of my time with groups of women, exploring feminist politics, art, and spirituality, and running around in nature. This Amazonian existence was spiced by passionate encounters with men, confusion, and broken hearts, usually mine.

Gil was twelve years my senior. When we met, he had recently moved to California after a lifetime of dedication to all the choices I had avoided. He had married young and then married again, and was a devoted father to a large tribe of children and step-children, whom he worked two jobs to support. He was a descendent of Cape Verdean immigrants, the first African people to come of their own free will to America. As a young boy growing up in the ghetto of Boston, his childhood had been as painful as mine was carefree, and he learned early that he would have to struggle to create his own destiny. One of his passions was music. He and his sister Margo formed a singing group and recorded a hit song, Margo's "Happy, Happy Birthday Baby." Another passion was community organization. Gil was deeply devoted to his Roxbury community, and was dedicated to resisting the oppression of black people by any means necessary.

There was much about Gil's early life I never knew or could never truly understand. He sometimes told me chilling stories of his activist days and of his interactions with leaders of the movement who had gone beyond self-defense to violence, even violence directed against other black people. Always creative, always a pioneer, Gil told me he had come to San Francisco to study radical therapy, communication theory, and conflict resolution techniques-- alternative methods of fighting oppression, and of making peace. I felt he had also come to broaden his world to include people like me.

At the time I met Gil I was ready to settle down with a man, and I saw in him the nurturing husband and father that was such a central part of his identity. He however, was ready to experiment with different kinds of family and relationships, with living in community, with supposedly non-possessive, non-monogamous love.

For awhile "community" and "non-monogamy" would come to be almost the same in my mind. "Non-monogamy" was a term I would come to hate; I saw it as a political excuse for men to form exploitative relationships with women. And as for our so-called "community," I vastly preferred the intimacy of heart-to-heart talks with my women friends.

I told Gil I had thought that of course all this silly sexual-political ideology would get thrown out the window when two people fell in real love. As far as I was concerned, non-monogamy only worked for non-love. My ideals of true love upset the whole comradely balance of the household, and I soon moved out, in tears and pain, never guessing that I would still be friends with Roy and Althea fifteen years later, and that they would help see me through some of the most difficult times in my life.

That my relationship with Gil survived this period at all was a testament to the depth of our bond. It was a bond stronger than that of sexual and romantic love, a rare bond between a man and a woman.

After one of our Big Fights, Gil said, "Now Becky, you and I don't have one of those cheap fly-by-night one hundred year relationships. This is a Forever Friendship! This is for keeps."

I knew Gil first as a friend, then as lover, and then as a soulmate. As I look back at the fifteen years of our life together, I see that after our first year of falling in love, my richest years with Gil were the last years, the years when together we faced his illness, his healing, and his dying. Those were also the years in which the spirit of community took on true meaning to me, when all of the faces of his many friends and family members gathered together in a circle of love around Gil.

"Do you think we've done for each other what we w ere supposed to do in this lifetime?" I asked Gil, after we had gone through one of the bouts of his illness.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, I do."

"How do you want to come back in the next life?" I asked.

"I don't want to come back here. It will be too fucked up." He took my hand. "I want to be with you."

Ever stronger and sweeter, Ever richer and deeper, Beloved Friends Forever was the affirmation I often wrote in my journal about our loving. It is still coming true.

It was ten years after I met Gil that this story of his sickness and healing and dying began.

It was a beautiful summer morning in San Francisco, sun burning through the fog, finches singing in the neighbor's apple trees.

I woke early and dumped all my cigarettes and ashes and ashtrays into the garbage can. I made a bargain with God: If I gave up cigarettes, Gil would not have cancer. I did not believe in that kind of Universe, and that kind of God, but today I bargained.

After a week of tortuous waiting, the first biopsy came back, "Non-diagnostic." I decided this meant that the doctors just did not want to admit that they had made a mistake when they said that Gil might have cancer.

I was in control of my world again. I was chirpy. I was cheery. I was unrelentingly positive. I was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Rebecca the Invincible, Rebecca the forty-six year old Wonderwoman miraculously unscathed by life. Health good, parents and siblings alive and well. Never been raped or beaten although I was a woman. Member of the right race and religion in white America. No relatives who died in concentration camps. No children kidnapped by madmen. No lovers tortured in prison. At night the Shadow of a great dark bird flew over my sleep, nightmares of degradation and mutilation and torture, things I read in the paper, things that happened to other people. In the daylight I smiled.

Gil went in for his second biopsy, and we again we awaited the results. Gil looked lost, like a great stunned beast, sunk deep into the layers of himself, eyes sunk into the fat of his face crying silently for help. He took his friends out for dinner on his credit cards, spending money he didn't have. He ate and drank like there was no tomorrow.

"I feel heavy," he said. "I feel empty."

I woke hours before dawn, worrying about Gil's finances, Gil's overworking, Gil's drinking, Gil's emptiness, Gil's weight. He was surrounded by people who loved him, but he could not let in their love. I remembered that during the Watts riots he sat for days in front of the television, drinking, not returning phone calls.

I felt his weight. I did not want to be his only friend, the only one to whom he turned. I could not bear his weight alone. I took long walks, and I could not sleep. People told me it was because I had given up cigarettes.

Gil was well now, I told myself, the first biopsy didn't show anything and the second was just a formality. Gil was well, and I couldn't defer my dreams any longer. I was determined to go on with my life, with my plans to move to the country. I felt a tug at my heart at the thought of leaving Gil, a familiar pain I had learned to ignore. I'm not going that far, I said to myself. He can come and visit me on weekends. Although I know he never would. Gil was afraid to go to the country. Images of black men hanging from trees with their genitals cut off had been engraved on his memory since childhood.

I returned from a trip to the country to learn that Gil had a malignant tumor on his lung. The dark bird lunged straight for my heart with images of Gil, emaciated and bald from chemotherapy, his body mutilated by endless surgeries, dying at last in horrible pain after a long struggle. I curled over around my insides, trying to protect my heart from the beak of the bird.

But the enemy had made itself known at last, and Gil the Warrior returned.

"I'm going to fight for my life," Gil said. "This is no time for fucking around. I want this thing cut out of me now!"

The hospital staff had been telling him he had to wait for surgery until his assigned doctor returned from vacation. But Gil was through with being a passive victim of bureaucracy.He called the Director of Surgery at San Francisco General Hospital, and demanded to get the surgery scheduled as early as possible.

I accompanied him for his interview with the Director of Surgery, who turned out to be good man. He apologized for the confusion and delay in attending to Gil's case. He served us coffee in his private office and made an opening for Gil on the surgery schedule. At the end of the interview he escorted us down the long hospital corridor, his arm around Gil's shoulder.

The old Gil was back, the man who had sued Boston State Hospital for genocide because of mistreatment of black patients. And Becky his Faithful Companion was back, back from her dreams of escape, ready to walk this path with him.

As a former nurse, my view was skewed. I had seen only those cancer patients who suffered and died in the hospital, not the ones who recovered and went on with their lives. To me, cancer was death, a slow horrible death, the cancer always one step ahead of the surgeon's knife. I was thankful that Gil had his fighting spirit back, but I was also afraid that he was only going to prolong his suffering.

My last thought on sleeping, my first thought on waking, my mantra all day: Gil has cancer, Gil has cancer, Gil has cancer. There was no escape from this cruel fact. It was implacable, relentless. For the first time I had encountered something terrible that I could not change or escape. In the face of all evidence, I had been a child in the Universe, with a kind of blithe, easy, untested assurance that all would be well. I had seen my life as a great adventure with myself as the plucky heroine. Now all that was changed utterly. No amount of cheerful posturing would change the fact that my beloved friend was going to die a horrible death, and there was nothing I could do but watch.

I'll never be happy again, I thought, and now I realized I had been happy all along, happy with my ordinary pain and problems.

And there was something new, a strange voice within me that said, without joy or pleasure, Now you'll get everything you want.

Everything but Gil.

I thought the voice meant I would get everything because I no longer cared. A job interview didn't frighten me, traveling alone didn't trouble me, meeting a new man didn't make me nervous, none of my old petty neurotic fears of life made any difference at all in the face of the fact that Gil had cancer and would die.

Now you'll get everything you want, the voice said flatly, But you'll never be happy again.

For the first time I was drawn to those who had faced the dark side, and I realized how often I had failed others with my emotional absence, my avoidance of their pain, and my unrelenting cheerfulness.

One of these was Linda, one of the therapists at the psychiatric clinic where I worked. Linda had been battling chronic fatigue syndrome for ten years. Her illness was debilitating but not fatal, difficult to diagnose and often invisible to others. She had periods of remission and lived in fear of recurrences.

I thought of Linda immediately when Gil got sick. A political activist who also confronted the inner struggles, she was one of the few people I knew who had Gil's stature, and his depth. Unlike me, who could not stand to learn about the pain of the world, she read the newspapers every day, and with her wonderful expansive intelligence took in all the suffering of the earth. Linda recognized Gil's magnificence, but also his essential aloneness. She once told me she thought they were very much alike.

I told Linda it was not Gil's dying I was afraid of, but watching him suffer. I told her this was my first experience with the Shadow. I had finally met something I couldn't change or run away from or trivialize with false hope. I told her I recognized now that I had always avoided suffering, and avoided her in her suffering.

"Bearing witness to someone else's suffering is the hardest thing anyone can do," Linda said.

Just the act of telling her my pain and having her give me her full compassionate attention relieved me in some way. She bore witness to my suffering.

"This is a long process, with many ups and downs. You'll have good times with Gil again."

Linda held me for a moment. She was a small woman, small as a child in my arms, but I was the one who felt like a child. I held onto her last words of hope like a talisman.

After I talked to Linda, one of the clients in our women's group came to the clinic in great distress.

It was Vicky, a generous warm-hearted woman who was the emotional center of the group.

"I just have to talk with somebody!" she said. I brought her into my office.

"My mother's spotting blood in her urine again, and I'm afraid her cancer is coming back. Oh Becky, I just can't stand to see her suffer. I love her so much."

She cried, and I sat next to her and patted her hand. After she had finished crying, she looked embarrassed to have broken down. She apologized for having taken up my time.

She reminded me of myself, not wanting to burden others with my dark side. But I saw now that it was not a burden. It was a sharing, a human sharing that did heal. Sharing relieved not the suffering, but the loneliness of the suffering.

Vicky told me she had to learn to stop praying for her mother's recovery, and to let her go. She said she wanted to see her mother again on the other side.

I abandoned my professional detachment.

"Do you really think our spirits live on after we die, Vicky? Do you think there is a reason for all this suffering?"

"I know there is, but sometimes we just can't see it yet. Back in the days when I was crazy and I had my visions, Becky, I saw many things. I even saw the Devil. But one thing I'll never forget in all my life was that I saw Jesus. He touched me on the shoulder, and I felt all his love pour through my body." She touched her shoulder. "Right here. Jesus touched me."

I hugged Vicky goodbye, my hand on the shoulder that Jesus touched. I thought about the rich inner life the clients had, a world of visions and voices we ordinary people never knew.

I remembered when I believed that Jesus loved me. I wished I had my childhood faith now, to call on gentle Jesus for his healing powers. I saw his dusty robe, smelled the diseased flesh of the lepers, heard the bloody cough.

Jesus, you who healed the lepers and raised Lazarus from the dead, Jesus, I ask you to heal my beloved friend.

I believed that spirituality was the key to healing, but I hesitated to mention the subject to Gil, who I imagined equated spirituality with fundamentalism, mystification , oppression. He has been disillusioned with religion ever since, as a devout young Catholic altar boy, he had discovered that his church district--in Boston's black ghetto, Roxbury--was designated not a parish, but a mission. Mission were places in other countries where you sent money to ransom the souls of pagan babies. Missions were not your neighborhood. Gil quit the Church. With his quality of selfless dedication, I sometimes thought that Gil's true vocation would have been the priesthood.

I knew there was a group in the Bay Area that used support groups for spiritual healing, but the center was in Marin, in the richest and most exclusive city in that county of wealth and privilege. I was sure that Gil would not feel comfortable with those people, no matter how kind and liberal they might be, and that they would not be able to give him the kind of support he needed. I did not mention the group to him.

Instead I gave him a copy of LOVE, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES, a book by Bernie Segal, a surgeon who worked with cancer patients. Bernie wrote that he finally realized how distant he felt from his patients, how exhausted he was by his endless struggle with death, how much he himself needed healing. He began to hug his patients and he shaved his head to identify with their baldness after chemotherapy. He urged his patients to change their lives to heal their bodies, to learn to express their feelings, and to forgive themselves and others.

I liked Bernie. If I couldn't have Jesus, I'd take Bernie.

I went to the park on Sunday afternoon, feeling separated forever from the happy people playing in the meadows around me. I saw the world through a veil. The sun did not touch me. As I sat under a green arbor reading Bernie's book, a ray of light entered my heart. He told stories of miracles of healing, miracles more common than we may know.

Tumors melt. Tumors could melt away as my pain was dissolving in this light. O God, perhaps it was possible, let it be possible. For the first time the darkness lifted, and I felt the beginning of hope.

I tucked the book into my purse and went to meet Gil at the movies, our last date before he went in for surgery. We sat in the darkness eating popcorn and holding hands and laughing ourselves silly as Whoopi Goldberg led a chorus of nuns in a finger-popping rendition of "My God." I thought of Linda telling me that Gil and I would have good times again, and I gave thanks in my heart to whatever gods may be.

After the movie Gil told me he loved the book. He said his roommate Althea had told him about the Center for Attitudinal Healing, and he wanted to go there after the surgery.

"You do!" I said. I was amazed. It was a miracle! "That's wonderful! But it is in Tiburon, Gil. You know, all rich white people."

"So, we're gonna integrate them," he said. "We'll learn from them, and then we'll come back here to San Francisco to start a group like that for folks like us."

"Hooray! That's my Spiritual Warrior Bear!"

I hugged him hard, pressing his cancer to my heart. In that moment at the noisy bus stop on Fillmore Street I was blessed. I heard angels singing. They sounded like the Supremes.

Chapter 9
A GROUP LIKE THAT FOR FOLKS LIKE US

Five years after his initial operation, Gil developed bone cancer, and his doctor told him that this time the disease was terminal. The Gil Lopez Buddy Network of friends and family swung into action, with support group meetings, parties and rituals, and a legacy group to carry on Gil’s work of teaching and peacemaking. As Gil grew weaker in the last months of his life, friends from the Buddy Network urged Gil, always a man who worked to benefit others before thinking of himself, to take more time for personal healing.

Gil jumped into healing with his characteristic enthusiasm. He and I went to Planetree, an alternative healing education center, to get tapes and books and information about groups. Meanwhile, he and Elma explored various healing groups in Marin, the county of wealthy white folks just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

After attending several of these groups, the sparkle came back into Gil’s spirit.

“I’ve discovered a whole new mission,” he said to me with a twinkle in his eye. “Inspiring middle-class white women to heal!”

Gil and Elma finally found a group that felt right, a “Voices of Healing” group led by Maureen Redl, a counselor who had herself healed from cancer. Her group was framed around the simple format of people sharing their stories of healing, stories that went beyond healing disease to healing the whole life regardless of illness.

Maureen was a woman with a mission. She wanted to produce a documentary of people talking about their healing. When Gil told the group that he wanted to leave his legacy, Maureen asked him to be in the film.

I went with Gil to see a short Voices of Healing video, a preview of the film. It was a powerful statement about life and death, with the compressed beauty of a perfect poem. In the video, a doctor dealing with chronic pain talked about letting go of the idea of mastery and control and opening to life. A woman dying of cancer talked about her realization of the all-importance of love. A man with cancer, told he would not live to see his child born, was a joyful father eight years later. “Chronic but stable” was the expression the doctors used to describe his cancer. I wanted that to be true for Gil, to hope against hope. In the film this man was shown radiant with health, running on the cliffs above the ocean, the cliffs near the Veteran’s Hospital where Gil and I often sat at a picnic table looking out on the big waters before his appointments.

Destiny had drawn Gil and Maureen together. Gil belonged in her film.

Gil and I went to an alternative healing conference sponsored by Commonweal, an organization whose founders believed that activism against the causes of cancer was part of the healing process. It was right up our alley.

The conference was held in a huge auditorium at the University of California Medical Center. The audience was packed with doctors and nurses and other healers, with cancer patients, and with some people who seemed to be both healers and healees. In that room there was a warmth and acceptance of disability and disfigurement that only comes from people who have been there. Everybody was cheering each other on, silently--and sometimes very loudly.

The first speaker was a man whose leg had been amputated because of bone cancer, the same kind of cancer Gil had. He was a former marathon runner who still incorporated vigorous exercise into his healing routine. He had healed himself of the cancer and now ran an alternative healing center in Australia.

The audience was powerfully affected by two images in the slide show the man presented.

One was a picture of the man’s chest with the bone cancer pushing huge knobs of bone almost through the skin. It was an image so painful you wanted to cover your eyes and cry out. I squeezed Gil's hand hard.

The second image was of the man’s chest several months later, after he had initiated self-healing practices, including a radical change in diet and daily meditation and visualization. The man’s chest was completely smooth and normal. He had shrunk--and finally eliminated-- his cancers.

The second speaker at the conference was Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, author of Kitchen Table Wisdom. Dr. Remen told an anecdote from a time when she was asked to authenticate personal healing stories from a student’s Ph.D. thesis on alternative healing. One of these stories was of a man who was told he had bone cancer and needed to have his leg amputated immediately. He chose instead to return to his small hometown in North Dakota. He sought no medical treatment, but the congregations of all the churches in the town prayed for him regularly. Now many years later, he was fully recovered, married, and a father.

To authenticate the story, Dr. Remen called the doctor in Boston who had made the original diagnosis and recommended amputation.

“I’m Dr. Remen, and I’m calling about your former patient, John Doe, who is now doing well and living in North Dakota,” she said.

“I’m so glad to hear that!” the doctor said. “So where did he get that leg amputated, anyway?”

“He didn’t,” Dr. Remen said, “And he is now free of cancer.”

The doctor simply hung up.

Dr. Remen said she was sure there were many instances of spontaneous healing from cancer, but we did not hear about them because the medical community did not find them worthy of investigation.

A special award was given to Dr. Lawrence Leshan, author of Cancer as a Turning Point, a seminal book on attitudinal healing. He looked like the kind of doctor who would be a friend, as he was a friend to the many cancer patients he visited in hospitals back in the days when a free-wheeling psychologist at the bedside was not warmly received by many hospital personnel. Another award went to a young researcher, herself a cancer patient, who in her book Living Downstream pointed out connections between cancer and environmental poisons.

The conference was like a giant Buddy Support meeting. These people were living big. Gil and I left the gathering walking tall.

As time went on, Gil told me that his experiences with other healing groups made him more aware of how fortunate we were that we already had a healing community. The feeling of on-going community was the quality others had to work to develop, no matter how wonderful the group facilitator or the individual members in the group.

I remembered the day many years before when Gil had told me we should integrate the rich-white-people groups, learn from them, and then start a group like that for folks like us. Why not now?

Sandi and I had long talked about running groups together. She was a great group facilitator, with so much natural Leo magnetism that she was charismatic even when she was depressed. She had lots of good ideas and material for the healing group, and I realized that during all the long years she had been sick with chronic fatigue syndrome she had been using her creativity in her own healing.

"I have been wanting to do a healing group with my friends for a long time," Sandi said. "Doing this work with other people really deepens your relationship with them.”

I felt our friendship deepening in that moment. In the midst of my sadness I felt a surge of satisfaction that Sandi and I were manifesting a little bit of our almost forgotten mutual-greatness.

Gil and Sandi and I put our heads together to organize our own Buddy Healing group. I facilitated the first meeting, Sandi led the meditation, and Gil got to sit back and enjoy not being the great leader for a change. We decided on a format for all the meetings that included rotating facilitation, an opening meditation, time for sharing feelings and problem-solving, and a group healing activity. With monthly meetings, nine regular members and occasional drop-ins, it became the most creative and lively of all the Buddy Network groups.

Gil and I shared stories from the Commonweal conference at the first meeting of our healing group.

"I was very inspired,” Gil said. "And I'm gonna become one of those people who heals himself from cancer-- with the help of my buddies-- and I'm going to share our story with the world!"

The spontaneous healing activity for the initial meeting was a vibrational vocal exercise for the chakras led by Gil’s old roommate Pat, a musician and voice teacher who usually led group singing on picket lines. I was amazed at how enthusiastically all those old-timey radical politicos--including Gil—now jumped into making funny spiritual sounds.

“WEEEEE HEEAALLL,” we chanted in harmony. The laughter that accompanied our efforts was part of the healing.

We ended the group with a song that Pat taught us.

We’re gonna keep on loving boldly
Keep on loving boldly
Never turning back, never turning back
We’re gonna keep on healing strongly
Keep on healing strongly
Never turning back, never turning back.

The song brought tears to my eyes. I needed so much to sing, and to believe the words of the song.

Gil’s new intern at the Veteran's Hospital was a true spirit healer.

The three of us met for the first time in a cubbyhole office in a side wing of the hospital. Dr. Jha listened to Gil attentively, and asked him questions not just about his symptoms, but about his feelings and what he thought they meant. It was touching to me to see the two of them together, heads nodding towards each other, grey-haired Gil trustingly confiding his concerns to this open-faced young man.

Dr. Jha treated Gil not just as a patient, but as a whole person. And I knew that on visits when I wasn't present, Gil sometimes talked with him about problems in our relationship. Gil usually held his own worries close to his chest while he took care of the feelings of others. I was very relieved that he had found someone--especially another man--who he allowed to be his wise counselor.

Around his neck Dr. Jha wore a stethoscope covered with native beadwork that had been given to him by people at the Indian reservation where he had worked before he came to San Francisco. I imagined they appreciated the same qualities in him that Gil and I did.

"We just started our own healing group," Gil told him.

Dr. Jha looked fascinated.

"Why don't you join us?” I asked spontaneously.

“I would love to come!” he said. “Anytime I’m not working, I’ll be there.”

And they were both from Boston! The universe had sent the perfect doctor for Gil. I was glad Dr. Jha’s assignment at the Veteran’s Hospital would last three years. Beyond that I wouldn’t allow myself to think.

The March healing group was also a success. I reported in the network newsletter:

Healing Group members discussed the importance of support groups emphasizing individual strengths and shared passions and projects rather than just the common bond of “victimhood.” Pat told her story of healing from cancer. Fran praised the nurse who at the end of her long hospital stay helped her identify the powerful lessons she had learned from her illness. Our vision is to become a committed healing community that allows for increasing intimacy and depth.

The healing group was turning out to be the spiritual branch of the Buddy Network, and I realized anew how much I needed spirituality in my life. The activity of the March meeting was a discussion of Carolyn Myss’s “Five Myths about Healing.” I worried that with all his emphasis on self-healing, Gil would begin to blame himself for his illness. Therefore it was a relief to share with the group that Myss challenged the myth that all illness is caused by negativity at the core of our being:

Even the holiest of people can and do become ill. Extraordinarily saintly people have contacted the commonest diseases, including painful cancers.

The statement jumped off the page at me; it seemed so applicable to Gil.

I loaned Gil my copy of Myss’s book, Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can. After he returned the book to me I took comfort in re-reading it and noting the passages he had highlighted in yellow. As I followed Gil’s yellow marker through the book, I saw that he took special interest in Myss’s theories on the dangers of emphasizing our victimization. Myss was concerned that a culture of “woundology” was developing which encouraged people to define themselves by their wounds and so remain stuck in them. She said healing would be better served if we sought out our strengths rather than dwelling on the wounds of our pasts. I could almost feel Gil’s creative mind integrating this material into his own ideas on internalized oppression and his work with support groups.

More surprising, and very touching, was his highlighting of another quote from Myss:

Transformation through illness is a time-honored spiritual theme, and faith in the Divine can yield dramatic insight and healing.

Gil had spoken to me only once about his spiritual experiences, and that was when I asked him directly.

“When I was a Catholic altar boy, I used to feel a chill at the back of my neck when I took communion,” he said. Although Gil had left the church long ago because of its racism, his highlighting of the passage made me believe that perhaps he had not lost his faith in the Divine.

Jesus the radical martyr was always a hero for Gil. His next highlighted passage was about the symbolic meaning of the story of the man who helped Jesus carry the cross to the crucifixion:

In our journey towards selfhood and towards realizing our unique destinies, we have to also carry burdens for those who aren’t strong enough --and sometimes the burden is negativity.

After Gil’s death, I cherished the book and the highlighted passages. When I re-read the book, it was as if Gil’s spirit were reading over my shoulder. I thought of him underlining the passages, perhaps late at night in a moment of despair, or early in the morning, struck with fresh revelation. I took comfort in the book’s affirmation of the spiritual meaning in his suffering, and in its message of hope.

Gil was altering almost before my eyes. To some he looked healthier, because he had lost his appetite and he was shedding all the excess weight he had carried for years. He enjoyed creating a new image for himself.

“I want to look dapper,” he said, and winked. He grew a dapper little beard, unlike the big beard of his black radical days, and bought a whole new wardrobe of bright ethnic shirts and hats.

He told me about his latest haircut.

“You’re looking good,” his barber told him.

“I’ve got cancer,” Gil said, and then launched into a discussion of alternative healing. “All the people in the barbershop joined in the discussion. It was a great meeting!” Gil said.

I had always called Gil “My Bear” and loved the comfort I got from his big warm fuzzy self. Now as I hugged him I realized that underneath that loose clothing he was thin, that I had more flesh than he did.

Gil saw the realization in my eyes.

“Your Bear is becoming a Butterfly,” he said.

On his altar Gil put a painting of a butterfly, labeled with the one word: TRANSFORMATION. I knew that transformation had always been a guiding principle for Gil. And I hadn’t forgotten that he had told me that I was his beacon on our transformational journey.

We both knew he was transforming fast. The Sunday after my April birthday we took a walk in the arboretum of Golden Gate Park. I was pained to see that though Gil might be dressed as brightly as a butterfly, he moved as slowly as an old man.

Gil had to go to a meeting, and I decided to stay behind in the arboretum. I walked him up the hill to the bench by the big wrought iron entrance gate. His car was parked on the street just outside the gate. Behind us in the arboretum the path wandered through green meadows, around a small lake, under pink-blossoming crabapple trees.

“You go back down that path, and let’s pretend we’re in a movie,” Gil said.

I walked down the path, and turned around. In the distance, Gil stood beside the bench at the gate. We waved goodbye, and then Gil turned and walked slowly on. As he passed through the gate, he turned back to me, knowing I would still be watching, and waved again.

Goodbye, Rebecca.

Goodbye, Gil.

My eyes filled with tears. I knew what we were practicing for.

Sometimes hope can be more painful than surrender. Gil was determined now to prove that he could heal himself, and often my suggestions to take medicine to alleviate his symptoms were interpreted by him as an admission of defeat. He seemed to see my concern as intrusion and criticism.

At least that was my interpretation of his puzzling behavior. I talked about it with my friend Alex, who had walked down this road herself, and had now recovered from breast cancer.

"How can Gil say he wants to heal, and wants support, and yet refuse help with his medication?"

“Sounds like Gil’s mind is saying one thing and his body is saying another,” she said.

Gil and I still had our tender moments, but there was also growing tension between us. Knowing he could not eat because of nausea, I would urge him to take his nausea medication. He would stubbornly refuse, as if by ignoring the problem he could make it go away. I grew more and more desperate, making lists of his many medications, trying to figure out which ones he was actually taking, what was working and what needed to be changed.

Even a visit to Dr. Jha didn’t help.

As soon as we had settled into our chairs, Gil had to get up again and go into the little bathroom in Dr. Jha's office to vomit.

Dr. Jha and I looked at each other helplessly as we listened to Gil retch.

Gil came back and sat down between us.

"Gil, could you tell Dr. Jha which of the nausea medications you have been taking?” I said. “I keep getting it confused."

Gil glared at me and went silent. All his anger at his illness seemed directed at me.

The night before the May healing meeting I woke up with my heart beating wildly in the middle of the night. My mind raced with worries about Gil, feeling so responsible and so powerless to help him. So sad and so alone.

Trying to return to the oblivion of sleep, I found myself chanting a mantra.

I surrender, I surrender, I surrender.

Finally I gave up and went into my kitchen for some warm milk. I sat at the kitchen table in the little circle of lamplight and read from the book Ritual, Healing, and Community by Malidoma Some`. Sandi had suggested the reading for our healing group.

As I read the powerful descriptions of native African traditions, I saw Gil as a tribal person and felt the African roots of his strong feeling about community.

My little lamp became a circle of firelight that illuminated the face of the village story-teller. Malidoma wrote about birth and initiation and sickness and death and becoming an ancestor and being reborn, all in the on-going circle of community. I felt comforted, as if I were no longer alone in my little apartment, but part of a tribe scattered around the San Francisco Bay. As had happened many times in my past, a book became my spiritual teacher.

I read until dawn, and then went out into my garden to transplant flowers. I knelt on the ground in the first golden light. I chanted as I packed earth around the tender roots of pansies.

I surrender, I surrender, I surrender.

Before the healing group meeting I took a long walk through the park, through fields of spring wildflowers. As I walked I became aware of an irrational and deeply painful thought that had long been dominating my consciousness: I thought I was not doing a good job with Gil’s care because I was not saving him from death. And I wondered if Gil might feel he was letting us all down because he was dying.

I walked the three miles through the park to the ocean. I stood at the beach and sent my prayer out to the great waters.

I surrender. Spirits of the Universe, please help me.

I arrived at Gil’s house for the meeting a little early, feeling ragged and fragile.

I was surprised when Gena, Gil’s girlfriend-before-me, opened the door. She was holding the vacuum cleaner, and still looked as young and pretty as she had in her hippy days, with the same pink cheeks and clouds of brown hair. Gil was sitting in his big chair in the living room, looking tired but peaceful.

In our younger days Gena and I had been rivals for Gil’s attention. Now she was married and a mother, and I had seen her only a few times in the last fifteen years. We had superficially resolved our differences, but there had always been some underlying distrust for Gena in my heart.

Now all those old feelings dissolved in an instant. Another friend to help Gil--I was so glad to see her!

Suddenly I remembered that Gena was a nurse. Immediately we plunged into a discussion of Gil’s nausea. Gena had worked in home health care for many years, and she had sound practical suggestions to make. I was enormously relieved by her calm assurance. She was the answer to my prayer.

"Gena," I said, "Would you be willing to work with me to help Gil and the doctors find the right anti-nausea medication?"

It was a historic moment, a break in our long cold war.

"Yes!" she said.

Gil couldn’t have mediated this situation better if he had done it on purpose. I was still getting transformed, sometimes in ways I never would have imagined. And it was fun! I remembered when I used to have jealous fantasies of pushing Gena down the steep staircase when she came to visit Gil at 369 Haight. The resolution of these moldy soap operas provided comic relief in the face of real tragedy.

The group began to arrive. For a few minutes I scurried around moving furniture, and then I realized: I don’t have to take care of everything! The community is here!

I took a deep breath and settled down. Each person who came brought good energy. We drew our chairs into a circle and looked expectantly to Gil.

Gil set up a small altar before his chair, lit a candle, and held up the talking stick. He looked completely at home in his role of sacred authority.

“Oh, you’re a shaman!” Gena said. She was still getting to know the transformed Gil.

Sandi led the group in a lovely Chi Gung parting-clouds movement with our hands. I felt gentle waves of energy flowing around the circle.

I led the meditation. By now it was clear to me that we were never going to go on an ocean cruise together, Gil and all his buddies and his family, as he had so yearned to do. Gil was too far gone. Something else I was sad about. So I took us on an imaginary ocean voyage:

...All of us are sitting with our deck chairs facing outward. We are looking out into the infinity of the blue sky and the ocean, and yet we are comfortingly aware that all our beloved friends are here with us...All of us are together and yet each of us has some measure of solitude in the face of the infinite...We take deep breaths of the wonderful salt air which seems to purify and heal us from the inside out...The sound of the waves rising and falling is washing our minds clean...Our hearts beat slowly with the gentle rocking of the boat, as if we were all in a giant womb together...We feel a sense of profound peace, a sense of oneness and harmony with all the universe...

I felt us there on that boat, me and Gil close but not touching, Sandi and Karim making silly jokes, Bonnie earnestly gazing out to sea like she was going to see God appear any minute.

“Mmmm, that was good,” Judith murmured, the ultimate compliment from a woman I often met at the ocean. She looked at me as if she knew why I had chosen that meditation.

Gil held the talking stick for the first check-in.

“I feel physically weak but emotionally very good. Right now I feel very loved.”

He looked loved. I remembered the peace in Gil’s face when I came in, and I felt that he and Gena must have had a reconciliation.

Gena took the stick.

“It feels wonderful to renew old connections with people I haven’t seen in years.”

When it was my turn to speak I told people I hadn’t been able to sleep because of worry about Gil. All night and all day I had been asking the universe for help, I said, and now it had come from a totally unexpected source.

“Years ago I used to be so jealous and angry at Gena that sometimes I felt almost homicidal, but now its a wonderful irony that I’m so glad to see her, and that she has the perfect medical experience to help Gil. In fact, it’s a total miracle! And the second miracle is that I look around at all of you and I realize that of course I am not alone. I’m not in charge of making everything all right.”

After everyone had checked in, Bill said, “I want to hear more about what is going on with you, Gil.”

I was always glad to see Bill at meetings. He was a tough working-class kid who had grown up to become a grey-bearded Quaker activist-pacifist, and in many ways his path was a parallel of Gil’s. Sometimes I felt Gil could hear things better from Bill than from the many women who surrounded him.

Gil told the group about his many legacy projects and about his plan to appear with a group of us buddies in Maureen’s healing film.

“And I’m going to get the doctors at San Francisco General Hospital to x-ray my bones now and six months from now, so I can prove that cancer can be healed.”

It was a typical heroic Gil gesture, but Gil didn’t look like he was getting better.

Bill looked concerned.

“It seems like you’re taking alot on yourself, Gil,” he said.

Gil didn’t respond.

I said, “Gil, there’s a part of me that loves it that you keep on fighting, and another part that feels like we’re hiding from the truth. I feel like I’m walking the line between hope and denial.”

Gil said, “And I’m learning to see criticism not as anger, but as love.”

“Are you talking about me?” I asked. “Because when I remind you to take your nausea medication, I feel like a nagging bitch. But when I don’t remind you I worry about you throwing up and not being able to eat. It seems like you’re angry at me all the time. I feel hopeless, like the more I give, the less I get.”

Pat said, “You’re not a nagging bitch, you’re the Jewish mother.”

Since Pat was a Jewish mother, I took this statement as an affirmation, but I still didn’t want the role.

“But I don’t want to be the designated Jewish mother! I need a mother! Let’s all be mothers!”

A maternal vibration settled over the group. Karim offered diet suggestions for Gil. Bonnie with her usual kind and unassuming efficiency offered to set up a network of people to bring dinner to Gil every night.

Gil said he needed help with exercise too.

“Gil, I’ll take you on walks to green places,” Fran said. My walks with Fran in green and watery places had already become a part of my healing.

Feeling pleased with our problem-solving, we took a break.

Gena sat next to me with a cup of tea.

“Becky, I know from my experience as a nurse with dying people that men are much harder to work with,” Gena said. “In some ways women are so much easier. They know when it is time to surrender.”

We gathered again for a Stephen Levine film about death and dying. Sandi had been trying to get me to watch it for months, and I kept telling her I just couldn’t take it.

In the first part of the film Stephen told a story about a bitter old woman who finally forgives everyone and whose sickroom is so full of love it becomes an attraction for all the patients and staff in the hospital.

I leaned over and whispered in Gena’s ear.

"So I guess now that we've forgiven each other we can die in peace."

She laughed. I hoped she had never read my mind about the pushing-down-the-stairs.

On the screen in the darkened living room, Stephen began to talk about the stages of dying.

Denial. Bargaining. Anger. Depression. Acceptance. Letting go.

Stephen was going to lead a meditation about letting go into death.

I took a deep breath. I wasn’t sure we were ready for this.

“Should I stop the film?” I asked.

I looked at Gil.

“I’m open to it,” he said.

Deep breath. Let go. I lay down on the floor.

We all closed our eyes in the darkened room. Stephen guided us through the final journey.

Breathe. Let go of identification with the body. Breathe. Let go and slip away into spirit. Breathe. Breathe your spirit free.

Together, we all practiced dying. It wasn't so bad with your buddies. After we died, we sat in silence for awhile.

Then Sally, another old Gil-buddy who was now an acupuncturist, opened her eyes and looked at Gil.

“Gil, what stage of dying are you in?”

I was shocked by her frankness. Usually I was the one who asked Gil the hard questions.

Gil wasn’t shocked.

“I’m in the stage of depression,” he said. “But it’s not bad. And what I need from all of you is what Stephen said in the film. I just need simple acceptance.”

I realized how panicky I often felt when Gil was realistically sad and withdrawn. How I tried to be his cheerleader all the time. How I tried to muster a heroic response to everything, when sometimes all that was needed was acceptance. Simple acceptance.

“Sandi, that film really helped me,” I said. “Thank you for your insight in suggesting it. And thank you for your persistence in keeping on suggesting it, even though I kept on resisting.”

“Thanks, Becky. I’m starting to surprise myself by becoming a very wise woman!”

We ended the meeting with another one of Pat’s radical spirituals, stuff that felt so good to sing it made you want to break down and go to church.

I looked with gratitude around the circle of loving faces. Gil’s tribe. Bill’s face was soft. Sandi was shiny. Bonnie was beautiful. I was starting to get a holy feeling at these meetings.

Still, I hung back as everybody was hugging Gil goodbye. He and I weren’t quite right yet, and I still felt sad and hurt.

As I was gathering up my things to go, Gil called to me.

“Rebecca!”

Nobody could put as much feeling into my name as Gil.

“You’re doing a wonderful job. Thank you for taking such good care of me.”

“I’ve missed you, My Bear.”

He took my hand.

“I’m sorry I don’t always feel the way you want me to feel.”

“Gil, I just feel so sad.”

“I feel sad too.”

“Have I been too hard on you, Gil?”

“No. I love you.”

I curled myself around his fragile body, and he enfolded me in his Bear-Butterfly hug.

I was home again.