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co-executor], to invite others to whom he was personally or professionally close, who gave him such pleasure, to share the burden, which burden is a great joy, because knowing Harry was a great joy. A vexatious joy, to be sure; but such are, finally, the most enduring joys. If Harry had not been, in his own way, difficult, he would certainly not have been Harry; and he would not have passed through our lives with so singular an impact on each one of us—each relationship somehow different. No two people knew exactly the same Harry, and although I know how fully he satisfied, in different ways, different people, I would not exchange the combination of qualities I experienced for any other mix. One day, two or three months ago, he told me three times, within a twenty-four-hour period, a witticism he had uttered to Helen [a friend]. Finally exasperated, I told him that he had already three times told me his bon mot , to which he replied that three times was insufficient to do justice to it, so deep were its reserves of wit and eloquence. I told him to call Mary McGrory and tell it to her, and he replied that he already had, but come to think of it, he would call her again, and say it again. Harry.
    I wrote once (it was in my book, Cruising Speed) about our first conversation. It was over the telephone, and this proved prophetic, because our relationship was primarily telephonic, and even as such—perhaps because it was such—proved profoundly satisfying. I had physically to go to him when he first learned that his wife, Lillian, would die; had to go to him when he learned that she had died; I had to see him in the hospital bed, during those final days, when we exchanged platitudes, because we knew what we were feeling, and knew that a platitude is a great and noble convention for sparing pain. But, for the most part, it was the telephone; and I suppose if I said we spoke two thousand times, I'd be underestimating the number. In this matter he was, however, remarkably disciplined. He would speak as long as you wished; but if you said you had to cut off, he would stop instantly: the man of affairs, recognizing other priorities, other obligations. When he called and you were occupied, he would not call again. "I always know you'll call me back," he said to me once; and it is a sadness very nearly disabling to know that I cannot call him back again.
    That thought crowded my mind yesterday afternoon, when with Christopher, and Pat, and Marvin Liebman, I poured his ashes into the sea, in front of my house on Long Island Sound. The wind was northwesterly and bitingly cold, and the tide was falling, so that his remains fell and drifted out into the currents, whence, I do not doubt—like the leaves that rustled in each other's company, from the tall boughs of the two great trees into which the god transformed Philemon and Baucis—I do not doubt that the remains of Harry, and of Lillian, who also elected to be put to sea, will come upon each other; and that a union consecrated by God, so tragically interrupted in 1973, will resume.
    Christopher and I, who believe in life after death, sought diligently not to take sectarian advantage of our role yesterday; but one cannot travel far with the psalmists without coming upon that hope which sustains the Old and New Testaments alike. So that I found myself reading, as Harry's ashes rested, those final seconds, in the urn, above the sea, "Behold, He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is thy keeper; the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: He shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore." And Christopher, as I let fall the ashes into the water, summoned the words spoken over the ages when men are buried at sea. "Unto almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we