I placed the flowers in Robbie’s memory on the sand, arranging them slowly, as if touch still mattered. The tide crept in, cool around my ankles, withdrawing and returning with a rhythm that felt almost deliberate. This was a special place—not because it was beautiful, but because it had once borne the weight of our closeness, and even now seemed to breathe with it.
Annie Ernaux. ‘Les Années’ / ‘The Years’. Paris. 2008.
In March 1913, the destitute Frederick Rolfe left his small room at the Albergo Cavaletto in Venice and moved into the Palazzo Marcello where he shared a flat with another poverty-stricken Englishman named Thomas Pennefather Wade Brown. On the evening of October 25, they dined and each went to his bedroom. The next day Wade Brown found Rolfe lying fully dressed on his bed where he had fallen with a final heart seizure. On September 25, 1968, a 64-year old man, one-legged and wheelchair-bound and looking almost ninety, died of a stroke in his shabby room at Manhattan’s Sheraton Russell Hotel. His name was Cornell Woolrich. One day, when I am old, and have fallen on hard times, I shall seek out a seedy room in an insalubrious part of Rome where I will live on Peroni Nastro Azzurro and canned sardines, and try to recreate the deaths of these homosexual writers.
That was a bloody good dream I had that night.
I walked into a room and found Sam Roberts smiling like he always did. I expected him to disappear, but he didn’t, and he gave me a big hug.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m always here, but you never see me,” he chuckled.
“I’ve not seen you for nearly 40 years.”
“Well, this week you’ve been thinking about me, and that’s a good reason to see you.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“But I also have something to tell you,” he added. “I want you to know that we never go away, and that means that you should never be sad.”
“Grandad, I’m not sad. In fact, I’m incredibly happy to see you.”
He was about to say something else but thought better of it. I could see that his figure was quickly fading, and there was only enough time for him to smile and wave, and in a flash, he had vanished.
Today, I thought about that dream after I received the telephone call to say that my dad had passed away.
Jeremy Ruehlemann (1995-2023)
Beneath the beauty was a person, like the rest of us. The blood running through the veins, and God-given blemishes. But that blood stopped flowing, and like others, will be remembered as you were. Never to grow old.
“If you dance with the devil, you may as well lead.”
For somebody who had ‘I will never die’ on his chest, you consistently tempted fate.
‘We’ve been – always here.’
What’s important was not the years in your life but the life in your years.
“This is for Jeremy, the most beautiful man that gave so much love to everyone he met no matter what.” – Christian Siriano
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 