Ann rubbed my brow, trying to wipe the fear rising in my face, while Robert read Neruda and Blake. What a vision they were. If you could have been behind my eyes. They seemed a dimly lit Rembrandt. Seen from the eyes of the dying, who the viewer never sees, they hovered, a portrait of two ministers of spirit cleansing the body of someone cut by a sword or crippled beneath a rusty plow. As he read the words, Ann’s touch seemed to sign them to the part of me too frightened to hear. We made it through, and I will never forget what they have taught; that reaching in and touching the spot that hurts, if done with selfless love, can release the pain the way a dark branch can be gently shook to free it of all those steely crows.

Within days, I lost feeling in my hands and toes. Ironically, the chemo had started to eat at my nerves, leaving me with the numbness of my brother. We both now had neuropathy. This brought an end to the chemo. It was summer, and in the weeks that followed, Robert and I would pick at sandwiches in the sun on a bench in downtown Albany, letting the light warm our nerveless hands.

It was there that suddenly, beyond the crisis, he looked into my very core and said, “I have your cancer,” and I realized he had cut all boundary between us, so great was his love. We gripped each other’s weary hands, the ends tingling with a new aura of numbness, and I said, “And I’m an alcoholic.”

Late in May, as my bonsai was beginning to stretch its bud, we celebrated Robert’s fifth anniversary of sobriety, and both of us accepted that, indeed, in the ways that matter, we are only five . . .

I found an exact copy of an engraving by Rembrandt, done in Holland in the late 1800s. It’s of an old man with new eyes, and he’s reaching out of his frame, his open palm extending to the viewer, as if to suggest there are no viewers, only those who see anew and reach. In this there seems hidden wisdom, in finding the courage to reach beyond our frame—of mind, of pain, of ambition, of fear. I matted the old man with new eyes, wrapped him in brown paper, and took him and Robert to Montreal for the weekend. That night, overlooking the blue city, from a room on the twenty-seventh floor, watching pigeons circle the lit statues on the church facade below, he opened his gift, and without words we knew that somewhere in Rembrandt’s private center, he, like Shakespeare, understood the heat of the human struggle to be.