I sought the sanctuary of routine, washing up the few dishes lying used by the sink. I placed the coffee stained tablecloth in a bucket of cold water. The gas bill was opened and processed for the next Presbytery meeting. I stripped my bed and loaded the washing machine. But as the possibility of routine’s sanctuary gave way to despair, I sat in the window seat, with its view of Glan y Mawddach and Garn Gorllwyn across the wide estuary, and wept. With no more tears but a heaviness that was hard to shoulder, I walked up into the hills behind the village and sat searching into the waters of Cregennen. I wondered when Joel might have picked it up. Surely since the days of our intimacy? In all the years of celibacy I’d never considered the possibility that the virus might be harboured somewhere in the nucleus of a white blood cell. But now the possibility gnawed.

Walking along Ffordd Ddu, I yielded to God’s embrace and lying in the sun I breathed in the rich smells of heather, bracken and sheep droppings. The Healer, who’d always tended the wounds of my lifetime’s struggle with a sexuality that was generally despised and mistrusted, comforted and re-assured my troubled mind. The sun warmed my face, inviting my imagination to wander again with Joel in the California sun. The camping trips to Yosemite… the retreats at the house in Bodega Bay where we’d read Anne Sexton and Dylan Thomas aloud to one another to ease the mental fatigue brought on by heavier theological tomes, and where we’d made love in the hot tub on the deck under the stars. I remembered the pumpkin festival at Half Moon Bay; the garlic ice cream in Gilroy that had made Joel sick… and the peace of the Rose Garden in the Berkeley Hills, shattered by the Argentinian students’ demonstration against the Malvinas war. And I wept again, but now the tears were less bitter. I had come to appreciate that what I’d shared with Joel had been a rich gift.

That spring evening, in the vestry of Bethania, only six gathered for the mid week prayer-cum-bible meeting – y seiat. We read Psalm One Hundred and Sixteen together. Some of it had come to me, mouthed over and over, during my mind’s sojourn with Joel, and again as I climbed down from the hills to the village late in the afternoon. Words that had been the source of comfort and strength to troubled people for more than two thousand years, had also comforted me. Gwenda Efans took her neatly ironed handkerchief from the shambles of her handbag. Wiping away the silent tears she told how she’d recited the same Psalm, from memory, to her comatose husband in Bangor hospital.