Those years I spent attending, nursing, celebrating, thirty-some waning boys, my straight friends spent having, nursing, teaching one baby. It’s a lovely baby, mind you, and my godchild. It has golden curls and is, of course, a genius. The parents’ engendering and then “changing” said baby seems laudable to all. My own loved ones were not brought into the world by me, but only, in my company, let out of it.

I know that my obit will read, “Leaves no immediate survivors.” And I know my friends who’re parents will be squired into their afterlife with the ennobling proclamation, “Leaves a son, Gaines, a student at New Haven …”

And yet, I feel I’ve earned a family, too. It’s just not a family of survivors.

Now I understand another peculiar fact of physics: It is possible to sit before Love—even the love of someone dead—to sit before it as you would before a brand-new sunlamp, and to become, over time, quite tanned by it.

You can be bronzed toward health by the love of your missing. I still feel irradiated daily by the playful wit, even by the stubborn petulance, of absent friends.

—So, I’ve decided: I will keep them in the book. But they will be spelled in capitals all their own. The living, any possible new ones, will get only lowercase. The living friends will have their jumbled data entered and then changed in pencil. But inked, changeless now, my darlings are rendered bold, right where they left off, all caps, all stars, and honored there forever.

Please, though, tell me. Tell me that I managed to love them enough.

When they started getting sick, I feared I wouldn’t do enough for them. When so many were down with it, I feared I’d done too much. Now they’re dead; I’m shamed by all the chances missed.

I am just figuring out how to do it right next time around.

You hear of something called Survivor’s Guilt. That’s less than half the story. With it comes Survivor’s Pride, Survivor’s Glee, Survivor’s Fear of Having Survived in Name Only. Add to that, a Survivor’s obnoxious tendency to work every topic back around to a Survivor’s survival. You can, if you’re lucky, tell yourself you’re living for them, so they can better live via you.

I hear there’s hope now. These new medical regimes can sometimes keep the sickness beaten to one place. The procedures are expensive; the sickness is still dreadful, but it’s becoming something you can mostly live with. Pray.

And yet, a pro at this by now, I feel somewhat teased by the protease inhibitors. They just make the struggles of my loved ones feel even more early early. Friends seem stuck even farther offshore that long night when our beautiful boat went down. Till then, we sure did think that we were something.

This, my ledger record, is a huge debt only partly repaid.

Only now am I just starting to begin to know them, whole.