And when it’s all over, and it’s two a.m. and we are back in the hotel and the adrenaline is fading, Amanda, who has been subdued and awkward since the gig finished, starts crying, silently, uncontrollably, and I hold her, not sure what to say.

“You saw how good it was tonight?” she asks as she cries, and I tell her that, yes. I did, and for the first time it occurs to me how bad it must have got to make her leave something that meant that much to her, that made so many people happy.

Her cheeks are black with wet eye makeup and it’s smearing on the sheets and the pillow as she sobs and I hold her tight, and try with all my might to understand.

This article was written for Spin magazine, and originally published on their website on November 5, 2010.

Eight Views of Mount Fuji: Beloved Demons and Anthony Martignetti

I

IT’S ALL ABOUT life.

And in the midst of whatever else we’re in, it’s always about life.

II

I HAD KNOWN Amanda Palmer for six months, and we were going on our first date. Our first date was four days long, because it was all the free time we had at the beginning of 2009 and we were giving it to each other. I had not yet met her family. I barely knew her friends.

“I want you to meet Anthony,” she said.

It was January. If I’d really known who Anthony was in her life then, if I’d known how much he’d played his part in raising her, I think I would have been nervous. I wasn’t nervous. I was just pleased that she wanted to introduce me to someone that she knew.

Anthony, she told me, was her next-door neighbor. He had known her since she was a child.

He turned up in the restaurant: a tall, good-looking man who looked a decade younger than his age. He had a walking cane, an easy comfortable manner, and we talked all that evening. Anthony told me about the nine-year-old Amanda who had thrown snowballs at his window, about the teenage Amanda who had come next door when she needed to vent, about the college-age Amanda who had called him from Germany when she was lonely and knew nobody, and about rock star Amanda (it was Anthony who had named The Dresden Dolls). He asked me about me, and I answered him as honestly as I could.

Later, Amanda told me that Anthony liked me, and had told her he thought I would make a good boyfriend for her.

I had no idea how important this was, or what Anthony’s approval meant at the time.

III

LIFE IS A stream: an ongoing conversation of nature with itself, contradictory and opinionated and dangerous. And the stream is made up of births and deaths, of things that come into existence and pass away. But there is always life, and things feeding on life.

We had been married for five months. Amanda phoned me in tears from a yoga retreat in the Canary Islands, to tell me Anthony had just been diagnosed with leukemia. She flew home. Anthony began treatment. It didn’t look as if there was anything real to worry about. Not then. They can treat these things.