We behave differently when we see the darkness looming. We become creatures of lust and fear.

Amanda pushed and helped him, and Anthony published some of his stories in a collection called Lunatic Heroes. He and his friends Nivi and Paul formed 3 Swallys Press to bring the book to the world. The launch event for Lunatic Heroes, in Lexington, Massachusetts, Anthony’s hometown, was a dark event in a sold-out theater: Amanda read her introduction, and I read some of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and most of all Anthony read from Lunatic Heroes.

I worried that he wasn’t going to live much beyond the launch event.

I was scared for Laura, Anthony’s wife, and scared for Amanda. I knew that any sadness I was going to feel at the loss of my friend was going to have to be put aside while I looked after Amanda, who would be broken and torn by Anthony’s death.

It was going to be hard for all of us.

I felt the air from the wings of the angel of death brushing my face at that launch event, that night.

VII

LIFE HAS A sense of humor, but then again, so does death.

Laura’s mother, Pat, who helped me cook when we first moved into this house, died this year of leukemia.

Anthony, to our delight, got through the chemo, and, with the help of a newly released drug, he recovered. He is in remission—for now. He beat death, as much as any of us gets to beat death. For now—it’s always a transient win, that one, and the reaper can wait. She’s patient, and she will be here when the last of us has gone.

Anthony no longer had leukemia; but now he had a book called Lunatic Heroes.

There were darker stories that Anthony had crafted from his life that had not made it into that first book. Stories of obsession and desire. Stories of loss and fear and hate. The kind of stories that need you to be brave to tell them, braver still to publish them so that other people can look inside your head and know what makes you tick, and what makes you hard, and what makes you cry, that tell you that the hardest battles are the ones you fight inside your own head, when nobody else is going to know if you won or lost or even if a battle was fought at all.

Or to put it another way, and quote the Buddha, who knew about these things,

Though one may conquer a million men in battle, yet the noblest of victors is he who conquers himself. Self-conquest is far better than the conquest of others. Not even a god, an angel, Mara or Brahma could turn that triumph back into defeat.

VIII

WE WIN SOME, but we lose many. We lose a lot. We lose our friends and we lose our family. In the end we lose everything. No matter who’s with us, we always die alone. When you fight your battles, whatever battles you fight, it’s always going to be about life.