We leave behind two things that matter, Stephen Sondheim said, in a musical I love and Amanda doesn’t, and those two things are children and art.

Anthony’s children are scattered: they are the people whose lives he has influenced and helped to shape. I count my wife as one of his children. Anthony’s art is here, in these pages, waiting for you, as fresh, as sharp, as painful a hundred years from now when I’m dead and Anthony’s dead and Amanda’s dead and everyone we know is dust and ash and bones in the ground.

This book is a gift, and, as I said, it is the tales that accompany the gift that matter: the stories that show us the joy of event, of the shaping of memories, and the joy of a life lived, as all lives are lived, both in the light and in the darkness.

These pages are gifts, from Anthony to you, and they hold the tales that accompany the gifts, from someone who has walked into the darkness and now stands in the light, ready to tell you his stories.

This was my introduction to C. Anthony Martignetti’s book Beloved Demons. Anthony died of leukemia in June 2015, at home, surrounded by his loved ones. We were there, his friends and family, around his bed. I was holding Amanda’s pregnant belly as he left us, and feeling the movements of the baby we would name after Anthony.

So Many Ways to Die in Syria Now: May 2014

We are in a metal shed in Azraq refugee camp, Jordan, sitting on a low mattress, talking to a couple who have been here since the camp opened two weeks ago. Abu Hani^* is a good-looking man in his late forties who looks beaten, like an abused dog. He hangs back. His wife, Yalda, talks more than he does.

There is a water jug on the floor. It is the only water they have. We have managed to knock it over twice, and each time we apologize and feel awful, as in order to refill it there is a five-minute walk to the four taps embedded in concrete at the corner of the block. The desert air dries out the thin carpet in moments.

The couple are telling us why they left Syria. Abu Hani once owned a small supermarket, but the “officials” who ran his town trashed it, mixed detergent into the grains and pulses, and took his stock. He spent his savings restocking the shop, but when he opened again they closed him down permanently. People were killed. On the local news they would show bodies that had been found, so people could identify their relatives: one time he saw a cousin’s severed head on there.

Mostly their relatives just vanished. Yalda’s brothers and cousin were on their way to deliver blood for a transfusion to their infant nephew who was having an open-heart operation when they were stopped at a roadblock, and interrogated about the blood. The three men did not arrive at the hospital and were never seen again. I did not want to ask what happened to the nephew. Her mother, Yalda tells us, has lost her mind: she goes from police station to hospital to police station, asking about her sons—the police got so tired of this they wrote “deceased” next to their names, to make her stop coming and asking.