The day of Anne's funeral my family fed me at a Chinese restaurant and my fortune cookie had two fortunes. One said You are a person of culture, and if it referred to me, then the fortune cookie people were a bit off -- but the other one I think of as Anne's. That's it, captioning her picture: cheerful and hospitable, kind and well-liked.

This is not to say that Anne did not also kick ass. One of my strongest memories is of her in Mass. General, telling a second-year resident that she had had quite enough medical attention and SNAFUs and that it was time and past time for the doctors to get their act together. She could do this very politely, with a glint in her eye. Her father the Navy captain had taught her that glint in a hard school. Her doctor was reduced to saying the Harvard Medical School-educated equivalent of "Yes, Ma'am, right away, Ma'am."

We got a new doctor that afternoon, Dr. Sean Harper. Sean Harper is a man with a high and graceful interpretation of his oath to heal. I cannot remember the number of times I told Anne, "Sean says..." and watched the pain and worry on her face ease with the certainty that she was well cared for.

I want you to think about something. What will you do when someone you love, perhaps someone you love more than you love your own life, says,

"I want you to end this for me."

I showed Anne how to shut down her life support systems; hospice expected her to live a few hours. She lived for two weeks.

On her own terms.

I can barely remember when we first met; I was in my office doing some geeky thing to an IBM mainframe, Anne was brand-new on the job and running the gantlet of introductions. I remember that she smiled at me.

I really saw Anne a few weeks later. She came to ask me a question while I was playing Brian Eno's Plateaux of Mirror, and she said in small distress, "Oh, you're playing spooky music," and I said, "It's just in a minor key; it's peaceful, don't you think?" and she looked at me. That was the first time we searched one another's face.

I read a book we have at the house, a Stephen King book about dragon's breath and evil wizards, and when I had finished Anne told me she'd been reading that book to John the night before she heard the Eno disc.

I remember going to see Laurie Anderson with Anne; and listening to Anne play Für Elise on our piano.

I remember her Southern accent, the swoop down through the middle of spooky.

Anne sang with a fine clear soprano voice... "on a good day," she could hit and hold the high notes.

Think of Lucy, from Peanuts, after many years, many loves, great joys and great sorrows. That's Anne. She never settled for less than what she needed, and right now, too!

I loved to watch Anne sleep. It was the only time I ever saw her relax.

Anne did not like to watch me sleep, not at first. She'd wake up and expect the world to get going with her. One Saturday she came into the bedroom and I began making guilty getting-up groans, and she laughed and said "I just came in to watch you sleeping, you look like a little bear curled up in the sheets." I didn't press my luck.

Anne did like to press her luck; she was infamous for biting off more than she could chew. One day between Christmas 1990 and New Year's Day 1991, I came home and found Anne and a girlfriend relaxing and having a drink. Anne said, "Dear, remember we talked about taking up the linoleum in the kitchen? Sue and I started; but it's really hard, so we thought you could..."

Anne and I worked like dogs on that kitchen floor for the next three days. I get the heebie-jeebies every time I see a floor nail.

We fell in love on a February morning, four days after Valentine's Day; spring was raw, unperfected promise, like what began in Anne's kitchen when she came to me and said "I just have to hug you."

On my birthday, in July, a year and a half later: Our children stood with us, the dog came to lie down near us, and we were married with Appalachian Spring playing.

We taught ourselves a love that was unselfish, that did not need to be for me, or even for us; love like water, spilling through our lives.

We had many great fights -- great, scary fights, with Anne screaming at me, and smashing things, every once in a while throwing something at me to emphasize her point of view; me slouching against a wall, daring her to try it -- both of us shouting our angry words out onto the battleground, or holding them in reserve, or organizing them in ambush.

The evening we really learned how to fight, Anne suddenly turned to me and said, "We settle this, or you leave, now!" I might have left her, if I hadn't looked into her eyes, dark and wild as a midnight gale at sea; I would have done anything for those eyes. I said, "Maybe we can both ease up. The deal with me is..."

I may be romanticizing, but I don't believe we ever spent a night angry with one another, after that. A few nights started with one of us on the couch, but sometime about three in the morning, being angry just plain gets cold, and unsatisfying.

We did not live happily ever after, nor would we have have trifled with something so much less remarkable than our life, messy, and harried, chaos in the house, and no real stability, Anne's journal says.

The last page of her journal begins,

To work to live gracefully. That is it.

I sang to Anne, in her final minutes of life,

'T is a gift to be simple,
't is a gift to be free,
't is a gift to come down
where you ought to be,

And when we come
to the place just right
't will be in the valley
of love and delight.

We had four years, six months, twenty-two days, ten hours, and twenty minutes -- so much in so little time -- but she left a part of her spirit in me, and the grace we struggled to achieve is alive and abroad in our world.

If you know me, then someday you will feel her hand at your back, her voice in your ear, saying what are you waiting for? Get out there and do something!