Matt and I didn’t keep in close touch. I stopped going to the island. I heard about Matt mostly through Jos and Electa. He married a few years after I did, moved to Nashville, had a child. But every time I published a book, he would come to a reading. He’d sit in the front with a huge smile on his face the whole time.
It was Electa who told me he had cancer. The next time I went to Nashville, we had dinner after my reading. He described the rhythm of chemo, the terrible days, the increasingly better days, the dread of the next round. He drove me around the city, pulled into the parking lot of his son’s elementary school. He said he’d made a promise to himself that he would stay alive until his son turned 10. He kept that promise.
The last time I saw him was on the island. I had a reading up there, and afterward we talked till one in the morning on the porch of the inn where I was staying. George had died, my mother had died, and Matt was dying. But the whole island, its low tides and tall firs and thick fogs, smelled of their lives and of my great love for each of them that would never die. Stars streaked across the clear black sky. Matt and I spoke only of the past.
Jos called me the day Matt died. We told each other all the Matt stories we always told. We laughed and we wept on the phone together.
A few years ago, Jos, Electa, Tyler, and I bought a little piece of land in Maine. Matt will never see it. He’ll never stay in the house we built together on a peninsula 50 miles south of our island, and where I am writing this now, the goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace in full bloom. He’ll never know that when our kids, in their 20s now and living in different cities, were all here with us last weekend they made a pact that their future children would be friends from birth like they’ve been, then stayed up late playing Wink and Mafia while their parents fell asleep to the quick swells of their laughter. But Matt brought us all here. We are all together, we are all so close, because of my teenage infatuation on a rocky beach, because of my mother’s middle-aged love for a man named George. They are each a vital link in this long chain of love that connects us, that binds us tight.
Love changes form, but not strength. It rushes through our lives like a great river. It is unpredictable. It changes course. And all we can do, all we must do, is keep our heart open and let it come.