“Intermezzo,” essay by Alex Behr c. 2024, Grief Stick, Picture Frame Press

My acoustic upright piano is a tame beast—a cow, a mule. Humble, it rests on its haunches with skinny legs. As my fiancé, Chris Hartman, was dying, I closed the lid and covered it with photos of him: from before I met him in San Francisco, when I was twenty-four to his thirty, and for the years when he was lost to me. His hospice bed fit between the piano and the dining room table. 

We’d met at the end of 1989 and dated in 1990, briefly but intensely, and broke, no contact, until the end of 2019, when I found him, and we fell in love. On January 5, 2020, we married each other “outside the state” in Seattle’s St. James Cathedral. In silence, we tied the knot with strings that he’d bitten off from teabags. He moved south to Portland in June 2020 to continue a life here with my teenage son and me.

On September 11, 2020, the admitting nurse at Portland’s OHSU looked at Chris’s MRI results and recent symptoms: the loss of peripheral vision, the shaking muscles, the shattered coffee cup. She guessed he likely had a rare sporadic prion disorder called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, later confirmed at the autopsy. The nurse gave him a death sentence of three months. The skies were yellow. He lived another three and half weeks.

We stayed at OHSU’s neuro wing for twelve days of tests and drugs until the skies cleared. He walked in on his own. When we left, he couldn’t. Diseased proteins were destroying healthy brain cells exponentially.

We’d never forgotten our connection, that heat. The coroner said the disease could’ve been in him for decades. Like me, dormant. 

So long, his body barely fit on the hospice bed. A leg would fall off, and he couldn’t lift it, so I propped it on the piano bench. I opened the curtain to the moon.

We’d wanted to get married after Covid eased up. Then it became an obsession: to “legitimize” what didn’t need legitimacy. He couldn’t control his hand to sign his name on our marriage license. But he said, “We have our hands. We are free.” 

On October 1, 2020, I held a commitment ceremony. Masked friends laid homemade hearts on him. He whispered, “Auspicious.” 

The piano fills any role asked of it. Yet when closed, the space it occupies becomes a black hole. His mother, stepfather, and grown son arrived from Seattle on October 2. Their only visit. I played Brahms for them beside his quiet body. They left after three hours.

He died shortly after midnight, on October 6, 2020. That evening, I saw him kneeling at the foot of our bed. He said, “Take me to the ocean.”

“You don’t have a body,” I said. And he disappeared.

A few weeks later, I woke with these words: 

“I met my peaceful other. I met my ferocious other. Some people only see one.”