Andrew Sullivan - "If Love Were All" excerpt

This came across especially powerfully as I read it on the train home last night after the Holy Joe's session on death. This is the 3rd of 3 essays in Sullian's book, "Love Undetectable". The essay is the second in the book on "friendship". He starts out the first essay talking about walking into the hospital room of his friend, Patrick, who is dying of complications related to AIDS (Sullivan is also HIV+). In this last essay, he's just finished up a discussion of Jesus' emphasis on friendship ("I no longer call you servants, I call you my friends") and the relationship of Jesus, John and Peter; "In the battle between love and friendship, between the injunction to carry the Church onward and the need of even the resurrected Jesus for intimacy, it is clear that what Peter apparently suspects is actually true: that it is friendship, the incarnation of love, that endures; that it is friendship that is eternal; and that even if John will die, Jesus' love for John will not."

The day of the funeral was a typically muggy one in Patrick's hometown. Our mutual friend Alane and I had gotten up before dawn in New York to make the journey down, and in Atlanta, we'd picked up the rest of his close friends for the final leg home. By the time we arrived at the spacious family house Pat had grown up in, we were ragged at the edges and still in a kind of emotional haze. Those few days since his death had been black ones, tenuous, strung-out affairs, places without may recognizable refues and the short car ride to the small-town church, past rows of neighbors on the streets, and bustling silence in the crammed pews. Pat's high school portrait was propped up on the altar, an airbrushed oil work that seemed as unreal as his death. So strange to be where he had taken us but, for the first time, without him; so strange to feel the eyes of a small town bear down on the huddle of suited "special friends" who had come to pay their respects.

And after the wake, his family took us down to the boat. It was late afternoon, and we were doing what he'd asked of us. There were five friends on the boat, and Pat's parents, three brothers, and their wives. We brought the ashes with us, some poems to read out loud, a trumpet to play a strain from Mahler, and, of course, some food. We knew where we were going but dreaded the moment when the boat's engine would stop, and we would be floating there in silence, above the warm, dark gulf of Shark's Hole, waiting at last to say goodbye. I must have imagined a scene like this a dozen times over the previous few years but it seemed even heavier than I anticipated, even emptier than I had feared. Still, there was something about the warm, gentle air that evening, and the red, incandescent sky, that leavened the atmosphere. So when the time came to empty the ashes into the still water, it was easy to be distracted by how white they were, like powdered sugar, and how they billowed so swiftly out behind the boat into the bay. We all stood there, watching the white cloud spread beneath us, wondering what to do next, when one of Pat's brothers started to take his shirt off. "I'm going in!" he yelled, and jumped in after Pat. The rest of us hesitated for a moment, and then followed.

I remember the shock of warmth as my body fell into the sea, and the strange gray mist that surrounded me as I opened my eyes in the water, and the pure, sweet breeze that greeted me as I reached the surface and looked around me again, and breathed, suddenly, for air.