Love me one more time,
Make this night last forever,
For on the morrow, I leave for battle...

And if I die, just remember I love you,
And you'll always be mine,
Let us warm up this cold night together,
Come the morrow, I leave for battle...
"Tomorrow", Heather Alexander

Five days. They managed to put everything together in just five days.

It became a legend told and retold around campfires as an example of the very best the Dream could be, and the vast number of people involved deserve more honor than could ever be given. My Auntie, and Erin, and Hector from down south, and the Bedlam Players, and Chris’s brother knights, and simply countless other people got together and put together, from scratch, a wedding for us both, in just five days.

It was beautiful. It was in the great clearing at the base of the giant hill in the Arboretum, under a brilliant autumn sky, ringed on all sides by the blazing gold of the turning leaves. It was a full-flourish SCAdian wedding, with resplendant finery and trumpeteers, with sword guard forming the arch of blades over the aisle and heralds calling forth, and literally hundreds of our friends from all across the Knowne World who drove and flew in on less than a week’s notice. And immediately after there was a revel to end all revels, of feasting and singing and merriment like every revel we ever had all rolled into one.

It was a joyous, yet bittersweet; by now news had quietly gotten out of Chris’s state; and the many friends of ours who came had an unspoken understanding that this was not only a celebration but a chance to say goodbye. Chris and I were leaving the next day for a three-week trip to Europe, which neither of us had ever seen. It was understood that, in all likelihood, Chris would never return.

And late into the night the revels went, until the stars had almost completed their dance from horizon to horizon, and I still mist with tears when I think about all the joy amidst the sorrow of parting that there was, of how brave and valiant and merry so many were. There is literally nothing I could have possibly done in my whole lifetime to have deserved friends and family as worthy as they; and if I spend the rest of my life trying to give back, I’ll never approach paying off the debt. And as night gave way to dawn, the crowd, still dozens and dozens strong, piled into cars and in a long, happy caravan saw us to the airport, one last honor guard in full armor forming the sword arch at the front door of the terminal as Dr. Chu pushed Chris in his wheelchair in.

The logistics that Dr. Chu and our friends must have had to go through simply boggles my mind. Or perhaps it is in the last light of dusk that the best in humanity comes out and all the rules that seem so important at other times get bent or shuffled; or maybe our friends simply refused to let them get in our way. Where Dr. Chu got all the permisions he needed to take aboard an airplane and overseas the panopoly of drugs, or all the sudden time off to accompany us, I don’t know. Nor will anyone tell me, even today, where the vast expense of the trip must have come from. Our trip would have been impossible otherwise without countless people’s help -most whose contributions I’ll never know. And impossible without Dr. Chu coming with us, to keep Chris on track of the medications he needed to keep his failing strength up, without all the arrangements he made with hotels and hostels and hospitals to have the equipment we needed at each place, the porters and the staffpeople ready at each train station, each terminal; the back-up plans he must have made, every step of the way, not knowing how long Chris had left. It all went perfectly.

And so the three of us paid visit to the fairy-tale castles of Mad King Ludwig, and raised a glass in the famous beer halls; wandered the streets where Mozart’s genius shined and participated in the grand magnificence of a night at the Vienna Philharmonic; wandered the banks of the Seine and stole a kiss at sunset at the top of the Eiffel; visited the Tower of London and watched dawn rise over the cliffs of Dover. So many happy memories to add to so many others, our last days together filled every moment with joy...

By the time Chris picked out the hound pendant for me, the end was obviously near. He was trying hard -oh, so hard-but the cancer was finally winning. We made it as far as a hospice in a monastery on the Irish Atlantic coast that Dr. Chu had made arrangements at, a place of peace and beauty where patients came for the very last step of their journeys. Chris was asleep when we wheeled him into the comfortably furnished cloisters late one October evening. He would never wake again.

The last day, the very last day, we spent on the stone patio outside of our room, Christopher in the bed the staff helped wheel out, his IV pole and oxygen next to him. Outside, where the sun shone and the waves crashed onto shore in front of us and the seagulls wheeled up overhead. We had come out there at sunrise, the three of us, me sitting by Chris’s bedside, holding his hand, feeling his chest rise and fall; Marcus sitting quietly in a chair on the other side, from time to time adjusting this or injecting that or changing the fluid bags, continuing to do what he could. The day was clear and cool and crisp; the clouds moved across the sky; the peace was disturbed by nothing. We spent the whole day there. The sun began to set the sky on fire as it sank to the horizon. And as the sky turned to red and gold and the first stars of evening began to twinkle in the sky, Christopher breathed his last.

We buried Christopher next to his beloved Rosella, next to his parents, next to little Sara and Stephen, in the beautiful patch on a hill, surrounded by trees but open to the sky. The grass was covered in a carpet of gold, and the forest was like the mythical Lorien, the day we came to say goodbye, virtually all of the same people who had come to our wedding just a few days before now come to lay roses on Christopher’s final resting place.

And Thomas’, too; for in a plot just next to where Christopher would rest next to his beloved Rosella, there was a space for Thomas...and I. Christopher had had two Truehearts in his lifetime, and so did I; and in time, when all things were done, we would all be together, in the end. Thomas had had no family of his own at all, an orphan raised as ward of state; when his killers had taken his life, we had arranged for his ashes to be kept in a temporary columbarium until a more permanent place could be found, so that eventually he would not be left behind from the only true family he had ever had. Auntie had quietly arranged for his headstone and his internment so that Thomas was already there when we came to bury Chris. Just the last of the countless gifts my precious friends and family gave to us both.

It was also one of the very last gifts Auntie ever gave me. Only one man survived the horrific Eastrail disaster -survived without a scratch, so they say. Everyone else aboard Eastrail #177 perished, including Auntie.

And then Erin and I hadn’t even reached Philadelphia to identify Auntie’s body when Dr. Chu was found slumped at his office desk, victim of a sudden, catastrophic stroke. His body was probably in the office for hours before a cleaning person found it.

I faintly remember standing on the top level of the parking structure at the hospital in Philadelphia after the call bearing the terrible news about Dr. Chu came, remember standing in a driving rain, screaming, shouting, roaring at the sky, screaming at the universe, bellowing at fate. I don’t remember what I said; I don’t remember how long I was out there, the rain falling over me like a shower, the lighting and the thunder only just louder than my rage. But I remember the terrible, burning resolution I made there, that I swore my life to; that while one breath remained in my body, I would not surrender to despair, to hopelessness, to sorrow; that while one moment of life remained to me, I would fight, with everything I had, to bring cheer to the world. The universe had done it’s damned darnest to pound me down, visited loss upon me again and again. It would not win. My friends had given me so much to help me fight back. I would fight, every day I had left, to try to give back to them, at whatever price. I would have my vengence against gloom and terror and fear, with every day and every moment, until Death finally came for me, too.

What could life possibly do to me that it hadn’t done to me already? What else could I possibly lose that I hadn’t already lost? What worse tragedy, what sicker injustice, could be visited upon me that wasn’t merely a variation on a theme? I was done being afraid. I was done being scared. I was done fearing loss. If the universe wanted to stop me, wanted to make me give up, it would have to kill me.

Nothing less.