Dear Harzee,

It’s 5.30am. Sleep has eluded me again, and my robin is already perched on a rose bush outside the window, a worm dangling from his mouth. I’m reading your last letter to me, crumpled and stained with tears. I know it by heart. It was ‘our thing’ writing notes to each other. We’d send them in the mail or leave them in unexpected places. But time ran out and yours was the last one.

So much left unsaid, and you left me without a forwarding address.

The day you left, the sun had risen as if it was an ordinary day. I watched from the window of your hospital room as the slowly brightening sky reflected a rosy glow on the lake beyond. As the sky lit up, the reflected ripples on the lake seemed to rush towards me like silvery balls of light. I wanted you to see it, but you were sleeping. And there was always tomorrow! Later that day, in my anguish, I believed that the silvery balls had been angels welcoming you to paradise.

Then came the lost, dark days when clouds of sorrow engulfed me in ways I could never have imagined. I wanted to talk about you. To talk to you. You must be somewhere? How could so much wisdom, so much love and kindness vanish forever? Did you know how much I loved and admired you? Do you miss me as much as I miss you? Has your pain gone away? But as time went on, I speculated alone. The sympathisers had moved on.

Against the odds, you achieved your dreams. I loved listening to tales of your childhood in a small US town. Even then, you were a fireball of energy. There was the time you stole a car, aged 14, intending to drive from New Jersey to California. Ten dollars in your pocket and a few thousand miles to go! The police brought you home an hour into the trip, but the car owner, an influential woman in your small town, didn’t press charges. She introduced you to the local library, and you credited her encouragement for your love of books, and your aspirations to become an educated man.

You joined the Navy, thrived on the discipline, saw the world, and the GI Bill gave you the opportunity to pursue an education, leading to a PhD. You were so proud of that achievement. An educated man! Not bad for a small-town delinquent, you’d say.

The horror and futility of war, witnessed at a young age, lived with you always and you were passionate about your work and support for disabled veterans. But sometimes when the sun went down, your young self re-emerged, and you relived the nightmare of Vietnam. The end of innocence. The horrified child in the soldier, seeing what no child should see, hearing what no human should hear. You needed me then to comfort you when you woke trembling.

The end was too unbearable to contemplate and we never talked about it. We sat on the patio at sunset, only the two of us in the universe, my feet on your lap, sipping a glass of wine. Do you think there is life after death, I asked you once? We have our paradise here, you replied, and we never spoke of it again. You hated it when people called you brave. This is not a battle, you’d say. In a fair fight I’d win. Not even a Navy boxing champ could fight a bunch of runaway cells. In the hospital waiting room I trembled with anxiety at every visit, but you were always composed, chatting easily.

You were my rock, always there for me and my life was shrouded in your love, shielded from the reality of mortality. Now I can feel death’s shadow, and I know it will never leave. But I feel in my heart that as long as I am thinking of you, you are somewhere, somehow, thinking of me — and that will last for ever. Love you always, Philzee Phil Krouse, Sutton, Dublin 13