Every year, for me this day (June 5th) is one of the most emotionally difficult days of the year; it’s my man Jacques Transue’s death day, in the bright early summer of what unfolded as the disastrous year 2003. Jacques died, after all those years of withering through dementia to death; I was crazed with grief (actually, I still am, it never went away, though the sharpest edges have worn down some, they would have had to); and then in November the flesh-eating bacteria came for me, and I just barely survived their onslaught, coming out disabled and disfigured, with almost all of my previous life gone.
Mozart’s disastrous year was 1791 — it’s chronicled in H. C. Robbins Landon’s 1791: Mozart’s Last Year (1988) — and ended with his death in the dark winter, but also embraced great triumphs, notably Die Zauberflöte. (More on Mozart’s last year below.)
I can’t tell you much about 2003 between J’s death in June and the appearance of a painful swelling in my right armpit in November. It’s almost all lost to me. I presumably spent this time in Palo Alto. I know that I was teaching a seminar at Stanford that fall, but I know that only because people have told me about it. My actual memory is blank.
I recall my response shortly after J’s death, because I wrote some about it in postings on the net: I wept a lot, and raged. At him: how could he have abandoned me like this, how could he have left me, damn him, how could he have just gone and died on me like this? And I sat with the flannel shirts that were heavy with smell of his body and mourned. Now, I fully understood the irrationality of my response, but I also realized that I was, like, the millionth person in the world to react this way; I would endure. Meanwhile, I wept, bitterly.
But sometimes I fall back into that hole. And then I miss Jacques terribly — well, the Jacques who mostly melted away in the 1990s, over 3 decades ago. But still…
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