The following are friends, whom I have lost through the years. While they were beautiful and valued people, I haven't sugar-coated the relationship between alcohol & other drugs, and their deaths. Please understand: addiction is a progressive disorder - not a moral dilema. These were real people, who laughed real laughter, & suffered real pains. Try to see their faces, and know that each had their moment in this world's sun. Remember this as you are tempted to take your own life for granted, or to become lost in the mire of life's problems - our stay here is brief; love this life while it's yours. 

Timothy Stephens was a painter...

I lived in a cabin that I built on his property in Bolinas, Ca. for most of a five year period during the mid seventies. Together we struggled through times of bad breaks, worked crappy jobs for short pay, & had some of the finest of hard times. I painted more than one picture at his urging - inspired by his example.

Tim & I would often hustle & scrimp together enough money to drive his truck down the coast to the border, at Tijuana. There we would park, & then venture into Baja, Mexico by bus for ill advised, but somehow survived adventures.

Tim was a very fine painter. He once painted a picture of his former wife from the neck to the thighs, as she was nine months pregnant. The body was a strange luminescent green, with details that at first seemed oddly convoluted. But then, on closer examination, the fetus inside was revealed, with the umbilicus, and looking deeper the heart & internal organs of mother and fetus, until, on deep concentration, one could see through to the mother's spine. Stepping back from the painting, the images again merged into the form of the mothers swollen, nude belly.

Tim was troubled by his ongoing battle with his former wife for continuing visitation rights with his two sons. During this period, in 1978, he was arrested on drug related charges. While the matter was pending, one sunny day he went into San Francisco, thirty miles to the south of us, and leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge. He was thirty Years of age, at the time of his death. I miss him to this day. 

David Sorrels was a scrawney, long haired, denim clad, guitar picking clown.

David's mother, Rosalie Sorrels, is a songwriter's songwriter, from the tradition of Ramblin Jack Elliot, Woody Guthrie and Utah Phillips.

Their kitchen became my second home - a place where one could drink Rosalie's homemade sangria, & be a fly on the wall, entertained by the likes of Jerry Jeff Walker, and Arlo Guthrie as they joined the ongoing parade of visitors through that home.

David & I had a penchant for sharing - whether it was George Dickle's #8 whiskey, a new tune, or even each others' girlfriends (not simultaneously, but still, no, I don't care to tell those sordid tales at this writing!) . David & I shared riotous times as we made weekly runs in his old Dodge split rimmed stake truck (Hezakia) to the Russian River & Mendicino county. There we would cut firewood, felling dense overgrowths of oak, eucalyptus, & fir. We fancied ourselves as lumberjacks & drunkards - in all the best traditions of those two closely related avocations. Usually far too hung over to safely handle chainsaws & splitting malls, we would none the less tackle our work with mirth & prankishness, hauling back several cords of wood for sale, which would usualy go to fund the next week's drinking.

David had a pensive & moody side - which was entirely unspoken. He was closed mouthed about his troubles, even among his closest friends. One night, while I was away during a year spent working in Santa Cruz, He went to another friend's house & borrowed a roll of electrical tape and a hose.

It was my late friend, Doly, who found him pulled off in his truck into a thick patch of brush alongside Mesa Road, the following day. He had gone to this spot, & quietly finished his quart of George Dickle, as he taped the borrowed hose to his exhaust pipe & then gassed himself at the wheel of Hezakia. His death tormented me for many years, as I never had the chance to mend a very minor broken fence that had stood between us at the time. David was 23. 

(Red Haired) Susan Cowan. The name says it all.

You could see her coming from over the horizon - and woe betide you if she was coming from behind the wheel. Susan was the incarnation of Janice Joplin - but without the voice to sing her tortured soul. She was a trust-fund baby, with enough money to buy her boyfriend a bronze Porche, and then replace it twice after he wrapped it -& another -around trees off the shoulder of Highway 1. Three cars in two months. She ran out of affection for the boyfriend long before she ran out of funds.

Billie Holiday sang, : "when you've got money, you've got lots of friends - crowded 'round your door...God bless the child, that's got his own..." Susan and her entourage held court in her expansive living room, in her lodge style house on the Bolinas Mesa. The booze was an ever flowing fount. Cocaine and other powders were like a snowy blanket, laying piled up in drifts on tables around the house. The party never ended at Susan's house - even as she would fall into her room, bleary eyed, and beyond control of her physical and mental abilities. Often, as she lay semiconcious in her room, utterly wasted, & near overdose, revelers from the other room would slither in to relieve her of the cash which was stuffed in uncounted wads in her purse & pockets.

Susan's breakfast consisted of fresh squeezed orange juice, mixed with a pint of 151 proof rum. She was always proud of how healthful the fresh squeezed orange juice was, as if to note that she had some little corner of will for self care left.

Susan died, predictably, in her bed. Her autopsy revealed that she had ruined nearly every major organ - stomach, liver, pancreas, kidneys, heart & lungs - with the uncontrolled flow of smokes, fluids, powders and pills into her addiction riddled body.

Susan was a lost child, trying to live without love. She tried vainly to buy it from a circle of self obsessed friends, too enamored of her wealth & willingness to see (or care) that they were exploiting a dying woman.

Susan was twenty eight, when she passed away. 

Freddy Bryant's passing was as far removed from the sordid realm of drugs as a person can get.

Fred was a diminuitive little man, with a deeply furrowed face that had a gnome-like quality. His bushy eyebrows rested above knowing, smiling brown eyes. Fred was developmentally disabled, having lived out the majority of his 53 years in the Colorado State institution for the mentally retarded at Wheatridge. He had seen it all, and for a seemingly meek and singularly gentle soul, he had learned well the ropes of survival. He spoke in a soft, mild voice, and approached people with the ready familiarity of a child. But make no mistake, Fred was no child.

Fred was the best friend of one of the residents of a large, fourplex apartment building that housed the residential program which I was manager of in 1978 - '79. He would come to visit on a nearly nightly basis, and nightly would quietly intimate to me that he had not been fed at the boarding home of which he had been a resident for the preceding two years. He would be included in our evening meals, & then I would drive him back to his seedy guest home in the North Capitol Hill area of Denver. I later discovered that Fred was playing me like a fiddle - eating at his home & then bamboozling me for yet another meal.

During these drives home, Fred won me over, & so it was that I was deeply distressed to learn from his boarding home staff that he had been discovered to have a terminal illness. Fred was suffering from a rare form of cirrhosis, & plans were being made to place him in a nursing home. The idea of this was so patently unfair. Fred was the most sweet natured & gentle soul imaginable, & yet had only lived out of the bounds of the state institution for a mere two years. At past fifty, Fred was just beginning to have a taste of life in the greater world, & now he was to be confined again until his final breath. It was intolerable to me, & so I used what influence I had in the Developmental Disabilities system to arrange for Fred to come & live with my family, as our first Adult Foster Care resident.

The proceding four years were to be among the most meaningfull of my life. Initially, I thought myself to be the giver. Soon, Fred showed me that the measure of a person's worth lies not in the contents of their head, but in the content of their heart. Fred, for all his meekness, was the most courageous person I have ever Known. The disease that took him was mean & relentless. It slowly wasted his limbs & bones, & destroyed the health of all his diminuitive body's systems. He knew that he was gravely ill, but never wavered in his conviction that all was well, & he was bound for a better place. He faced death with great dignity, & met life with love & light until his very last breath. He gave me insight into the nature of faith, & I was in awe of his capacity for all the best things that we know as human.

We built a motor home from a 34 foot schoolbus, & took Fred & my then six week old daughter, on the trip of a lifetime. We made a 5000 mile loop, taking us from Denver to Key West, & back again, staying at Sugarloaf Key for several weeks, & then taking in the gulf coast in springtime. Stories from that adventure still flow like milk & honey around my house.

Fred, for all his graces, had a fatal flaw - he stole like an old crow. If it was shiny, small, & easily spirited off, it probably had Fred's name on it. He had been suffering terribly toward the end, & his face was haggard & furrowed from pain. I had been staying at the hospital on a cot in his room for several days. He hovered near death for endless hours, & finally I decided that I couldn't serve him, nor me, by staying another sleepless night on that wretched cot. I went home to steal a few hours of sleep, and at around midnight, Fred let go. When I went to his room at the hospital, the nurses had carefully combed his hair, & neatly folded the covers across his shoulders. As I looked at his restfull face, I could see the relief from pain he was finally given - as the lines of his brow were soft again, and he faintly smiled. Pulling the sheet away from his chest, I noticed the slight glint of the edge of a steel object tucked well beneath his hip. I was amazed & amused to find that as his last waking act of life, Fred had relieved a nurse of her bandage scissors.

Fred's Funeral was a testament to his life. Several bus loads of his former friends & coworkers from his sheltered workshop came to the decidedly formal chapel at Fairmont cemetary for the service. It seemed that not a one of them had refrained from raiding a neighbors' garden, as fruit jars of flowers filled the alters. The raw love of that gesture brought genuine tears to the eyes of even the upright, stodgy mortuary staff, as Fred touched people in death exactly as he had in life - sweetly, & with amazing depth.