It was Halloween last year. I’d risen early in upstate New York, where I’d arrived the day before from home in California. A long flight, short sleep, and now a drive, further north and east. Just after dawn I was on the road, and by mid-morning, I was arriving at the home of my friend and former customer in a little town in New England.

Former home, I suppose. Patrick had died a little less than two years previously. So instead of meeting Patrick, I was meeting his widow. My job was to assess Patrick’s library and begin the process of helping the items therein find new shelves and new stewards.

Were I talking to Patrick, I’d have told him that his cramped library at the top of the house was a mess. So I’ll say the same to you. It was a mess. It had remained untouched since his death, and the accumulation of dust and crawly things that like neglected spaces had done nothing to improve Patrick’s unique sense of… ahem… organization. Books piled in tottery towers on the floor. Books stacked vertically and horizontally, two-deep on the shelves. Precious objects – Second World War posters, photo collections, correspondence – stuffed in random tubes and boxes and envelopes, these higgledy piggledy on any available horizontal surface, stuffed into any nook. An incredible wartime album from Nazi-occupied Jersey – the contents clearly clandestinely compiled at personal risk and then signed, after liberation, by both Churchill and Montgomery – was found on the floor behind the upholstered fringe of Patrick’s tatty easy chair. The overall aesthetic effect was neglected attic meets the National Archives, the mashup impossibly crammed into an area not much bigger than a largish closet. Imagine if entropy became a sentient force, wilfull, and grumpy.

In a word, it was Patrick. Only I did not see it right away. I only had the day, so I only saw the work. That we started right away, laboring – and I use the term literally. We spent much of the day on our knees, on a tiny patch of floor repeatedly cleared and filled, and cleared and filled again. We kept at it, breaking only for the bathroom, until late in the day, sussing, sorting, listing, and packing, conveying heavy boxes, one by one, down the stairs and out to the car for shipment.

At the end of the day, with the last box packed and Tetris-fitted into the car, I went back up to the library to have a look for anything left behind and for a general tidy-up. The latter was impossible. Patrick’s Catholic heart might have relished the loaves-and-fishes miracle; even fifteen large boxes lighter, the library still looked unreasonably full.

Standing there, the day’s work done and about to close the door to the room – that’s when I finally saw Patrick. I finally saw the library not as a space, but his space. Saw my friend occupying his space. Nesting in it, professorially, like an unkempt owl, surrounded by piles of the things he’d digested. I looked at his desk, at the old chair in the center of the room, under which he’d stuffed treasure. I realized that this was likely the very spot where he’d sat as we talked and debated for hours over the phone, compressing a continent’s worth of physical distance.

So, car packed, ready to go, I just sat in his chair for a few minutes. I’d not been able to say a proper goodbye – assuming there is such a thing. The illness revealed itself late and took him swiftly. We said goodbye via text. His last text to me had expressed “Grateful for everything.” So I told him – told him in a quiet few moments spent in his space, sitting in his chair.

But that wasn’t it either. That was not yet the moment I wanted with him.

Patrick was many things. Among them he was well and truly and for a very long time an ardent collector. I am now entrusted with hundreds of the books and artifacts he collected. He wanted, sought, acquired, and touched every item I now handle, regard, describe, and seek to pass on. So, in a way, over these past months I’ve had that extra time with Patrick I didn’t get. I’m having the grace of an extended communion with a kindred spirit. And this is being followed by the opportunity to distribute things he loved among others who will continue to love and appreciate them. There might be no better goodbye.