James was magic and he was made of love. For some reason his giggle has followed me around these few days, and it is almost unbearable. If this kind of anguish is what this odyssey of a week has been for me . . . I can't imagine what it must be like for you. You did everything you possibly could have done, everything. And he suffered so unduly, so unfairly -- never was a person's suffering more undeserved. You raised a truly special human being and now he's gone and we'll all have to find a way of carrying him around with us in a way that isn't devastating. But I've carried him with me for all the 12 years I've known him and can't imagine doing otherwise.

The last time I saw James in person was a couple of years ago in New York. We wandered for hours and had the most healing conversation of my life, without question; he released me from a lot of guilt I'd felt for years, and explained a few things that had happened when he was manic such that a narrative was able to click into place for the first time. But he wouldn't accept the same reassurances and explanations from me; he couldn't accept that his illness wasn't his fault, and that the manic version of himself wasn't core to who he was somehow. That he was one of the kindest people I had ever met, of a sort that seemed instinctive somehow. He would never take the slack he so readily gave others. That night he quoted liberally from a play (can't remember which) and from a Walt Whitman poem . . . and sang an off-tune Barrett's Privateers. What a marvel he was.

Ellen Quigley