Wonderful to feel Ben’s presence again, and so vividly, though I often think of him: his warmth, his wild, incredible wit, the great soulfulness of everything he did.

I remember I felt a need to touch him once more, lightly, as he lay in his coffin, looking–as he always did–cool. Decked out in a black leather jacket, wearing his wedding ring, and with his harmonica near by for whenever he might need it. Wow.

The night before Ben’s great friend Glenn Spearman died, Glenn’s wife Shantee asked, “Are you dying?” Glenn answered, “No.”

The same is true of Ben.

(I remember that the priest who presided at Ben’s Russian Orthodox service said this: The Pagans thought of the body as a prison, and the Jews too thought of the body as corrupt. He felt that where his faith parted company with both the Pagans and the Jews was in the belief in the resurrected body. As Jesus had been resurrected in his body, so too would the dead be. The priest insisted that though he “didn’t know how,” we would “see Benjamin again.”)