Robert wasn’t attracted to me either. If it weren’t for the fact that he’d been in a relationship with a woman for twenty years and even married her when she was terminally ill (the poor woman managed to get the sort of rare killer breast cancer that doesn’t show up on a mammogram and does present with pain as a symptom), the folks in our group would have concluded he was gay. In fact, some of them concluded that anyway. Personally, I think the man was asexual (or maybe one of the recently-named demisexuals in our midst). As far as I could tell, Robert just didn’t seek intimacy with another person. He once told me that he’d acquired a video on self-love – I guess he wasn’t without libido – but I never saw an inkling of any lust in him.

Robert was the only person I ever knew who used the word “excrescence” in normal speech and correctly pronounced “desultory.” He was the only peer I ever had who owned a grand piano. He used to play Gershwin for me when I came to his house for dinner. I remember sitting on his angular sofa, my head bent back over the square cushion, lost in the way the tones rang in his living room.

The rest of the room wasn’t spectacular. Robert had beautiful rugs but there were too many and they overlapped like a Bedouin tent. He’d hung a few expensive well-lit paintings on the walls but they were all still-life scenes of flowers and vegetables. The furniture was uncomfortable and the drapes were dark and dull. But that piano gleamed like a magic lamp. Its lines were pure elegance. Its tones were in tune.

Then Robert began to lose his mind. He was six years older than I (I would have said “than me,” but he in his prime would have corrected me), and at first I considered it normal for him to misplace a few nouns in his speech. But when he told me he thought he was losing it, and he mentioned the brain exercises he was doing to try to keep it, and one of those exercises was attempting the Chronicle commuter crossword puzzle (this from a guy who used to do the NY Times puzzle in ink), I started paying attention.

He often had a look of confusion, about normal social interactions. He started to trip a lot when walking, and then it appeared he was having other balance problems. He lost so many common words that he started stammering and often avoided talking. He stopped trying to translate French stories. He exchanged reading for watching movies at home, and almost scared me and his other friends with the number of films he screened (I remember him bragging that he’d watched one hundred eighty-four movies in a month).

One evening he fell down his own basement stairs. It must have taken him an hour to crawl up to the kitchen and work the phone. He had a broken right wrist and he knocked out a bicuspid. In the gap months before the implant his mouth resembled a portion of his own piano keyboard, with that black space between his ivories.

The accident prompted us to get him checked out. That process landed him and his best friend Fred at the Mayo clinic. The diagnosis was acute progressive aphasia. Too ironic. Too awful. The most articulate individual I ever met was losing his ability to speak.

There was more to it. There was clear memory loss and the balance issue. It was only a matter of time before we’d have to intervene and remove him from his house.

We got him to stop driving. Soon he gave up playing music. When he stopped responding to texts and emails, Fred and I decided to visit.

My heart clutched at the first smell. Even from the front door it was obvious that housecleaning and bathing weren’t happening. The sunlight scattered storms of dust motes. And Robert didn’t respond to our voices. Not even when Fred yelled.

As hard as I try to remember Robert smart and healthy, even after five years I can’t get that last sight of him out of my head: crouching like Fred and I wouldn’t see him, face pushed into his bony knees, in plain sight under his grand piano.