12-8-23: Happy 64th Birthday, my dear Chris.

Eulogy by Lake Washington, 8-15-21, for my partner, Christopher Dean Hartman, who died in Oct. 2020 near the end of his 60th year. He died in our home in the midst of Covid. Our cat stayed with him till the end.

Hi, Thank you for coming here to celebrate Chris’s life.

In early January 2020 I visited him in Seattle, a week after we’d reunited in person — with only a three-decade break. At the Frye Museum we saw a pre-Raphaelite painting called Sin, Eve with a snake wrapped around her neck. We drank tea at the museum café, and I said we should get married at St. James Cathedral across the way. He bit off the strings from our tea bags. Under the statue of the Virgin Mary we made silent vows and tied the knot. Mine was something like – I love you right now, even if this is all there is – it’s enough. We considered ourselves married — outside the state.

He wrote me later, “Tying the knot with you at the foot of Mary was one of the most loving experiences of my life, up there with the birth of my son.”

He proposed on Easter Sunday, in the car, because that’s how we met thirty years ago. It’s like my ’64 Plymouth Valiant pushed us together, because it kept breaking down long ago in San Francisco, and he was my “car guy.” We thought we’d have time to make up for the lost decades. We were best friends.

Chris said our love had the power to heal us. The depth and intensity felt unique and cathartic for both of us.

In mid-September he got too sick too quickly to marry me. I held a commitment ceremony after the hospital stay, and a few friends and I lay homemade hearts on him on his hospice bed, in the dining room where we used to eat pancakes.

As most of you know, Chris didn’t like to follow rules. I have a strong attraction to rebels, and Chris saw something in me. I wanted someone wild and kind. He had an essential workers’ pass so we saw each other a lot during the shutdown – and then he transferred between Lowe’s stores and moved to Portland to live with me and my son in June.

The prion disease was quite rare and shockingly aggressive, but Chris barely complained about its indignities. He mainly wanted to stop it or slow it down.

The last time Chris and I went downstairs in our home, he couldn’t walk and his eyes couldn’t focus, so we went down on our butts, step by step, like kids. If I were sick, I know he’d carry me like a refrigerator, but nicely. I told him if he couldn’t see or hear me, he could smell me so he’d feel safe. He said, “You smell so good.” That was the last thing he said to anyone.

In my grief and shock, I reached out to some of you to fill in the gaps of what I didn’t know. He wanted me to know about his life, over time, because a lot of it was challenging. Around April he had written me a letter about some of those challenges, which I found the day he died, in an unmarked envelope.

A lot of what I knew about him didn’t need words, like when I looked into his gorgeous silver-blue eyes, or held his hand, or laughed, or walked in the woods.

I used to fall asleep listening to his stories, much like I did as a little girl on car rides with my parents. I wish I could remember them all. This is from part of an email:

“Jack and I used to go for drives and camp or just go to see how far we could get. We had a Corgi, Basho, who came along. We once drove and ferried, out to western Vancouver Island to camp for a week. Another spontaneous trip ended at the Oregon dunes. … We made a ‘giro’ from the house in central Italy up to Lake Geneva. And yes we had a guitar and yes, we played ‘Smoke on the Water.’”

He told me about his father, Hugh Hartman, who was a poet. Chris smashed random keys on an Underwood typewriter, Hugh would read the mess, and in Chris’s words, they’d “laugh like fools.”

Chris wrote something sweet about his stepdad Al Arnold, too, whose last name Chris once took as his own: “Al made his living doing body and fender, but was a sculptor at heart. He could go into a shop with his tools and walk out with a job. He taught me how to feel with my hands, to get the smoothness of a quarter panel right. The last thing Al ever said to me was, ‘I love you because you love motorcycles forever.’ Al died on Valentine’s Day.”

He wrote me, “I love blueberries, and salmon. And the shhhh sound when it snows. And my mom and my son. And Cat. And my friends.”

Christopher Dean Hartman, we love you because you love motorcycles forever.

He put a big bore kit on his Honda and said it was hot, wild, and sexy. I was like – all right!

One morning after he died I woke with these words: “I met my peaceful other. I met my ferocious other. Some people only see one.”

Letter to me, 4/7/2020: “You have tried to find me for your whole life, but you didn’t know it was me. I am the idea you wished could be real. It’s finally happened to both of us.”

10/15/2020: “In my dream, I was feeding Chris pieces of apple, that was his soul, and his soul was melting in his mouth.”

In my wallet are two notes from him. One is about how he felt in 1990, after we parted, “I felt I was losing something I really wanted and sad that would could have been was lost.” And, “Dear Alex, Of course I will stay with you forever. Chris”

“I’m excited to see how the slow burn started in 1990 will continue. I’m not afraid, I trust it.”

Letter, May 2020: “I have no idea how it’s going to be. But we aren’t getting any younger. We definitely love each other, so let’s give it a chance. I hope whatever we come up against we can be kind to each other and work it out. Your darkness and mine can be a source of passion. Dirty hippie punk goths.”