“… We sometimes have the wrong ideas about persons; we think that like computers they can be re-booted and something entirely new will come out: bum one day, hero the next. Well a boot won’t change who I am after all these years. But I still hope. We have an obligation to hope as long as we’re alive, perhaps especially when everything seems hopeless. Stay a friend as long as you can.”

I was 17; he was 42. In my first week of college I met Robert Proctor—the handsome, brilliant professor who became my mentor, father figure, and confidante. Immediately drawn to each other, we could have become lovers, but instead entered a lifelong friendship, over-shadowed by his deepening battle with mental illness. This is our story—about love, faith, and friendship—and the sacrifices required.

“At the core of this moving homage to a challenging friendship is a thoughtful meditation on a peculiar experience of loss, the mourning of someone still alive but transformed… a tenderly rendered account, sad and inspiring at the same time…” —Kirkus Reviews

Excerpt from Chapter 1:

December 1994

Dear Robert,

Here’s hoping Secret Service aren’t reading this letter. But if they are, well, I hope they enjoy it.
I say that about three-quarters tongue-in-cheek. The other quarter is reserved for the possibility that they really are reading it. We didn’t hear from you about all that, and maybe it really was a bout of paranoia. I alternated back and forth during the phone conversation, wondering. On the one hand, it was ridiculous; on the other, if I were a federal investigator, your entire life would be suspicious to me.
There’s a title for you: “Your Entire Life Would Be Suspicious”…. V

It was in the fall of 1994, ten years earlier, when Robert first called to tell me and my husband John that he felt quite sure he was being followed. There was a team of them, he said, mostly men but an occasional woman, who would trail him when he would walk to the local café to have coffee, who would say something to him as they brushed by him on the street. He was beginning to recognize some of them. This had been going on for a few months when he called.

“But why?” we asked. “Why would they follow you?”

He had been gambling, he said. I knew he had supported himself occasionally by betting—on greyhounds, horses, the stock market. Who knows how often he did it, or why, or how much money he made. He had mentioned at least one bad time when he lost a lot.

Robert liked speculation, considering an allotment of factors and situations and imagining the outcome. He did this careful considering about everything in his life, to the point where sometimes he couldn’t make a move, could not do anything at all.

He told us that earlier in the year he had won at the racetrack and used a hundred dollar bill from that win to place another bet. Authorities had pulled him aside, taken him to an upstairs room at the track and interrogated him. They said the bill was counterfeit. Robert protested that he had gotten the bill there at the track, that he knew nothing else.

Shortly after that, he said, the surveillance began.

“I just wanted you to know.” His tone on the phone had been very somber. The idea of him being followed was frightening, but not impossible. He did live an isolated, eccentric life; in its predictable dailiness he could fit the profile of a Unabomber; he could be someone who was of interest to the government, we supposed. But what were we to do, and at this distance?

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