Endings are hard. Hard endings, that is that drop you fast and hard like a sack of winter-cold stones.

I took this photograph at six a.m. in New York City on West 11th at my favorite haunt where i used to always meet my best-friend for our three-hour tea talks. Always sitting there over steaming pots of camomile tea with a table-centered jar of honey and me eating spoonfuls of honey that i poured from it, sticky-lipped and smiling and laughing, always always laughing.

But not this time. This time, things caved in on themselves and on this day, which was also my birthday, the most awful September day I can think of (though I've never much liked my birthday anyway, this made it all the worse), I found myself, not by accident, at the same cafe only this time, I went alone at the early hour of the day before I was set to go to The Morgan Library for research on my book.

It was empty there at this early hour. Nobody but me, which gave me all of the room I wanted to take photographs (later that day I was to meet my agent who represents my photography also, so why not take more photographs; if nothing else I am a documentarian as I have said many times in the past - documenting in the last three years some of the happiest times in my life only now to find it crashing down all around me. People come and go, yes, but some people you expect to be in your life forever because every sign points in that direction. What do you do when that is not the case. When they suddenly up and go?

Not only was I in New York for research for my book, but to eulogize and speak at a memorial for a dear, dear friend (author Hans Koning, who if you do not know, you should look for his work Hans Koning (www.hanskoning.net) or Google him. Hans I knew first as an author I published while running my publishing house, Lumen Editions, and from there, my relationship with Hans and subsequently, his family and particularly his lovely wife, Kate, grew. If you want to read what I wrote and read that night, you can find on the web, but to find the original text go to my own home site on Tant Mieux and read O To Be As Cool As Hans Koning. I never met anyone as cool as Hans Koning. I doubt I ever will again. Read and you'll see.

People come and go in our lives and we accept that for the most part because we know that life is nothing if not change. But some people come and go, or they die, and they leave a hole. Yes, we grieve always those we miss, but somehow we manage to move on. Lately, these last, I find myself stuck, unable to quite move on, much as I still find it difficult to move on from losing a sibling. Some things you just never recover from and all of the trite "give it time" and "the indefinite future" that people talk about and "never say never" and etc are mere platitudes that add up to nothing in the face of real grief.

I am not at all ashamed to say that when I was in New York I spent my birthday at St. Thomas's on Fifth Avenue where I thought I would seek some sanctuary. Instead, I found none. I found only a cold and forever twilight-lit church and wondered what kind of God what take from me, take such people from me that I loved so deeply. Yes, that's selfish. Yes, that's part of life. But what if one of them is still living? Yes, that's part of life too, and as everyone's favorite quip, "God doesn't micromanage." Apparently not.

So I sat in the twilight of St. Thomas's on my birthday for three or more hours and I cried, or sobbed more like, sounds of a professional mourner you would hire for funeral of an unpopular deceased and I would be there crying and so there I was, my hands buried in my face, soaking the tissue-thin paper of a prayer book that was doing me little good because at that moment, and perhaps forever now, I have given up on God. I never thought I would say that. I never thought that after so many years of serving the church in the capacity as an Officiant that I would do such a thing, but there you have it - . So that was my birthday, at 1:37 p.m., Fifth Avenue, New York City, 2007.