Day of love and lovers, of hearts and roses red! Is Geoffrey Chaucer, the great poet-pilgrim of medieval England, to blame for this? Some say so: that it was he who transformed the ordinary enough feast day of an ordinary enough saint (what business does a saint have with all this hearts-and-roses stuff, anyway?) into a festival of courtly love. The association of February 14 with romance may have hatched about halfway into Chaucer’s poem “The Parliament of Fowls,” with these lines: Saint Valentine’s Day—when every bird comes to choose his mate. On Valentine’s Day, 2010, I lugged all five pounds and four ounces of my old college copy of to the room in a Brooklyn, New York, hospice where Frank, my mate of thirteen years, husband for seven, lay dying.
But he did not lie, really: he revolved with effort to one side, flipped sharply on the other like a fish pitched ashore, and then, with resignation, rotated himself flat onto his back again, back to where he’d started. And again. He squeezed the white plastic button that permitted him to activate the pump that pushed opioids into his bloodstream when he needed them.
He was forty-two. There was little relief left for his bones and joints, his limbs and ligaments, but his mind was still alight with curiosity, still glimmering, more votive than bonfire now. His imagination, and that pulsing knot of muscle that is Saint Valentine’s emblem: they were still active, and he was still yearning, even adrift on a plain of po.