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With only weeks to live, he found mixing colors too time-consuming. His last drawing was a pen-and-ink landscape—the lake and the woods beyond. Rather than draw the woods as a solid black shape, he drew the trees individually. He was getting weaker by the day and there were thousands of trees. Did …

I gave him his privacy until the sobs subsided. He had every right to cry for what was about to be taken from him.

Everything.

When I finally joined him in the bedroom, he said, “It’s hard to believe that I’m not going to be here in a few weeks.”

“You could have months,” I said.

“It’s j…

How does one grow old as the younger woman? One doesn’t. I always looked fresher than he. If I gained a few pounds, he gained more. If my skin wasn’t as taut as it once was, his was looser. And I always had more energy. When he fell asleep during a movie, I poked him awake. When he nodded off durin…

He painted—not the hellscape that was outside his window, but the hellscape that was eternal, the same view that Goya had.

No matter the hour, whenever I stopped by his studio unannounced, I would find him working. We had his palette table put on casters to give him more mobility and freedom. Wh…

The studios had changed, but not the loneliness of struggling and arguing with himself unobserved. His dealer and the twenty-something East Village artists, the exuberant boys and girls who had visited his studio and danced with him at the Palladium, had perished of AIDS or overdoses or moved on to…