A good friend gone

Jose or Joe Gouveia, known by some as the first and some as the second, passed away yesterday morning @ 4:30 a.m. He was only 49 years old. We had visited him in hospice in midMarch. A short time later, they let him go home in the care of his wife Josy, visited daily by hospice nurses. His sister warned me a couple of days before he died that he was failing rapidly.We’ve been friends for twenty-five years. He loved poetry, wrote some of his own and pushed the writing of other poets. He was incredibly generous with his time and energy. He was a good performer. Like me, he was a working class kid, in his case from a Portuguese family – a close knit family that he often wrote about.   He ran a poetry series for years and had a program on community radio, WOMR, on which he interviewed visiting and local poets and had them do a bit of reading of their work.He had a true gift for enjoyment. He loved playing bad boy, roaring up on his motorcycle, but he was actually sensitive and good hearted. I think every July when we had our big garden party, he got a ticket when he rode through Eastham – something of a speed trap. He enjoyed food, he enjoyed poetry, his family, his friends. He had a new girlfriend every six months until he met Josy, an immigrant from Brazil, pretty, sweet and hard working. They got married a couple of years ago, a beautiful wedding on a pond in Falmouth. I was delighted to be part of the wedding party and to read a poem in the service – we all stood on a dock surrounded by the lake, in a nature preserve with wildflowers everywhere.For years, Jose made a living as a carpenter. He did some minor work for us and then built the beautiful sun porch – a place we and the cats and guests enjoy for three seasons of the year. We have a friend who insists on sleeping there when he visits.Construction is hard on the body and he began looking for another way ot make a living. He drove a cab. After he got an MFA in a low residency program in New Hampshire, he began trying to publish his poetry and sought a teaching job. He would have been wonderful but couldn’t get hired.He began to have pain in his hip and at a local hospital, they found a small tumor and removed it, giving him some chemo and telling him he was healed. Jose introduced Yevgeni Yevtushenko at a fundraiser in Wellfleet on a night when I and a couple of others were reading his poems in English before he read them in the original Russian. Afterward we all went nextdoor for some food and drink. Jose began to have great pain. it turns out the hospital had missed the source of his cancer, that had started in his appendix and was rapidly marching through his digestive system. Thus began a series of removing parts of him, chemo everthing they throw at cancer again and again and again, letting him go and then calling him back. He fought his cancer valiantly, trying every remedy possible to survive and go on living with and for Josy and his work.His book of poetry came out a few weeks before his death with many blurbs including our mutual friend Martin Espada and myself, Martin will organize a memorial for him on the Cape sometime late this summer or early fall, coordinating with me. I will miss him. We spent so much time together over the years, communicated always by email or phone when we weren’t socializing face to face.   We have been planting this week with the weather cooperating. Today feel like early summer. Zukes, cukes, peppers, tomatoes, basil. It feels lifeaffirming to plant when we’re feeling surrounded by death, when we have lost so many dear friends.