A little while ago, I looked around the room, crowded with bedsheets, towels, Depends, pads, medications, an oxygen tank and other medical equipment, and I began clearing it out, all of it. First, I brought in stacks of all of O’s books, cleared a bedside table, and put them there. I brought in a cycad plant and a fern. Kate joined me, and we cleared more space, making room on another table for some of O’s beloved minerals and elements, his fountain pens, a ginkgo fossil, his pocket watch. Elsewhere, a few books by his heroes—Darwin, Freud, Luria, Edelman, Thom Gunn—and photos—his father, Auden, his mother as a girl with her seventeen siblings, his aunts and uncles, his brothers. We brought in flowers, candles.
Hayes, Bill. Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me (p. 283). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.