By Eliot Wilner

Lionel was eighty-four years old, a friend of mine for many years, and in very good health prior to his disappearance. Whoever imagined that his life would end in such a strange way, that he could simply disappear? It had never crossed my mind that Lionel might die before me. I’m now eighty-four years of age, too, and I’ve been getting more and more accustomed to losing friends and family members. But not that way. Until very recently, I just assumed that Lionel and I would both get old and simply dwindle away. But Lionel didn’t dwindle, he just vanished. I was aware, of course, that people can and do die unexpectedly, without any preliminary dwindles, sometimes in mysterious circumstances, yet I was utterly shocked when I read Margot’s email message.

Margot was Lionel’s wife of fifty-three years, a Brit like Lionel, and the message she sent me was direct, understated, yet surreal: Thirteen days earlier, she wrote, Lionel became lost at sea while aboard his boat.  He had gone for a sail alone on Lake Ontario and he just disappeared.  His boat was located the next day, run aground on the rocky shoreline, but Lionel was not aboard. And his body was not recovered, despite an extensive search conducted by Coast Guard boats and helicopters. Lost at Sea? Truly? Who, in this day and age, loses his life that way? It was more than I could fathom. (Hah! “fathom” is a stupid pun that Lionel would have appreciated.)  I read Margot’s message again and again over the course of that day and the next, trying to make sense of what had happened to Lionel, trying to imagine the circumstances that could have caused a veteran sailor to fall overboard in calm waters. But nothing made sense, and my obsession with his death eventually gave way to recurring reflections on his life. 

Lionel and I had been friends for fully fifty-five years — although physically distant friends, for the most part — ever since we shared a flat for a year in the South Kensington neighborhood of London. That was in 1966, and for me 1966 was a very good year, in no small part due to my having had Lionel as a flat mate.  When I arrived in London, in mid-December of 1965, I found lodging with a widow in a council flat not far from the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (familiarly known as the National Hospital or the Queen’s Square Hospital) where, immediately after New Year’s Day, I would begin a one-year term as a house officer. As a lodger in her council flat, my landlady informed me, I had the privilege of running a hot bath whenever I wished, as long as it was on a Monday, Thursday or Saturday and between 5 and 6 p.m.  I was also free to drop a shilling into the timer of my bedroom’s space heater whenever I might develop chilblain.  When I met up with Lionel at the National Hospital, soon after New Year’s Day, and learned that he, too, was newly employed as a house officer and that he was seeking a flat-mate, I eagerly accepted his invitation. It was a stroke of great luck for me that I came to share a flat with Lionel – not only because I could now bathe whenever it suited me, but, more importantly, because I acquired a friend. 

During my year-long stay in London, Lionel proved to be more than a friend to me. He was my mentor, my guide, my benefactor. Lionel taught me proper English — the proper usage of words such as bird, mate, dirty weekend, bloody, wanker — which enabled me to integrate more easily into British society. Lionel and I were assigned to different departments in the National Hospital, and we saw little of one another while we were at work, but during the evenings and weekends we partied together, and we partied often.  It was also my good fortune that Lionel had a car. We were both twenty-nine years old at the time, in the last throes of bachelorhood and we could easily relate to one another.

I enjoyed many outings with Lionel that afforded me novel experiences, including regular visits to the pub around the corner from our flat, where I learned to drink room-temperature beer and to toss darts.  And Lionel secured a subscription series for both of us to the Old Vic Theatre, where I came to admire legendary actors such as Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith and Peter O’Toole.  I ruefully recall an international rugby match at Twickenham, where, amongst a host of other groundlings, we stood stoically for two hours in a steady downpour.  But I also recall a lovely summer day at Wimbledon, where we viewed lots of splendid tennis while drinking lots of Pimm’s Cup cocktails until the setting of the sun. Then there was the May Day picnic on Hampstead Heath when we were caught in a sudden shower but resolutely remained in situ, ignoring the rain while cheerfully toasting one another with bottle after bottle of Beaujolais. Most memorably, in August we spent a memorable “dirty weekend” aboard a houseboat on the Thames, together with Lionel’s girlfriend Margot and ten other single people, chugging up the river toward Windsor Castle — where we managed to snag tickets for a performance of Richard Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. And we took advantage of every riverside pub on the way up and again on the way down. My year in London, which transpired during the decade of the swinging sixties, was no doubt the most enjoyable year of my pre-marital adult life, thanks in large part to Lionel. 

After completing his training at Queen’s Square Hospital, and marrying Margot, Lionel accepted a position as a post-graduate fellow at a hospital in Toronto. He remained in Canada for the rest of his life, becoming a highly regarded clinical neurologist. The two of us met up but rarely during the next fifty-four years, usually at a neurological conference in the U.S. or Canada. In addition, we would occasionally telephone  one another, and we exchanged Christmas newsletters every year. With the advent of the digital age, and especially after we both had retired and become gentlemen of leisure, we corresponded regularly by email, usually to provide critiques of one another’s essays and poems. I very much wanted to stay in touch with Lionel. I’m sure, though, that our connection meant more to me than it did to him. For me, he was a living memento of the annus mirabilis that I had experienced in the wonderful city of London. During every in-person meeting with Lionel, and with every exchange of emails, I would luxuriate in a soothing bath of warm memories as I re-imagined the places we had visited, the people we had met, the cheap (but quite drinkable) French wine we had shared.

Every contact with Lionel reminded me, also, of the amorous adventures I had vicariously experienced by virtue of sharing a flat with someone who was a dedicated philanderer. Within a few weeks of moving into the flat, I became convinced that Lionel was a real-life incarnation of Alfie, the engaging rogue who was the lead character in the movie Alfie – a movie that just happened to open, to great acclaim — soon after my arrival in London. Lionel regularly acted the part of a compulsive womanizer, much in the mold of the concupiscent Alfie, although Lionel was, to be sure, a more polished and worldly version of the character portrayed in the movie by Michael Caine. His sexual adventures notwithstanding, Lionel was in a committed relationship with Margot, whom he had met a year earlier when he was a medical student and she an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh. When he moved to London, Margot faithfully followed him there. To me, the arrangement with Margot seemed to be problematic, something on the order of a “sticky wicket.” Were his numerous dalliances not a betrayal of Margot? Did he not feel, at a minimum, conflicted? Evidently not. It was if Lionel had been secretly an acolyte of St. Augustine and had adopted, as his mantra, Augustine’s prayer: “Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

I sometimes wondered what accounted for Lionel’s success with birds. Yes, he was a little more than six feet tall, slim, darkly handsome, with a full head of hair – but could not the same be said for a lot of young males in London? What, exactly, made him stand out when he was chatting up a bird? Then it struck me: it was precisely that talent – his chatter – that made him so attractive to birds! Lionel was a product of an English public school and Christ Church College, Oxford, and his English diction was impeccably posh. He spoke fluent French, to boot, and his chatter was liberally seasoned with piquant French phrases. I think it was mainly his way with words that paved his way with women. He could talk the talk, for sure, and many a lass was sweet-talked into his bedroom. (Okay, that’s just my guess; I never interviewed any of the women.) Whatever may have been the secret of Lionel’s charm, I can attest that there were quite a few nocturnal visitors who passed through our flat during the course of a year. Sometimes I would meet the bird de nuit in the morning at the breakfast table, but some I never met.

Not all of Lionel’s birds were transients, however. There were two with whom he had a relatively constant relationship: One was Margot, of course, and the other was a pretty blonde, Angela, who lived not far from our flat. I soon came to regard Angela as “Miss Wednesday.” Wednesday was always laundry day for Lionel, and that always meant a visit to Angela’s place. Angela was in her early twenties, buxomly attractive and a rather jolly soul, employed as the manager of an upscale florist’s shop in nearby Chelsea. Every Wednesday after work, Lionel would come back to our flat, stuff a week’s worth of underwear, socks, shirts and bed linens into a laundry bag, then lug the bag a couple of blocks to the mews where Angela lived. Oh, yes, he never failed to bring with him a bottle of wine, too. I wouldn’t see Lionel again until Thursday morning, when he would return home with a load of clean laundry. Overnight, Angela had washed everything, folded his underwear and ironed his shirts and linens, while also cooking his dinner and no doubt providing him with other social benefits. This ongoing relationship, it seemed to me, was bizarrely out of balance. It was, I thought, a little too reminiscent of droit du seigneur. Why did Angela allow herself to be used by Lionel? After all, Angela was an attractive, good-natured, healthy and gainfully employed young woman. Didn’t she have a life outside of this weekly laundry assignation? But, hey, what did I really know of British social mores?

Lionel’s other “relatively constant” companion, Margot, did eventually become his wife, and once married they would enjoy a faithful and happy union lasting fifty-three years. I met Margot on several occasions during my stay in London, including one memorable visit to her flat – which she shared with four other single women – after I was extended an invitation to join her and Lionel and one of her flat mates for Sunday dinner. (The idea was that the flat mate and I might connect, although that didn’t come to fruition. Nonetheless, it was a memorably sumptuous dinner.) Margot was comely if not exactly drop-dead-beautiful, unfailingly polite and cordial, cultured and well-spoken, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh and a few years Lionel’s junior. She was Lionel’s “steady” girlfriend, although it soon became clear to me that “steady,” in the case of those two, meant that they dated only on Sundays. Never on a Saturday, a Monday or any other day. Lionel always had other plans for Saturdays, and for weekday evenings as well. 

Why had Margot agreed to such a one-sided relationship? A solemn trust apparently existed between the two of them (and they may even have signed a pact, for all I knew) that one day they would get married. Lionel did once confide in me that he had every intention of marrying Margot — someday, but not yet — and they indeed appeared to be a good match. If I thought of Angela as “Miss Wednesday,” then Margot fairly deserved the honorific of “Mrs. Sunday.” It seemed to me that Margot – even more than the complaisant Angela, considering that Margot and Lionel were in a mutually committed relationship – wasn’t getting a fair shake out of her deal with Lionel. But, again, what did I know of British social mores?

In the end, it all worked out for Lionel and Margot. Until the day that Lionel was lost at sea.  Their long and happy marriage constituted, in my estimation, a rather surprising and ironic denouement to Lionel’s life as a bachelor. Knowing what I knew about his pre-marital womanizing proclivities, I never imagined that he would easily adapt to a connubial life. But I was mistaken. They settled in Toronto, acquired children and a mortgage, bought a sailboat, and joined a yacht club on Lake Ontario which became practically their second home. Lionel established himself as a clinical neurologist and academician, specializing in electromyography, and was highly regarded in the medical community. I had thought that married life for Lionel might have become “the whole catastrophe” famously lamented by Zorba the Greek, but in fact the transition seemed natural and painless for him. He enjoyed Toronto and he enjoyed married life. While Lionel was always ready to reminisce with me about those sweet, long-ago days in London, he never gave any indication to me that he yearned for the bachelor’s life that he had left behind. It was as if Lionel, again following in St. Augustine’s footsteps, had finally seen the light and achieved chastity (monogamous chastity, that is, in Lionel’s case.)

Lionel and Margot both enjoyed sailing, and they sailed as often as the weather in Toronto would permit. They both felt that sailing added zest to their marriage. On weekends they regularly took their two children — a son and a daughter — aboard the boat with them, and on occasion the family would sail beyond the shores of Lake Ontario, into the St. Lawrence Seaway. After Lionel’s retirement, when he had more time at his disposal, he and Margot twice navigated the length of the St. Lawrence and ventured into the Atlantic Ocean, once sailing as far south as the Chesapeake Bay and once sailing all the way to the Caribbean Sea. They never experienced a serious mishap – neither nautical nor marital, as Lionel once quipped to me – when they sailed together. It was hard for me to suppress the intrusive thought that maybe, just maybe, Lionel, you would have survived if you hadn’t gone sailing alone, without Margot, on that fateful day.

I had emailed an essay to Lionel in September of 2021, but he had not responded promptly, as he usually did. Margot’s message to me in October came as a reply by proxy to my heretofore unanswered email – but it was not the reply I had been hoping for. The day after I received Margot’s heartbreaking yet predictably stiff-upper-lip account of Lionel’s inexplicable disappearance, I rang her up. We spoke at length, but I struggled to find any words with which to express condolence. Thirteen days had now passed since Lionel was lost at sea, and Margot’s much-subdued voice conveyed both bewilderment and misery. She said the police were baffled: The weather had been fair on the day of Lionel’s disappearance, no signs of foul play were found aboard the boat, and the body had not been recovered. It seemed that Lionel’s disappearance would remain forever a mystery. Margot was struggling to come to grips with the reality that her husband was gone, completely gone, never to be found. Even though Lionel was not verifiably dead, she surely knew he would never return home and his body would never be interred.

I wanted to explain to Margot how it was that I, a longtime friend of Lionel’s but not really a close friend, could also be experiencing a measure of grief and bewilderment. Precisely because Lionel had been such a key player in the year-long adventure that had brightened my life in London more than a half-century ago, I said to her, my happy memories of that time and place would now and forever be tarnished by sorrow. The images of London that were stored in my brain, and that I cherished, had now, of a sudden, become less vivid, less “alive.”  I, too, was feeling disoriented as a result of Lionel’s abrupt disappearance. But I realized that my self-centered eulogy was probably meaningless to Margot, a woman who had just come to the abrupt end of a fulfilling, fifty-three-year marriage.  In fact, I asked myself soon after we had concluded our conversation, what had motivated me to place a call to Margot? Had I called to express my sympathy for her loss — or merely to confront my own loss?   And what, exactly, was my loss?

As more time elapsed after Lionel’s disappearance, I came to reckon with a number of personal losses. In my conversation with the widow, Margot, so soon after the tragedy, I had spoken only in generalities about my time with Lionel in London and how much I appreciated his friendship.  Over the course of fifty-five years, I told her, my recollections of the good times Lionel and I had shared in London had become more and more uncertain, the images less bright, and it might all have dissipated — except for the occasions when the two us were in touch and could jointly  recherche those temps perdu, and then they would come back to life. During my telephone call  with Margot, I took care, of course, not to dwell on the details of those temps perdu.

As more time passed after Lionel’s disappearance, I came to reckon with a more existential, arguably neurotic, aspect of my lost link to Lionel and to my annus mirabilis in London. It had to do with reconciliation: how does one supplant, or reconcile, the joie de vivre of a bachelor’s life with the simple joys of married life?  When Lionel married, he made a clean break from bachelorhood.  It was if, after taking his wedding vows, Lionel had announced to the world, Goodbye to all that — and thanks for the laundry and everything else, Ms. Wednesday. And when I married, I, too, made a clean break from my pre-marital persona.  I would venture to say, moreover, that both of us married none too soon, because the joy in a bachelor’s way of life is perishable, not sustainable much beyond thirty years of age. 

That said, while there is a joy in married life that is more sustainable, more likely to endure, marriage is also burdened with never-ending responsibilities and inevitable periods of ennui. The selfish, irresponsible lifestyle of a bachelor, on the other hand, may sometimes yield an intense joie de vivre that is seldom realizable in marriage. With Lionel as my reliable collaborator, I was able to recapture those lustrous memories of London, to relive those joyous moments – now become like fantasies — which would buoy me up during times of marital tedium. I suspect that those reminiscences had a similar effect on Lionel, but of course I couldn’t share that sentiment with Margot, his wife. With my memories of London having become over the years increasingly difficult to retrieve, and Lionel now gone, that source of joie went away. Maybe it ought to have gone away a lot sooner, but, still, it was a loss for me.

There was yet another loss, a personal loss that was really self-inflicted and many years in the making, but which I felt only after Lionel was gone.  For one year, the year that Lionel and I were flat mates, we were good friends. We connected, we shared a lot of interests – medicine, politics, sports, birds — and we had many enjoyable conversations.  But after that first year, after he married Margot and I married Sarah and we put down roots in cities several hundred miles apart, we became just “casual friends.” We would meet in person only once or twice in a decade, and we occasionally telephoned one another, but mainly we communicated through email exchanges and Christmas newsletters.  I guess our friendship just devolved into a form – “virtual friends” — which was to become commonplace in the twenty-first century

Why was that?  Why didn’t we meet more often?  We didn’t have to wait for the rare neurology conference for which we might both have chanced to register; I could have invited Lionel and Margot to visit Sarah and me in Washington for a weekend, or we could have vacationed together – but nothing of that sort happened.  How hard is it, really, to fly from Washington, D.C. to Toronto, or vice versa?  Only once did we meet at Lionel and Margot’s home, and that was when we booked a trans-Canada train trip and stayed one night in Toronto before the trip. Friendship requires effort, doesn’t it?  It’s not a prize that just falls like manna from the heavens, but it’s a seed planted in the earth that requires cultivation.  And there are so many distractions in our daily lives, so many reasons to procrastinate, that we might just allow a friendship to wither, blandly assuming that it would be revived at some future date of our choosing. 

The odd thing about my relationship with Lionel is that I miss him more now, since he’s gone, than I did while he was alive.  Only now do I realize what could have been, what should have been: I should have taken care to cultivate a real friendship, not just a casual connection, because it would have enriched my life.  We had been close friends for one year, but we could have been close friends for fifty-five years.  Of course, we are all inclined to dwell on what could have been, particularly when it can no longer be, aren’t we?  There’s a line in The Great Gatsby – spoken by an old acquaintance of Gatsby’s as he reflects on the good times they used to have together – that has stuck in my brain ever since I read the book many years ago: “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”  I guess that this line from The Great Gatsby didn’t stick very firmly in my brain after all, or I simply didn’t act on it when I could have.

So, now Lionel is gone, lost at sea, and I am mourning his loss.  But whom am I kidding? I’m not mourning what Lionel has lost but my own loss — the loss of a friend and the lost chance for a closer friendship.  Others have suffered losses greater than mine due to Lionel’s death: Margot, of course, and their children and grandchildren, and the many individuals who were really close friends.  But what has Lionel himself lost, actually?  When you were lost at sea, Lionel, you were eighty-four and (as far as any of us knew) in excellent health, not dwindling in any way, not beset by any of those chronic, debilitating diseases that cause many a person to pray for a quick death.  Yes, Lionel, you might have asked for a few more years of life, a few more years to enjoy the companionship of your wife and family and friends — but would you really have enjoyed your life if you were dwindling?  Let me put it to you this way: What’s it all about, Alfie?  You did enjoy a good life – two good lives, arguably, one before and one after marriage – for eighty-four years. What more could anyone ask?  

No one has any idea of how you came to be lost at sea, Lionel, but it’s all to the good that you were at the helm of your boat, out on the open water of Lake Ontario, when you disappeared. You were always at the helm – until, suddenly, you weren’t. At age eighty-four you never dwindled, and no one can say with certainty that you died. You just vanished. I do grieve, Lionel, but not for you, only for myself.

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Elliot Wilner is a retired neurologist, living in Bethesda, MD. In retirement, he has enjoyed — with his wife’s indulgence — a long-deferred dalliance with creative writing. Friendship, he has learned during his long life, is like a lot of other functions: use it or lose it.