A Quiet Unraveling
Tracing Claude’s Final Year Through His Words and Mine
This week, I return to Claude’s journal—but from the final year of his life, 2012. I couldn’t bring myself to read these pages right after he died in January 2013. But later that year, I did—first to prepare the words I spoke at his memorial, and to begin finding language for that final year.
Claude Fredericks (1923–2013) kept one of the longest personal journals ever recorded—over 65,000 pages across eight decades, now preserved at the Getty Research Institute. A poet, playwright, printer, and teacher, he chronicled daily life with rare devotion. Since January, I’ve been sharing selections from that record here—moments of love, reflection, and artistic insight.
Included below are four entries from 2012, one in the form of a birthday letter he wrote me in late June; one just before our anniversary in July, as we begin to suspect something is wrong; one from October, after a long season of radiation and weariness; and finally, my own journal entry—written only this week—about the day Claude died in January 2013.
There’s no way to write this cleanly. But I’ve tried to offer it plainly and with care. As I did last week, I’m placing myself here too—not as a pivot from the archive, but as part of it. This is where the quiet unraveling began.
This is where the record begins to break open.
Claude wrote these pages during the final year we shared—after seventeen rich and beautiful years together—when illness quietly entered our lives. He kept writing. I kept living beside him, day by steady day. But I didn’t return to these words until after he died. Only the other day did I open them again—and found what I wasn’t prepared for: the anguish, the exhaustion, the tears I’d nearly forgotten. And somehow, he had captured it all.
I. A Birthday Letter
Claude’s Birthday Letter to Me – June 23, 2012
Just days before the first half of the year slipped away, Claude tucked a tender letter into a handmade birthday card—typed on his little Olivetti Valentine, on fine European paper, naturally salvaged from leftover scraps of his printing days. His voice is full of gratitude, warmth, and plainspoken love. In that moment, illness is neither named nor hinted—but presence and devotion run powerfully through his words.
Typed on archival paper, slipped into a handmade envelope, Claude wrote me this the day before my birthday.
How my heart soars at the very thought of you always but particularly at this moment, at this very moment, as I think of all that we have been and done and had made together these almost twenty years now, hardly ever all these years, separated ever from each other for more than a few hours at the very most, and I wonder if ever there was any companionship so sweet, so entire, so blessed, so fruitful in dozens of ways as ours has been, rivalling—ah, surpassing—all those legendary friends of the past, David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, in particular… How deeply I love you in every way, how deeply I know that you love me in return. What perfection, in all that truly matters, our life is.
—Claudio
Johannistag Eve, 2012
Affection in every line. I see again the foundation of our bond—simple, elegant, tender—before illness takes hold. This was just before his illness entered our days—pure presence, pure devotion.
II. Morning in the Pressroom
Claude’s Journal – July 1, 2012
In the pressroom, he describes the day while hinting at his own faltering—his flow of language, his strength beginning to ebb. . .
There is so much I would like to say and have to say, but I sit here staring at the keyboard of this machine or out the window onto the east lawn from the window here in the Pressroom, finding it so hard—yes, I who much of my life have had an endless flow of language to say things. Could it be the drug the dentist prescribed two weeks ago? It seems almost to have restored my mouth—and my tongue—to me, my digestion had a rather violent response to it the first three or four days—once at least or even perhaps twice—but since then seems almost to have healed the digestion that has given me rather serious trouble for two or three years now at least.
Ah, it's time to stop even when really I have not yet begun. Perhaps this afternoon it will be easier for me to work here for a while, at least to speak of the charming creatures—birds, squirrels, a deer, my dear friend the front terrace's sweet chipmunk, the whole little family of coyotes, four or five young ones and seemingly unaccompanied by parents or elders of any kind, that came evening before last at dusk, as we were having a drink before dinner, and gambolled all too delightfully on the lawn to the south of the house and then—their goal—underneath the two apple trees, eating apples that have already formed, even so early, and fallen.
The details are pure Claude—precise, alive. But behind them lies a struggle: ‘finding it so hard—yes, I who much of my life have had an endless flow of language to say things.’ The illness isn't named yet—but the difficulty is there.
III. Tender Warning: Perhaps I am more seriously sick...
Claude’s Journal – July 28, 2012
Just before our anniversary, he writes with a mix of celebration and concern.
This is the entry I read aloud at Claude’s memorial service. It appears two days before our 17th anniversary—the day we took the photos on the back terrace included in this post. It’s one of the earliest moments where Claude names the possibility that something is truly wrong.
. . . His admiration for me, as mine for him, has only steadily grown month after month year after year, our love for each other, our solicitude for each other’s well being at every turn. No one else matters to us except each other, our own self too, no other joy is there except the joy we share together, the books we read together, the music we listen to—all the great works, on which man has made in the last two or three millennia, the concerts we go to, the museums we go to, the trips we take, the daily pattern of our daily lives together, everything and all, what we want of course to last forever & ever & ever & somehow believe will.
But on the sixteenth of this month, less than two weeks ago, the long postponed trip to a doctor (there was none to be had) was made, and the steady series of meetings and tests the next few days seemed to make it seem possible that I am more seriously sick than any symptoms I have been struggling with the past month or two suggest. That is all I can say now. My sweet friend, and I too, keep brave and happy, keep our thoughts free from imaginings of one kind or another.
Ah there is his sweet voice from the shower. The evening is beginning. I’ll go take him his towel.
We were just beginning to sense the slope. And still—he wrote with joy, reflection, and care. That tenderness—love and fear folded together—is what makes this entry so vivid. He speaks of light and love—and in the same breath admits his fear.
IV. Shared Strain: He burst into tears…
Claude’s Journal – October 13, 2012
On the eve of his birthday, under pressure from illness...
This captures a night that had become, in my memory, hazy and raw—but which he recorded the next day with grace and devotion.
What I had forgotten—but Claude captured—was that I had reached a breaking point. The demands of caregiving, the toll of his illness, the pressure and fatigue—all of it overcame me in a moment I wasn’t prepared for. And I burst into tears.
When he’d finished, I made some remark or other, not really untrue or unkind, and he—who is never furious with me any more than I with him, ever, ever, ever, all these almost twenty years—suddenly was angry and made a few short retorts back and then burst into tears, sweet, sweet friend, and said he couldn’t, he just couldn’t, that there was too much asked of him. He left the room for a moment or two even if I was trying to take him in my arms and reassure him in every way that no one in all the world would or could do all that he was every day doing to keep us fed and warm and cared for in every possible way. Suddenly he melted in my arms as he began to relent a little his sudden outburst, and the next hour he was in my arms once again my sweet, kind, loyal friend, my only friend, the only one in all the world who truly loved me and cared for me in every way, night and day, the very way I had loved him all these years too, giving him everything I had and knew and was as if it was—it was—it is—his too as much as it is my own. I have such a sense of failure, he was softly saying as he stood there in my arms as I kept reassuring him in every way I knew how.
Gradually he was restored to himself and to us, and the fit passed. I realised little by little that in truth it had all come forth really because of the appointments we had the next day—Thursday—at the hospital, with Dr Rogge, the heart doctor, at 9 o’clock, later with the doctor who had given the radiation treatments, the eight or nine, that, if successful, had been so hard to have done. ..
What strikes me now is how Claude, even while gravely ill, wrote not just about his own pain—but mine. He bore witness to the fullness of our life, and to the difficulty of holding it all. In this quiet moment, when I broke, he captured it gently, allowing even my unraveling to be part of the record we shared.
IV. My Memory: The Day Claude Died
My Journal – June 14, 2025
I couldn’t write this until now—twelve years later. It’s always been too raw, too full of tenderness and regret. But I’m finally ready.
He read a passage from Stendhal. We laughed at the Italians’ ease versus the French—just minutes before he reached out, and then there was nothing but breath and stillness.
Then it was January 13 in the afternoon, after lunch. He was in his officer’s chair—one of the two we both sat in side by side in the living room—reading Stendhal’s Voyage en Italie. He was actually reading me a passage where Stendhal was comparing the free and easy and open communicative quality of the Italians to the staid, repressed, precise French—and we laughed about that a minute. And then he was seeming to say something else but started reaching out with his arms—and it was really the moment of death, where he then couldn’t breathe, it seemed. I knew later that probably his blood pressure had dipped so low that he was slipping away.
Well, I’ll stop here because I can’t yet recount the part that was most traumatic—I’ve been suffering PTSD from it ever since—when yes, he did die in my arms and that was hard enough. And yet, after a few minutes he was calm and his body had gone still.
But then what I did next—calling 911—oh, that enormous regret that hangs over me. . .
I didn’t picture that scene when I imagined writing about Claude. But it matters. These lines carry the weight of knowing how deeply love—and loss—can arrive.
Invitation to the Full Entry
These extracts offer a glimpse into a fragile, powerful chapter. The full entries—and my complete journal account of that day—live in today’s paid section. They’re unfiltered and raw, showing how illness reconfigured our daily lives—and how grief reshaped mine.
Closing Thoughts
I’ll return to Claude’s earlier years soon. But this week, I needed to share where the end began—and how that end still lives with me. Thank you for reading. For honoring this story—for holding this place where love and grief still converge, and for walking with me through a life that is still being written
—Marc
Copyright Notice: All journal entries and photographs are © Marc Harrington. No portion of these materials—whether photographs, full journal entries, excerpts, or extracts—may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission. With gratitude to the Getty Research Institute for preserving the original manuscripts.
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