I had forgotten about Gilgamesh.

The epic was one of the earliest things we read in my first years at UCR. They were starting us at the beginning. It’s the oldest recorded epic, nearly intact on clay tablets, where the symbols are pressed in as cuneiform.

Though I’m a slow reader, and had trouble keeping up with classes that had long and challenging reading lists, Gilgamesh is relatively short, and the story is riveting, the characters identifiable. It contains an early account of The Flood that later appears, almost identically, in the Bible version of world history. We students could see immediately the way one civilization and religion borrows from an earlier one. We gained a world view.

I took the story personally. It’s a tale of an anti-hero, of arrogance (I’m dealing with it), of love and loss, overreaching ambition and inevitable mortality.

I’ve always been an emotional guy, and the story of the human condition hit me hard.

When Gilgamesh lost his companion Enkidu and journeyed to the underworld, seeking the secret of eternal life, he had to travel through the tunnel for days of darkness. Day after day his spirit was torn, down to the depths. He reached his limit, and after so many days, “he gave a great cry.”

I cried out myself and put the book down. I sat for a long time in silence, breathing slow and deep.

It took me hours to recover and finish the book.

The human condition, life and death, was spelled out for me and I was shaken to the core.

I have never been the same since. It took Shirley to save me from myself, to show me that life is in the living of it, and love is the root and the meaning.

Now that I am old and she is gone, the book is still on the shelf and I may read it again.

But I don’t need to do that, because the lesson learned sustains me through memory, and Shirley, invisible, is always here beside me, and that is enough because it has to be.