Quincy, R.I.P.

Quincy Ryland died two weeks ago. She was my good friend Alex’s cousin. She came, with her Greek boyfriend, Cristo, to stay with us in Paris when we lived there in 1972. They also brought their excitable black lab, Orion.

You can see Quincy here, in the murky photo — God, I wish we’d taken better pictures — in a white sweater, her right hand resting on Orion’s side. We’re sitting at our table at 43 villa d’Alésia in Paris. That’s me, on the right, long hair and all and our roommate, Do, to my right. Alex is to Quincy’s left. We were all young, in our mid-twenties, without a care, taking great gulps of life in that most beautiful city.

Before we settled in Paris, Alex and I had stayed with Quincy and Cristo in Athens where they lived. We slept in our sleeping bags on their concrete deck outdoors. The hot summer sun would wake us, and we would often find that Orion had peed near us on the deck. We’d rouse to the grimy line of dog pee next to us becoming fragrant with the rising sun. Ah, travel!

Quincy was a bright-spirited, energetic woman who loved to walk around Paris. She was relentlessly cheerful and all but unstoppable. I would walk with her from time to time. She had a quirk of rubbing her thumb and forefinger together as she walked, the rubbing faster as the pace became more brisk. It always did. She was slim, with long, fine brown hair and a ready smile. Her voice was high-pitched with a taste of the South, where she was from. She had a sly sense of humor, and she was kind.

Alex and I had many good times with Quincy and Cristo when they stayed with us in Paris. She became a strong weave in the fabric of our experience as we fell deeply in love with they city. She drank and laughed with us, and she took our kidding about her beloved Orion good-naturedly. When you are as unformed as we were, those good people and places you encounter when you’re young never leave you.

A few years after all of this, after I’d returned from Paris, I was living in Cambridge, MA. Quincy came for a conference and visited me. It was so good to see her. We embraced and shouted our happiness and laughed a lot. We walked together around a lake, and I had a hard time keeping up with her. “What’s the matter, Rich — have you let yourself go? Come on! Let’s go!” I smiled weakly and pushed myself to stay with her.

A few years after that, I got a call from Alex. Quincy had been in an automobile accident. Her spine had been severed. She was paralyzed from the waist down. The great walker would walk no more. Nothing makes any sense sometimes.

But Quincy didn’t withdraw from life. She and Cristo, who had moved to America with her, had two children. She moved to a farm in Virginia and raised them. Cristo left her one day, poof, just like that, never to return. Quincy persevered. “She was gallant,” Alex said about her. Indeed, she was. One could learn a lot about determination and fortitude from her.

I hadn’t seen Quincy in years when, a few weeks ago, Alex wrote me that she had died peacefully in her sleep. She had been ill for some time. She had fought hard, but her body had to let go.

In my mind’s eye, I still see the Quincy I knew from Paris and Cambridge. This is who will always be Quincy for me. The relentless walker, moving swiftly on the balls of her feet, on and on and on, urging me to keep up with her, and I can’t.