Of love and other demons

Kent L. Mannis (1959-2024)

Kent Mannis and I have been together 30 years. And now we aren’t. Kent left me in the early morning hours Sunday, May 19. Over the course of ten days Kent seemed gradually to slide away, as though he had somewhere to go. Each day he was a little less here — a little less he could say, a little less he could do. Most the time Kent seemed to sleep or was only semi-conscious. I often wasn’t sure how much he was connected to the world. But when he was able to reach out to us, it was always a gift, a relief, a blessing. I wanted him to stay. I did not want him to go.

I told him I loved him. I didn’t tell him he couldn’t leave me, or that I wouldn’t be able to live without him. No matter what I wanted, what either of us wanted, Kent was not going to stay. I didn’t want him to hear me say he was the one hurting me. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. I thanked Kent for being with me for 30 years. I thanked Kent for being. I said, “Yay, Kent!” He taught me to do that not long after we began seeing each other. “Yay, Glenn!” he’d say. “Yay, Kent!” I learned to respond, overcoming the inertia of what felt like endless yay-free years. What does it mean, this yay? I’d ask myself. It means he’s cheering for me. “I love you.” Kent said it first. I wasn’t sure. We had fights. We didn’t always agree. I thought he was unfair or arrogant. One time I said, “I always discount your I-love-yous because when you get mad I feel like that’s when it comes out what you really think of me.” Kent said, “Why don’t you think when I say I love you that that is what is real?”

It was real. There was so much that was real. I once heard it said that the couple that stays together is one in which both people believe they are the lucky one. I was lucky. I thought that from the beginning. But I was wary. Not since Mom had anybody stuck by me.

Fourteen years ago Kent was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. There were no symptoms. The cancer was discovered during a routine screening. Over those fourteen years Kent endured radiation, chemotherapy, and multiple surgeries. He had to adapt to a colostomy, later also a urostomy. Kent handled all of this. We were still able to do things we wanted to do.

Fifteen years ago it became possible for us to marry legally. Years before, Kent and I had filled out domestic partnership paperwork, which in California was supposed to be marriage-in-all-but-name. (The notary public shook her pen at each of us in turn and said, “Rice! Rice!”) Did we need to get married? As election day 2008 crept closer and the discouraging Prop 8 campaign filled the news, I said this isn’t a decision we can put off. Our wedding ceremony was small and it was on such short notice that when we got the marriage license back from the registrar we saw it had been accepted on the same day California voters passed Prop 8.

Our legal marriage was just confirming what was already true, Kent and I knew that. We were together and we were going to be together the next day and the day after that. We had been together fourteen years already. What would change? At first I thought the joy that surprised me was because society was at last acknowledging my humanity, that I got to form a family, too. We were not just not illegal any longer; we were believed in.

It was that, yes. But there was something more specific, something specific to the two of us. After Kent and I signed the marriage license, we trusted each other more. I didn’t know for sure something wouldn’t come along to sour this. My parents divorced after being married for eight years, and my brother and I grew up with a single mother. As I moved through my twenties friends who seemed to have married the day before already were splitting up. (Had my sitting through their weddings cursed them?) I didn’t believe marriage fixed anything. A wedding ring isn’t a suture closing a wound. Before Kent the men I dated weren’t interested in me for long. Yet here we were, fourteen years into a life together. If something was going to break us up, it was something that hadn’t happened yet.

This February by video, Kent’s oncologist told us a brain scan had exposed lesions, a small-cell cancer. There is no cure for this kind of cancer. The only treatment is full-brain radiation, a treatment offering the hope of stalling the cancer’s growth. Kent’s mother had breast cancer; it moved to her brain. She opted for radiation and Kent saw how hard it hit her. He didn’t see as a good bargain trading good days in the present for a chance at a few more later, every day by that time a strain. The prognosis? Kent asked. How long do you see me living? The oncologist guessed two months.

And so we lived as we had, the life Kent and I had created for ourselves, each day ordinary. Kent didn’t have a list of things undone that had to be crammed into two months. He was tired and often dealing with pain. His mobility wasn’t good. But he was able to be here as himself. If Kent had wanted to rush off to Hawaii one more time, we had friends volunteering to make that as easy as possible. But wearing himself out for a little tropical sun didn’t seem worth it, he said. Here was where he had a good life, in his own house, with his husband, friends nearby. He wanted to go on living this life.

There was an us. That was real. And now it is the world that seems unreal. I am in Kent’s home and there’s no Kent. That’s not right. I am in my own home and yet I’m not. I was at home with Kent. I find myself thinking, “When Kent comes home —“ Kent, my lover, Kent, I did not want you to go.