Oddly or not, it was exactly a year ago (to the day) that I paid tribute to one of my students from that summer’s Screenwriting/Playwriting seminar at the Glen Workshop.

As I wrote in that post regarding my class: “All had come ready to put their work on the line. But one came willing to put his life on it, too.”

Who is that? I remember thinking when I first saw him at breakfast the Monday morning of the conference. Sitting by himself in a cardigan sweater despite the warm desert air, his face mottled with lesions where it wasn’t flaking with dead skin, he seemed to struggle just to raise a spoon to his mouth.

“Gordon Williams” was the answer a half-hour later when he introduced himself to the group in our first class. He spoke openly about the dual ravages of cancer and chemo in his ongoing battle, the most recent assault being an experimental drug that left his face looking the way it did.

I honestly wasn’t sure he’d make it through the week.

And he nearly didn’t, waking on the third day to blood on his pillow and a trip to the E.R.

But Gordon was a fighter as much as he was a Southern gentleman, and when I visited him in ICU that afternoon to deliver a “Get Well” card from the class that felt more like a “Going Away” one in disguise, he opened his eyes mid-dialysis to greet me and say: “I do apologize for not being there in class today.”

He went on to ask after a fellow student’s piece that had been workshopped that morning, seemingly more concerned for her script than his own two kidneys.

That was Gordon, who survived the week in Santa Fe only to return to Houston and a year’s worth of seemingly endless rounds of chemotherapy, kidney stints, and the like.

We kept in touch by phone and e-mail, mostly around the time of his hospital visits when he reached out for contact from friends. Gordon was always glad to hear from me, as he took me for a comrade on the battlefield of endeavors in the dramatic arts—he in the local church and theater scene of Houston, me in the New York fringes of Hollywood.

“I guess what you and I have in common,” he said over the phone on repeated occasions during this or that bedridden recovery, “is we can’t let the laurels go to our head.” In addition to having recently had a prizewinning piece staged at Houston’s Country Playhouse, IWA! (Inspirational Writers Alive!) had named Gordon “Writer of the Year.”

I, for my part, had just returned from a fruitless round of pitching to the networks in L.A., but I think Gordon was convinced that laurels were in my future. To whatever degree he may have had an exaggerated sense of the problem we did or didn’t share, though, this is what I love: that when ungodly doses of chemical compounds were going to his kidneys just to keep him alive, Gordon was purportedly concerned about laurels going to his head.

Laughable, yes, but in the best sense of the word.

He always asked after my family, and closed most e-mails with, “In Christ, Our Jehova Rapha.” Gordon believed in this Name of God as “The Lord Who Heals,” and he never stopped believing that he himself would be healed.

I’m not sure how to say this without it sounding like a sugar-coated dose of Vitamin Gee, but what if Gordon was healed in the form of his passing? What if that (unimaginably for such a mortal-minded man like myself at times) was the final salve?

Could this explain what has felt like an insufficient grief on my part? The obvious reason is the admitted measure of inevitability and relief, as the only end in sight to his cycle of treatments seemed to be The End itself.

An undeniable sidebar, though, is that I’ve been caught up in other matters of the moment, mainly the resumption of a more demanding domestic schedule come September and the start of a new school year for the children.

But perhaps a third factor behind my flagging sense of grief, the one I would put the most stock in without turning a blind eye or letting myself off the hook, is that Gordon’s faith has been residing with me, and within me, even more than my own this week.

At our church in Brooklyn on Sunday’s ten-year anniversary of 9/11, there was an afternoon service of remembrance to mark the occasion. By virtue of the timing alone and no other common factor, it was a fitting occasion to think about Gordon in light of this passage from Middlemarch by George Eliot that was included in the readings:

The growing good of the world is mainly dependent on unrecorded acts, and that things are not as ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and now rest in unvisited graves.

Thankfully, Gordon does not rest in such an unvisited grave, given the chain of e-mail from his brother and fellow church congregants or friends in the wake of his death.

But I keep thinking about this quote from Middlemarch as it applies to him, a man who in his own illness saw fit to pray for me over the phone as much as I prayed for him.

A fellow student of his in our class at the Glen Workshop happened to receive a letter from Gordon postmarked a few days before he died, and it included this line referring to the visit from his classmates while in ICU: “I saw Romans 8:28 in action, and I will always appreciate what you did for me.”

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.

What if that is true?