About six weeks after Bill's death, I found myself becoming anxious about forgetting details of those incredibly intense two weeks between the day he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and the day he died. It felt to me that if I forgot, it would be like losing Bill all over again. So I decided to create a record of those sixteen days. As I started writing, I was reminded of events from our thirty-three years together as a gay couple. Quite spontaneously, as they occurred to me, I began integrating vignettes from our past into the chronology of his dying days. The result was August Farewell.