FOR SEVERAL WEEKS this summer, I was able to put aside my outrage with the court-appointed president and all the fat cats who now use 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as their personal litter box.

I had more immediate problems than the dissolution of civil liberties at home; the greed of corporations that have stolen so much that they can no longer afford employees, much less pension plans; or the poor people who will suffer as the US military, in its role as 21st-century corporate Hessians, stomps all over the Middle East.

An emergency demanded all my physical and spiritual resources. Chris Bracken, one of the finest people I have ever known, was diagnosed with "aggressive, inoperable" liver cancer on July 5. The doctors gave him just three weeks to live.

Chris was the first friend I made after I moved to Boston in 1979. We became closer with each succeeding year — in large part because he was more laughs than a documentary about J. Edgar Hoover’s private life and more reliable than any information gathered by Hoover’s agency. He was the kind of there-when-needed guy who didn’t have a best friend — because he had several.

In 2001, Chris had been diagnosed with colon cancer. This past April, after nearly a year of treatments and surgeries, he was pronounced cancer-free. But then, in July, we learned the disease never really left and probably wouldn’t until it took Chris Bracken with it.

Chris’s final weeks were similar to those of many doomed people — desperately horrible and shockingly unavoidable, yet profoundly redemptive. People who knew Chris pulled together and gave all they could and then some in an attempt to save him. That included his oncologist, who’d gotten to know Chris over the past year and wept when giving him the liver-cancer diagnosis, and dozens of friends beating the bushes and the Internet for miracle cures (herbal and otherwise) and special comforts (late-stage-cancer patients need really super-soft blankets and so on). When it was clear no miracle was forthcoming, they did all they could to send him off in a tight cocoon of love.

And he returned the love with special words and gestures for all of us.

I was among several who picked up where he’d left off on a house he’d begun to construct on a Vermont mountainside. His plan was to move into the completed structure with his fiancée, Amy LeBaron, and her daughter, Hali. That dream was never realized, but by the time Chris passed, we’d made the building solid and secure, sealed from the elements with a sturdy roof and sound carpentry. Dozens of people donated time, effort, and material to this cause. The details of their generosity could fill a book and perhaps someday will, but I have another purpose for this essay.

Chris died on Saturday, August 3 at 4 p.m., with Amy and his sister, Mary, at his side. His family and friends held a beautiful memorial service for him on Wednesday, August 7 in the Barnard, Vermont, town hall. We laughed and cried as we remembered him. We hovered around Amy and Hali and Chris’s mother, Verna; his brother, Denis; his uncle, Carroll Miles; his sister-in-law, Rhonda; his niece, Elizabeth; and nephew, Simon, as if the proximity of our compassion could somehow salve such a cruel wound. Our hearts were knitted together in love and anguish. True to Chris’s nature, the memorial service wasn’t dogmatic or stodgy. One of his best friends, Chuck Gunderson, served as the gracious, eloquent, and warm master of ceremonies. Several of his other best friends spoke from the heart with wit and love. Hali and Elizabeth did a reading of Bernie Taupin’s lyrics from "Your Song," changing the tense at the end of the refrain to "when you were in the world." They were great. Finally, another of his best friends — me — formally eulogized Chris Bracken.

We had a reception that took place in the hall following the service. As I spoke with all the mourner/celebrants, it struck me how profoundly the world had been changed by the loss of this one good person. Everyone’s heart was broken. Everyone was flabbergasted that a 48-year-old, very fine man could be stolen so quickly. Everyone was scared by life’s random brutality and indifferent cruelty. Everyone wished there was some way to take on even more pain if it could relieve Amy and Hali and his family of just a little of their own.

And then, after a few more days on the house project, I found myself back home in upstate New York, trying to return to my work, which entails paying close attention to people like George W. Bush.

It’s been a tough adjustment, particularly now that I am in possession of the all-too-costly perspective that the loss of a dear and vital loved one provides. Chris always referred to W. as the "MOE-RON," which rolled off his tongue with the eloquent impatience of a person who had grown up in Northern New Jersey traffic. Upon my return, Bush seemed more MOE-RONIC than ever — especially since all he has done for the past several weeks is froth at the mouth over Saddam Hussein. He says he wants a regime change, but what he really wants is the world’s second-largest oil reserve, and he is willing to send American troops into combat to secure it. He is doubly willing to massacre scores of Iraqi peasants under the guise of saving them.

And that’s why my new and awful perspective costs me sleep. I had just spent the summer in an intimate and dreadful embrace with mortality. After seeing Chris fight with literally everything he had to remain part of this world, I had renewed respect for life, at least in part because I had a closer understanding of death. No matter how we try, we can’t stop the grim reaper from making his appointed rounds. All the good medicine, good intentions, and love in the world can’t keep each of our numbers from eventually coming up. Until then, we will have to live through the gradual loss of most of the people we have ever known and cared for. At 49, I can no longer count all the friends I have lost. All four of my grandparents, my father, and my dear, sweet infant nephew Gavin have now been gone for years. I’m very sentimental. I still miss every one of my dogs, who lived their lives at an extremely unfair seven-times-human speed. Lost, Fluke, Zack, and Keed all haunt me, as does Chris’s dog, Larry. She had to be put down due to extreme old age (15) just at the time Chris was originally diagnosed with cancer. I had named her. (Chris called and asked for suggestions, but didn’t specify a gender. "Okay," he said, "her name is Larry.")

My current hound, Lloyd, and I now wander the New York countryside that I left plush and green in July but that had time-lapsed into a dry and multicolored burst of wildflowers and leaves during my absence. Fall is ripe with melancholy this year. I walk back inside, turn on the computer or, worse, the television, where the cable news networks clamor for war in hopes of a payoff during October ratings sweeps. There are heartening amounts of broad-based opposition to W.’s bloodlust for Iraq, but the Democrats look like they aren’t about to do much to represent that widespread view. After attending to some mere formalities at the UN, where the rest of the world has clearly taken up Bush’s offer to decide if it was "with us or against us" by choosing the latter, he will unleash holy hell on the Iraqi people. It won’t matter that he has been caught in lie after lie while rattling his red-white-and-blue saber. He has his heart set on war, and like the spoiled rich brat that he is, he’ll whine until he gets his way.

We all did everything we could to save Chris Bracken, but sadly, his death was unavoidable. Right now, in far-off Iraq, thousands face even more senseless deaths as the US prepares to set a synthetic grim reaper in motion. And good people, who just happen to speak a different language, wear different clothes, and live under a different illegitimate leader than did Chris Bracken, are going to die. The ripple effect of those deaths will bring unavailing grief to their loved ones, just as grief engulfed Chris’s survivors. And they will hate the United States as Chris’s survivors hate liver cancer. The only difference between their grief and ours is that liver cancer, the cause of our grief, couldn’t have been stopped if the American people rose up and spoke out against it with righteous indignation.

And so, at the end of heartbreaking and weary months, I sit and wonder when it will be that my country will gather the courage to become morally superior to liver cancer. As it stands, it would be a marked improvement if the USA were merely to become its moral equal. As we sat at that memorial service in Vermont last summer, we didn’t have to worry about liver cancer returning and carpet-bombing those of us who survived its cruel theft of life.

Liver cancer may have destroyed the dream Chris had of moving into his new house with Amy and Hali, but it didn’t destroy the house, much less all the other houses and towns and cities in the area. But make no mistake, that’s exactly what George Bush is asking us to endorse: the wholesale massacre of innocents and the destruction of all that people need to get by each day. He’ll tell us that we must strike to keep Hussein from using chemical weapons (of course, as it played both sides against the middle during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the Reagan administration turned a blind eye to Hussein’s use of gas weaponry). He won’t mention that the US will surely destroy Iraq’s sewer systems, thus causing cholera epidemics and many horrifically painful and needless deaths. He will invoke 9/11 and a commitment to fight terrorism while surrounding himself with retro-terrorist bureaucrats like Richard Armitage (deputy secretary of state and current roving minister of doom), Elliott Abrams (who has some bogus National Security Council title concerning democracy), John Negroponte (UN ambassador), John Poindexter (currently organizing some sort of computer-spying initiative), and so many more who engineered the US-backed death-squad activity that terrorized the peasants of Central America back when Bush’s poppy was vice-president. He’ll wrap his intentions in the flag as he wipes his ass with the Bill of Rights. He’ll tell us the sky is about to fall unless there is a regime change, and he’ll equate Saddam Hussein with Hitler. But he will be the one who has sent troops all over the globe, driven by dreams of world domination. That thug Hussein would love to do the same, but he is a piker compared to Bush and his carnivorous handlers.

One day, near the end, Chris and I flipped on CNN for a moment just as George W. Bush was walking toward a podium with body language that announced he was about to start lying well before he began to speak. Chris said, "Arggh, the MOE-RON! Make it stop, make it stop!"

I quickly extinguished the television and Chris said, "Thanks. There are still some things that are worse than liver cancer."

Exactly, my friend. Exactly.

Non-tax-deductible donations to help complete the house Chris Bracken began can be sent to Amy LeBaron, c/o Teago General Store, Box 127, South Pomfret, VT 05067. More info on Chris Bracken’s self-penned obituary and the eulogy from his memorial service can be found at www.barrycrimmins.com.