While we're on epitaphs

I ran across this letter that I'd written after the death of my dear friend Li Greiner. I was privileged to be able to read it at a gathering of his friends in San Francisco. Having been a little closer to fulfilling it than I'd like recently, I thought it worth sharing:

I miss Li. The worst part is, I let a long time go by without seeing him, knowing in my heart that he’d surely be there later. And then, quite suddenly, he wasn’t.
We were supposed to have a grand time together as old men, Li and I. With me coming to see him in his palatial and convoluted digs, whether the apartment in San Francisco or the country estate in far-off Bisbee, where he’d be surrounded by passageways and rooms jammed with books [more books than in most bookstores I frequent], lined with shelves laden with arcane and hermetic bric-à-brac, and strewn with Oriental rugs. I would bring a bottle of ancient port or single-malt whisky, and, while Li lit up one of his pestiferous little cigars, we would pour out copious quantities into cut-glass containers. Then Li would regale me with long hours of intricate and learned discourse on any and all of a thousand topics, ranging from the proper use of firearms while boarding either a four-masted barkentine or the Number 44 bus to the use of labial fricatives in either Zulu or oral sex.
For that is what Li always was to me, the epitome of the learned sybarite. He surrounded himself with interesting and diverse things, books, and people. [I count myself honored to have been one of them.] He’d actually read every book he owned, and probably a thousand more along the way. He knew a great deal about a lot of things, and a lot about a great deal of things, and what he didn’t know about he was usually interested in. Yet he was never a bore [or a boor] about anything of interest to him, and was ever the perfect gentleman [both as a gentilhomme, a nobleman, and as a gentle man], in public and private. Though it would have been a mistake, and often was, to dismiss Li as some sort of fop. He had a lovely example of Samuel Colt’s handiwork [blued and .45 caliber] that he kept in his nightstand, and stood ready and capable of using it in the protection of himself and those he loved. His sartorial preferences, while occasionally outré by conventional standards, always had a delightful internal consistency. Li, in fact, showed me the rightness of dressing just like Wyatt Earp, down to the impeccably placed diamond stickpin, yet he would’ve been equally at home as an Edwardian dandy with top hat and cane, or an Elizabethan boulevardier with breeches and sword.
I envied him his abilities, his style, his knowledge, his savoir-faire. I always enjoyed his company, his speech, his view of the world. I was so very angry that he went without telling me he was going, without giving me a chance to tell him how much I loved him; but I soon had to forgive him, for what Li feared, I think, was our inability to show him the dignity he deserved, in life and in death.
I miss Li. I always will, on this side. As his friend, it is my hope to enjoy a good glass of port with him, someday.