These essays only are licensed under a Creative Commons License.
On Sunday, April 12, 1992, James Nicholas Bucci was one of ninety people to die that day from AIDS-related infections. He was seventeen days shy of his thirty-first birthday. Originally from L.A., Nick had moved with his lover Sammy and friend James first to Atlanta and then New York, where I first met him at a midtown legal publisher. We worked together there as copy editors in 1986 and 1987. After a while, a core group of about seven of us—copy editors all—started hanging out together. We went out on Friday nights for drinks, went to each others’ parties, ate lunch together, collected and covertly “published” a massive volume of legalese bloopers, and plotted ways out of the dead-end jobs we were in. We developed a kind of foxhole camaraderie. Eventually, we moved on to other jobs, but stayed in touch. Nick stayed on at our original place of employment and got promotions until he was forced to leave after his first bout of PCP.
For the next four years, Nick shuttled between his family in L.A. and his friends in New York. We became his second family to varying degrees, moving him and his ever-decreasing amount of possessions from apartment to apartment, visiting him in the hospital, doing whatever needed to be done as he got sicker and sicker. He gave James his power of attorney, and together, he and Jennifer were there when he needed someone to take care of medical and legal details for him. Collectively, we took care of the funeral arrangements, of scattering part of his ashes here and sending the rest to friends in Venice, California, of packing up his things and sending them back to his mother, Jackie, in L.A.
Nick’s death stunned me completely, more than I expected it to. After all, I’d had four years to prepare for it and we weren’t close friends. Regardless, for four months after Nick died, I did nothing but sit and play solitaire, finding myself oddly devastated by this loss. If Nick and I had been closer, this depression would have made sense in some way. Losing him felt like losing someone who was more than just the casual friend he was. I began to wonder how others got through the grief for people they really loved a great deal. I began to wonder how my gay friends coped with watching their friends and lovers disappear this way, over and over and over again.
I started writing these letters to Nick on the advice of another friend who had lost her only child, a son, in a car wreck some years before. She too had gone into a depression after his death and had only managed to get out of it by writing daily letters to him. I took the first three to my friend Laurie, who sat patiently through them as I read them between sobs. After she urged me to continue writing them, I was astonished at the rate at which the letters began to pour out of me.
I suppose in some way, these letters are conversations that we might have had if Nick had lived and we’d become better friends. I started writing in part to explain to myself and other friends how I felt my life had changed, how I had changed personally because of Nick’s sickness and death; I hope someone else might read this and find some affirmation of their own experiences here, because nothing brings quite as much relief as knowing you’re not the only person who’s enduring something catastrophic. They’ve been a form of therapy, too—a way of figuring out what happened, why it hurt so much, of why I was grieving so much for someone I hadn’t known that well. They’re also a way of honoring Nick and others who’ve died of AIDS, and of acknowledging the losses of those left behind, acknowledging that life is like this now for so many people, too many people all over the world, gay and straight.
I’m not a PWA myself, and can’t possibly begin to write about that experience with any kind of authority at all. I wish Nick could have written his own story; I think he would have been a fine writer if he’d hadn’t been robbed of both time and mental ability by this disease. I wish he could have written any story but that one. But this book isn’t just about Nick, either. It’s about some of the people who came to love him here in New York, about how our lives were changed by him and gutted by the disease from which he suffered. Quite a lot of it takes place inside my head, because that’s what I know best. I’m certainly not the first person to have lost a friend to AIDS; I wish I were the last. But I’m not, and I hope this might help others make some sense of what happened to them and their friends, too.
These essays/letters are also about the issues that surround AIDS, at least in this country: health care, prejudice, discrimination, grief, research, politics, and activism. I think many people resist the notion that dying of AIDS is different from dying of anything else. It’s one of the top five killers of young people in the country. The others—heart disease, cancer, accidents and violence—have been around for a long time. AIDS has only become a killer in the last decade. It’s like having a war break out and not only never stopping, but having no end in sight. We’re in a war zone now, one that’s killing kids and teenagers and adults, women and men, people of all colors, as indiscriminately as shelling and air strikes do. I hope that reading about what this disease does from the point of view of someone like me—a white, straight, female, morally conservative Christian—might wake some people up before their grandchildren, or teenagers, or another loved one is hit by this particular bombshell and they find themselves eating not just crow but one of those horrible potluck funeral meals.
-1996Since I started writing these essays a decade ago, treatment options for AIDS and HIV have changed for the better, making it a somewhat less dangerous and fatal disease to contract than when Nick died of it. Alarmingly, this seems to have made people more careless about getting it, as though it were no more harmful than, say, diabetes or high blood pressure. This makes me frantic for my younger friends, and it makes these essays seem unfortunately relevant again.
After more or less completing them in 1996, I’d let them sit on my hard drive, occasionally dragging them out to take to a new writing group to read, hoping somebody might be able to tell me what to do with them. They didn’t seem publishable in much of any format, at least not in print, and though I’ve been online and computer literate almost from the start, this is the first I’ve really had need of a website. Thankfully, the Web is a forgiving medium, and here they are, at last, in a very public forum, available to more readers than I could ever have hoped would see them. I would much rather they were far more irrelevant than they seem, in the new reading I’ve given them, formatting them for the Web.
Instead, though some of the media events mentioned are obviously dated, the underlying ideas still need to be talked about. The war’s not over. We have new weapons, but they’re of limited value if we keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Of course, I’m ten years older and wiser now, and it’s easy to forget how immortal we all felt in our 20s. Bad stuff always happens to someone else at that age. In view of that, I’m putting these essays out here, hoping they might strike some new but too-familiar notes in the next generation coming up behind us.
Please, learn from our mistakes. Be safe. Live long.
-2002
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Dear Nick,
I think you should know that you died at a really inconvenient time. I mean, my God—Saturday night? You, of all people, should know better. Have a little consideration. Why couldn’t you have dragged us all out of work or something? (“Oops! Sorry, gotta go, boss. I’ll be back when he’s dead. This shouldn’t take too long.”) We could have at least gotten an afternoon off. And if you’d planned it for the middle of the week, we could have milked it for a long weekend too. Death leave and all that, although I guess they don’t give you that for just friends. Well, it would have been worth a try, anyway.
But, oh no, not you! Ever the drama queen, you had to go into the hospital for that last great scene on a Saturday afternoon, upstaging everybody’s recreational plans. Your timing for Jen and me couldn’t have been better. We had tickets to see the Public Theatre’s production of “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore” (fondly known as “Too Bad She’s a Slut,” and noted for a plot worthy of a spot on Oprah), but instead, we spent the evening with you, alternating between bad dialogue on the phone and terrible acting at your bedside. You have no idea how hard we worked to get you a good audience, either. It wasn’t easy, you know. People do have social lives, especially on a Saturday night.
And what did we get in return? The privilege of sorting through your dirty sheets and underwear the week after. I mean, it’s not like you left much. There was more medical equipment than anything. Some college kids in your building really cleaned up (we gave them your Armani suits and the furniture, such as it was) but all Jen and I took away were some photographs, one shirt each and some of your tapes. And I know you must have told all our friends—behind my back!—to let me take your color TV. That’s exactly your idea of a bad joke. You knew what a video idiot I’d turn into if I owned a tv that had to have cable. It’s your fault I’m addicted to “Hometime,” the Cartoon Channel, and “Forever Knight” (I can just hear you: “A vampire series set in Toronto? Get real, girlfriend! Who’d wanna bite anemic Canadians?”). I suppose that’s your idea of a ten percent agent’s fee. And after the publicity work we did for you, too.
James was already there when Jen and I arrived, and so was Sammy. For being a couple of former crackheads, you’d have thought they’d have been out doing something better than waiting around for you to go into the hospital for the last time. Well, I guess they had to be there, as your former roommates. And Sammy couldn’t really not show, as your ex- lover. Anyway, I guess your social life kind of diminishes with Kaposi’s and ARC. (James’s lesions weren’t really obvious though, and Sammy still looked pretty good, if a little thin.) Steve and Joel arrived as I was coming out of your room, and I know those two had something else planned, probably involving performance art, leather, and nipple clamps. Fran and Dave weren’t home when I called them, but I left them a message and they showed up later, after dinner and a movie. What a way to cap off an evening. (“Oh, honey, listen, I’ve got this great idea: let’s go to that new restaurant in the Village, see that film at the Angelica and then go down to Beekman and watch Nick die. What do you think?”) Even your mom, in L.A. with a three hour time difference, was hard to find. Once we did get hold of her though, she was ready to just hop that plane right out to New York to catch your shtick. What a jet setter. We told her not to bother because by the time she got here, she’d have missed the last act anyway. We gave her an hourly synopsis instead and told her we’d ship her the proceeds. But Susie—forget it. I don’t know what Susie was doing. It was all just too fraught with fraughtness for her, I think. She’s always liked comedy better than high drama.
Can’t say I blame her. Face it, you weren’t really up for it. It wasn’t one of your finer efforts. I’ve seen better death scenes on soap operas. But I know it was a tough room and you were winging it. On top of that, the script wasn’t the best and none of us knew whether to laugh or cry. We cracked a lot of really bad jokes too, like the one about you going out just the way you’d have liked: stoned. But the curtain calls—Geeze. Give it a rest. We were there from two in the afternoon until after eleven, well after the waiting room closed. When the house management finally threw us out, we’d no sooner gotten home than they called to tell us the encores were over. You couldn’t do it while we were all there, could you?
I still wonder if you did that on purpose. I mean, did you think we were going to applaud?
Yours, really pissed.
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Dear Nick,
It’s been almost a year since Sammy and James scattered your ashes in Times Square and Venice Beach. This is the first I’ve really been able to sit down and think about you without being swamped by inertia; for four months after you died, the only thing I could do was sit playing solitaire. Whenever Jen and I got together, all we talked about was you, and how we were always seeing you on the street. The man we saw wasn’t the one in that hospital bed, though. The Nick I kept catching glimpses of was 6 feet tall, weighed 180, and could have swum the Narrows. There wasn’t much life left in the 98 pounds you weighed when I last saw you. You died a couple of hours later, just shy of your 31st birthday.
I hope you know I was there, even when I wasn’t. It was so painful to watch you deteriorate—a year younger than me, the flesh sliding from your bones like wax from a candle—that I couldn’t often bear to be with you in the flesh. But you were never far from my thoughts. I wish now, as one always does, that I had been more attentive, stopped by more often, called. When I was younger, I would have, but it shreds my insides now to watch people suffering. It makes me angry, which is what I do to keep from being scared.
It made me angry that you had to die the way you did, full of tubes, isolated from your friends and family, alone, in pain. And I’m scared—not that I’ll die that way—but that others I love will, that my parents might. When I went in to see you in intensive care, they made us put on surgical masks, an absurdity which only astounded me later, when I’d had time to think about it. I mean, how our germs possibly could have harmed you then, when you were dying, I can’t imagine. In retrospect, it seems more like a ritual performed even though its significance has been lost, as though we might once have put on those masks to shield us from the presence of death, to disguise ourselves from it, so it wouldn’t take us too. But we no longer believe in death as an entity in itself, and like everything else in our mass-produced society, they weren’t even masks we had created for ourselves with that purpose in mind, for this particular ceremony. It’s all done very badly now, in a very slipshod, cold, misdirected manner, hiding us from the wrong person. Worshipping Science, we’ve lost the instructions for this ritual. If anything, this sanitized distance makes us more afraid of death.
Which is not to say I think death is anything but an outrage. Just the fact that almost all of us fight it so ferociously says to me that we weren’t really meant to die. If the afterlife is so wonderful, why does getting there scare the shit out of us? And if there’s nothing at all after death, which I think more likely, how much more appropriate that we fight tooth and nail to avoid disappearing into oblivion? If it were possible for the dead to ask for anything, wouldn’t it be more life? I know the living would ask that for them. I would ask it for you. At 33, I’m just beginning to feel I might be gaining some wisdom and maturity. You died before that process could progress very far. How can that be right?
In saying this, I’m assuming that the universe makes sense, has some kind of logic behind it, if only because it works so well without anybody’s intervention. Even chaos is not what we thought it was. So how does death make sense? How can it, without faith? Not dogma, not religion in its original sense, because faith doesn’t bind. It releases. But Biblical faith, the “assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld. ” And the only way death makes sense in this sort of universe is as a travesty of the original purpose of human life.
I know that, nominally, you were a Catholic, and this is something else I wish we’d talked about. In the year you died, Nick, five other people I knew died too. An old friend of mine from my childhood watched both of her parents die within a two months of each other, her father of a stroke, her mother of cancer that was already devouring her when her husband died. Two more of my friends back home lost their father to a heart attack, and another’s dad died of a chronic lung disease that probably was due to being in Hiroshima after the A-bombing. And Tom, a faithful man in my home congregation, died of hypothermia after wandering lost for several hours, a bit addled at 83.
I’ll miss Tom the most of all these other deaths. Like you, he was very funny, and very intense, and he had always been a bit preoccupied. He once mailed a banana and didn’t discover it until he looked for the lunch his wife had packed and discovered an envelope in the bag instead of his dessert. He was a foot-in-the-door evangelizer, who often embarrassed the people who accompanied him; I always figured he had earned the right to be fervent, having been jailed for that faith in World War II. We called him Jehu the chariot driver because he drove like a man in battle—a little in-joke of the kind Bible students tend to make. The only thing that made his death—and yours—bearable at all, is the faith I have that I’ll see you both again, and that when I do, you’ll be healthy and laughing and will probably even have hair. If I’m lucky enough to be there, I might not recognize you. Wouldn’t that be funny?
The night you died, I had a dream I was dying myself, and that my friend John, who has introduced me to some wonderful music and to many ideas that have shaped my thinking, was helping me pack up and distribute my things to the right people. Then he took me out to the beach, wrapped me in a blanket, and sang to me all the songs we’d ever sung together. I woke feeling loved and serene. That dream came from a couple of places, I think, besides my own horror of seeing you die that way. As we were sitting in the intensive care waiting room, Steve told us about a friend of his who had himself kidnapped from the hospital by his friends when he was dying, and taken to the Grand Canyon to die looking out over its rim. And it came from having never been at a deathbed in adulthood.
My grandfather died of cancer when I was about seven, and when my Mom and I went over to see him at home before they took him to the hospital, my uncle—the one nobody in the family liked—called me in to see Grampa, saying he was asking for me. I was his favorite grandchild so I suppose that might have been true, but by the time I saw him, he was just barely conscious and drooling. My mother was so angry at my uncle for making sure this was my last memory of my grandfather that she drove away at 90 miles an hour and didn’t speak to my uncle again for five years. But I don’t remember my grandfather only in that deathbed; memory is a good editor. At least at his bedside, none of us had masks and I could kiss him goodby without the intervening taste of cotton.
I won’t remember you only in this way either, eventually. I’ll remember you sitting at the White Horse Tavern with Fran and Dave, me, Susie, Steve, and a bunch of other people from Bender when we all went out to celebrate my getting a new job. You were drinking and smoking and talking with Susie about going out to find some grass in Washington Square. I guess the two of you stayed out half the night looking for hash. Susie confessed later that the two of you almost went to bed together just because you were curious about what it was like to sleep with a woman. Susie hadn’t had sex in four years at that point and probably would have slept with anyone for whatever reason. And even then you were carrying the virus that killed you.
You were hilarious that night, a consummate storyteller playing your audience, drinking gin-and-tonics and getting wittier and more cynical with each one. You bought drinks for everyone, throwing away your thin paycheck for the sake of fun. The next two weeks you borrowed money and lived on Bucci-family-recipe spaghetti. The predominant joke after your memorial service was that, having grown up in L.A. and moved to New York, you’d now be truly bicoastal with your ashes scattered in both places. It’s the kind of joke you would have made yourself, if you’d been around to. I’m surprised you never did. You joked about so many of the other awful things about having AIDS.
Like that time you and I moved Jennifer out of her illegal fifth-floor walk-up: She was leaving for Ireland the next day, had just found out two days before that she was being evicted, and just barely found a new apartment to move to. Jen didn’t have much, so it only took us a few hours, but the climb was murder and we drank gallons of water. Halfway through, at about 2 a.m., I remember you standing on the curb saying in your best melodramatic, bitchy queen voice, “I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m a sick man. I have a terminal disease,” even though you’d been asymptomatic up to that point. About six months later, you went into the hospital with PCP for the first time. That was the first slip.
You got much closer to Jen than to me after that. The two of you had a lot in common: painful childhoods, moves to New York to start new lives, a spirit of experimentation, sexual and otherwise. It was Jen you called first when you went into the hospital, Jen and James who claimed your body. It wasn’t you, she said, lying in the morgue, just some inert organic compounds wearing your face. It seemed to surprise her.
Then there’s the night you and I went to that little cafe somewhere in the West Village—8th or 9th Avenue, I think, and sat around until late, drinking cafe au lait at a window table, watching the rain and talking. That was the night I discovered you—like me—loved Chandler’s detectives and old jazz: Miles, Bird, Coltrane, Billie and Sarah. We seemed to have the same vision of The City, having come to New York looking for the 40’s, when men wore fedoras and took their dates to the Stork Club. I can’t remember what else we talked about, and you weren’t your usual manic self. It was the first time I saw your serious side. That flip attitude hid a very intelligent romantic.
You know, I’ve never been able to find that cafe again. I think it’s a noddle shop now.
Lewis Thomas wrote in one of his essays that death is probably more painful for the living who are watching than the dying who are experiencing it, although if we’re not just making that up remains to be seen. Are all the things the living tell one another about dying lies? I guess only you can answer that now. Whatever the truth, we tell them to make ourselves feel better, not to comfort the dying. In dying, you were already somewhere beyond any comfort we could give you, except the comfort of love. I hope that was how you ended: surrounded by love and at peace, knowing you were secure in the memories, not just of your friends, but in the memory of the person who can remember you so well that you live again.
Yours, looking for truth.
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Dear Nick,
Your death in April was the start of one of the hardest years of my life. I’ll get you for this. So will the rest of my friends. In the weeks following your death, I called all the ones most at-risk, including Paul and Rob, and fiercely demanded they practice safe sex. The night you died, at one o’clock in the morning, I was on the phone to Chicago with Paul, blurting out that you were dead. He didn’t even know you, except second hand, but that didn’t matter. Everyone in my circle of friends here already knew it, and we were all too busy hurting to comfort one another much. The two bonds I was counting on then were the one that stretched between me and Paul back to first grade and the one that grows between two people who’ve lost friends. A few months before, he’d called me at a similar hour from his friend Scott’s wake, drunk on champagne and in high hilarity, the kind that’s so fragile it turns to tears like a switch has been thrown. It scared me, because I was too far away to do anything about it, and because I knew I’d be doing it too, sometime soon.
As luck would have it, I missed your wake. I came down with a vicious sinus infection (probably from crying so much) and had a 103° fever that day. I didn’t think it would make that much of a difference, but it has. I wish I’d been there. Jen told me later there were some great Nick stories floating around, and I wish I’d heard them. Not just for the sake of hearing them and remembering you in better days, but in that atmosphere, with friends, for the value of the ceremony itself. I’ve always thought wakes were a great idea. Forget the solemn funeral crap. Get a keg of good beer, as many pitchers of margaritas as it takes, play the Stones and the Spin Doctors and tell rude stories about me. (“That bitch was always sobbin’ at somethin’” “Yeah, even a AT&T commercial. She was too much.”) I wanted to be with people who knew you and could show me sides of you I had never seen. And I wanted to forge those bonds like the one between Paul and me. You can’t do that without some sort of ritual, even if only one of you is participating in it.
For about a week after that Saturday night, I wanted nothing so much as a fireplace to smash cheap glasses in. I wanted to dance, to shout, to do something, anything. Right after Jen called me with the news, I felt compelled to give you a last salute with a shot of tequila before calling Sammy. Afterwards, I really wanted to throw the glass at something. It had become a ceremonial object, something that should never be drunk out of again, that should end its usefulness as you had ended your life.
I remember feeling that way when Jim Henson died too, a few years before you did. I don’t know why—I didn’t even know the man—but it really put a gash in my psyche. I wrote a whole long riff in my journal about why his death was such a loss, but it was completely inadequate. In another life, he would have been a Master Bard, and there aren’t many of them left; that’s as close as I can get to it. It still makes me sad to see Kermit the Frog and hear him talking with someone else’s voice.
The year he died, I spent New Year’s out at my friend Laurie’s beach house in Quogue with her and a mutual friend. (Okay, okay, I know that would get me one of those “Miss Thing” looks—but you’d like Laurie and her folks, trust me.) We didn’t do much but hang out, walk on the beach in the bitter cold, cook for each other together, and watch old movies, but it was one of the best vacations I’ve had in my life, right up there with Europe. On New Year’s Eve, as the year turned, we lit a fire, drank Bloody Marys and a little champagne, wrote plans for the coming year, and performed a ceremony I proposed. We wrote down ten things we wanted out of our lives on slips of paper, and one by one, alternately, said them aloud and threw them into the fire. Jim Henson’s death was one of the things I threw into those flames and, you know, I really felt unburdened after I’d done it. I wish I could think of something similar to do for your death, Nick.
The year before you died, I went to the first annual AIDS Dance-a-thon at Javits. I only brought in about $400, but I was glad I did it. I felt then like I was dancing for your life, for Steve’s life, maybe for Paul’s, for who knew how many of my other friends. Although officially you didn’t have to dance continuously the whole four hours, I did, pretty much, for at least 3 ½ . I danced myself into a sort of trance state, or at least I was trying to. I think I actually achieved it at some point, because I don’t remember much about it and it was a hell of a big party. I wanted to do it again the year we lost you, to try to put some closure on it all, but couldn’t raise enough money to get in the door since I wasn’t working in an office anymore. So I wound up sponsoring the bartender at Telephone, who seemed surprisingly impressed that I gave her $20. That doesn’t seem like much, even now, when I’m broke.
For several nights running after you died, I found myself putting Seal on my CD on repeat and dancing myself into exhaustion. It was the only way I could sleep. I’d drop into bed and cry and wake up stupid and puffy-eyed the next morning. No wonder I got sick. But I had to do something and dancing always seems so life-affirming, like sex used to be. I’ve been a dance fan for years (even actually took lessons—ballet and tap—as a kid, believe it or not), and even when it’s tragic, like Giselle, or some of Martha Graham’s work, the sheer beauty of the movement, the fact that there is movement, links it irrevocably to life. I was dancing, I think, not to call you back, but to remind myself that I was still here.
I still keep finding ways to say goodbye, because somehow it doesn’t feel quite final yet. Maybe that’s good, or maybe I’m just in denial. Anyway, when Jen and I were cleaning out your apartment, I took a pair of your jeans for the quilt I’ve been making for years and drew up an embroidery design for it: a pink triangle filled with satin stitched cranes, and your name and dates below it and The Big Sleep (Chandler—remember?) above it. I haven’t done the embroidery yet though. I’ve been thinking about making a piece for the AIDS Quilt for you too. And when I was up at St. John the Divine last week to hear the Monteverde 1610 Vespers, I stopped by the AIDS chapel and said goodby there too. I even almost bought a candle. But you’re Catholic, I’m a Jehovah’s Witness and it’s an Episcopal church; somehow it didn’t seem right.
And of course, I’ve been writing which, along with crying, are my two main functions in life. I’ve written you poems, and these letters too. Maybe that’s the best goodbye I can give you.
Yours, still dancing.
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Dear Nick,
Well, Jen’s in love. I can hardly have a conversation with her that doesn’t focus on the Polish Physicist. (Yeah, she’s still in that stage of it.) I don’t think you ever met him, but I think you would have gotten along all right. He’s more uptight than you are, but I think you’d have been good for him. This has got to be the longest courtship in Jen’s life. They’ve been “dating” for a year now, and he’s just worked up to kissing her on the lips and maybe lingering a little. It’s a novel situation for Jen, to go for a whole year without sleeping with whomever she’s dating.Anyway, this means that once again, I’m the only one of our group who’s not seeing anybody.
I did talk to my old boyfriend, Rob, the other night. We dated when I was in grad school in East Lansing and broke up after a trip out here during which he finally decided he was gay. I slept and cried most of the way home, lying in the back seat while he and Brian—the guy he had the hots for—sat in the front seat. I wasn’t ever really in love with Rob, I guess, although I thought I was at the time. After all, he was a great kisser. We both were terribly infatuated with each other and flirted shamelessly. I guess that’s why I couldn’t stay mad at him after we broke up. It was only a little hurt, not like the big one that came later and left me angry and bitter and hollow. In fact, it was kind of nice the other night to flirt with flirting again and be able to laugh about it. He asked if I was seeing anybody and when I said no, told me he’d found the perfect guy for me. I asked him how he knew I’d like this guy and Rob said cheerfully—“Because I want him, but he’s straight!” Needless to say, I cracked up. I probably would like him, whoever he is, in the same way I liked Joel immediately. Not that I was infatuated with Steve, but I did and do like him an awful lot.
I first met Joel, Steve’s lover, when I came out from your hospital bedside Saturday night. He was the only person standing in the hall then, and I was crying (my official function at any social event). I was, in fact, crying so hard that I could barely see, and I almost mistook Joel for Steve, they look that much alike. They’re practically twins physically—same height, same wiry build. Then there’s the multiple earrings, beards, long hair, boots, jeans and penchant for leather. Anyway, I managed to choke out “You must be Joel, I’m Lee,” and the next thing I knew, he’d wrapped me up in a hug. It had been a long time since I’d been held by anyone then, and it felt really good, even from a stranger. And Joel was so sweet. Here I was, some person he knew only as a mutual friend of yours and his lover Steve, and he’s holding me like I’m someone he really cares for. I could have stayed in his arms all night, and it had nothing to do with sexual attraction.
I don’t really remember, but I think he must have said something like “it’s okay to cry,” which is something I don’t hear very often, probably because I do it so much all my friends get sick of it. I cry at everything, which makes me into sort of a girl who cried (wolf). After seeing me choke up at a sitcom I’ve seen twice already, people stop paying attention to the fact that I’m crying. My friends who know me really well don’t even bother to comment when I get misty eyed, it happens so often. But I can’t help it. There’s just something about being the witness of other people’s pain or acts of kindness that chokes me up.
One of my friends who’s just getting to know me said to another friend that I’ve got this shell of steel around a core of marshmallow, and I suppose that’s true. All too often lately, I feel lacerated by other people’s pain. That’s why it was so hard to be in that room with you. Oddly enough, I don’t think I ever cried in front of you, before that night, probably because I was always too busy laughing at your jokes and stories. No, that’s not true—I cried the first time I saw you in the hospital when you had PCP, and it was you who told me it was okay. But I don’t know if you saw me crying this time behind the surgical mask or not, you were so far gone. I just kept saying, “I love you, Nick,” and crying and holding your hand.
And I felt—and was—so completely useless, too. I’m not used to being quite so lost anymore. Living in New York has given me the courage to do a lot of things I couldn’t do before, to speak up in a way I couldn’t before. But that night I was too wimpy to argue with the nurse about giving you morphine, too dazed to find the doctor to argue with him, too busy steeling myself to stay in that awful room with you—to make myself be there—to think about anything else but the fact that this was it, the moment we’d all been waiting for for the last four years. The hardest thing I’ve ever done is to be in that room with you, watching you suffer. It was such a relief when Steve arrived and I surrendered my mask to him, because we were only allowed in two at a time. And there was Joel, outside.
I always forget how much larger men are, until I’m held by one of them. It’s a nice feeling, to be in the arms of someone larger and stronger than you, in that kind of embrace. I really needed that comfort because I’ve always been the hard-ass for everyone else and this was suddenly—wham!—far beyond my coping capacity. Joel just stood there and held my head against his shoulder with his hand in my hair and rocked me a little. I was unutterably grateful for someone’s arms around me, someone who’d let me cry. Even so, as much as I needed that affirmation and comfort, the uptight WASP in my genes got hold of me and pulled away from Joel’s extraordinary gift. After all, he was a stranger, not even someone I knew. How could I continue to cry on him, much less completely break down and sob the way I wanted to? What would he think of me, for Christ’s sake? “You hysterical asshole, get a grip,” I told myself, apologizing to Joel for having the audacity to cry on him, to need that embrace and accept it from him, a total stranger. I’ve never thanked Joel properly for it, but I can’t help but think that that kindness will come back to him someday, either from me or someone else.
And anyway, why shouldn’t I have cried for you? What’s wrong with grief? When I lived in East Lansing, my friend John took me to see “Fanny and Alexander,” and the scene I remember most vividly was right at the beginning, where the wife is mourning her husband, walking up and down beside the coffin and actually wailing with grief. I remember one of my cousins-by-marriage doing the same thing at the funeral of her husband, although she’d known when she married him that he wouldn’t live long with the hole in his heart. My mother was completely disgusted with the “show” she “put on,” throwing herself across the coffin and weeping. I didn’t understand why then, and I don’t now. What makes her think such a show of emotions isn’t genuine? And who decided that it’s unseemly to wail—to howl—at death? The same people who decreed you can’t wear white after Labor Day? It’s like yelling “Stop! Thief!” We have, after all, been robbed, no matter what our beliefs in an afterlife or resurrection are. I’ve been robbed of your sense of humor, your wild tales, of the writer that might have bloomed inside you, Nick. I wouldn’t be writing you these fucking letters now, if I didn’t feel I’d been robbed of the opportunity to share things with you.
And all I can think now is that Steve, and Joel, are both HIV positive, and I’ll probably lose them both too, in the not-distant-enough future. Who’ll hold me then? And who will I have to hold? Where are you when I need you?
Yours, still sniveling unapologetically.
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Dear Nick,
I saw you again yesterday, in the lobby of my friend Steven’s apartment building, talking to a woman I didn’t know. My heart actually stopped for a split second and I got a dizzy adrenalin rush out of it. Cheap thrill. No doubt the state I was in contributed to it, but it was still a shock to see you standing there laughing, that expanse of shiny baldness reflecting the fluorescent lights.
Remember Steven? We spent our last Christmas together at his apartment, even though he didn’t know you. That’s the kind of guy he is. That year, he was volunteering at a food drop for homeless PWAs at the church across the street. He kept asking me to come down and help hand out bags of groceries with him, but I just couldn’t. I could barely cope with the thought that you were a PWA and getting sicker all the time.
Then, when you came back from California and went into the hospital again, Jen found you an apartment just a couple of blocks from Steven’s building, in Gramercy Park. She lied spectacularly to the landlord, telling him you were an exec on the road a lot, which was why she was getting the apartment for you. We knew he’d never rent a Gramercy apartment, even the not-at-all-posh one she found for you, to a PWA. She even put the security deposit on her credit card, knowing she’d probably never get it back because your dad had filched so much from your Social Security checks and bank account. We collected furniture, linens, a beautiful oriental rug from Carole—who’d only met you once—pots and pans, the works, and set it all up before you got out of the hospital. We spent a weekend cleaning it up and moving everything in for you. I was glad you had a nice place in a good neighborhood because we all knew it would be your last apartment.
And when Christmas rolled around, Steven invited you up to his duplex on Park with the motley assortment of his other friends who were at loose ends for the holidays: me, Jen, his Japanese neighbors Eiko and Wadi, and Guiseppi the Italian food critic, who lives alone and doesn’t cook. The food was great: boned turkey, glazed ham, two quiches (my contribution), salad, chestnut stuffing, spuds, and good wine. Having never celebrated Christmas, I’m not much of a critic, but it was a lovely evening, and you really rallied for it, sick as you were. It was a great audience and you worked it like old times. Shticks on the home shopping club, insomniac TV, tequila, crack. Steven wasn’t sleeping well himself at that time, and laughed more than the rest of us did. Should have been a clue, I guess.
The only awkward moment was when we were moaning about the economy and Steven mentioned converting his assets. Jen and I just looked at each other and rolled our eyes. You were on welfare, Social Security, and Medicaid by then, I’d been laid off, and Jen had just started making over $30,000 for the first time—which ain’t much in this town. But you made some wise crack and the moment passed. You went home early, and we all more or less left when you did. I got you a taxi, kissed you goodbye, and headed home, feeling better about seeing you than I had in a long time.
So I guess it sort of made sense to see you there, in that particular lobby. As I say, it was probably my state of mind, at least in part. Having just poured an entire bottle of expensive champagne down Steven’s kitchen sink, I was on my way two blocks up the street to talk to Legs—remember Legs, the one who dumped Jen for Sinead O’Conner?—to get the number of the nearest AA meeting for Steven, who was drunk and crying at 1:30 in the afternoon. It’s been a bad year for him too. Actually, a bad couple of years, since his mom died. Before that too, I think. Hell, maybe it’s just been a bad life. Sometimes it is. But it beats the hell out of being dead, doesn’t it? I don’t believe any of us want to die—you certainly didn’t—but I’m amazed at how many people seem terrified by the idea of not doing it.
Science writer Timothy Ferris thinks that with all our ancestors living, we’d never be able to make a decision without consulting them back to great, great, great, great grandmother Muriel. With all these living relatives, “no person is whole,” he says. “No person is free.” I can only assume he thinks we are whole and free now, with the people we love dying around us. Looking at the state of my friends, I can’t say I agree. Examining my own heart, I know it’s not so.
If it comes to that, none of us will ever be free the way he seems to imply. And what a tragedy if we were! To be free of the influence of our relatives is truly to cease to exist. The Nature vs. Nurture debate is an old one, and we still don’t know which is more influential (I suspect both about equally), but genetics, at least cannot be disregarded. Coded into us are the traits of all our ancestors, as undisregardable as the shape of our face, whether we actually express those traits or not. Sometimes we only need the right catalyst, like the presence of an allergen, to make them evident. You could no more disregard the centuries of Italian relatives in your gene pool, than I can the generations of German peasants and minor Scottish nobility in mine. No more than any of us can deny safely our interconnectedness with the other people sharing our planet. The past already weighs heavily on most of us, but it is only the immediate past of our own short lives. If the vast memory of immortality were behind us, perhaps we’d gradually quit making the same mistakes over and over every generation. Then we would be whole and free.
Then I wouldn’t be seeing your ghost in building lobbies or comforting friends who are afraid of finding out who they are.
Yours, under the influence.
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Dear Nick,
It’s time to tell your doppelgangers to go home, especially since they just ignore me when I see them. Today on the train, on my way into NYU to post flyers for my business, you got on at Ninth Street and sat down in the seat right in front of mine and didn’t even say hello. Some nerve. It was your bald, bristly head, that robust swimmer’s physique, and those slightly sunken, haunted eyes. I was reminded of how handsome you were. Really, it was uncanny how much this guy looked like you. I think he was a little taller and bulkier, but with a pair of glasses, he could have been you in our Bender days.
He was wearing one of those J. Peterman canvas coats, jeans, a T-shirt, and boots and sat in the seat perpendicular to mine with his back against the wall. You’d probably give me one of your patented “Miss Thing” look for this, but I had my sunglasses on, in part because it was a nice day upstairs and I was too lazy to take them off, and in part because—if they’re dark enough—nobody knows you’re studying them. So I stared, shamelessly and undetected. He’d shaved his head, but from where I was sitting—on the outside seat facing forward—his five o’clock shadow revealed the same, typical “male pattern” baldness you had. He looked good as a skinhead. You would have too, if you hadn’t been so sick then. After a while, he leaned forward so his head was about two feet from me, in profile. I got absolutely fascinated by the shape of his ears, the way the top of it whorled up and over and around from his skull and curled into the inside of his ear in a curve that was almost geometric. Beautiful, really. I wanted to reach out and trace it with one finger. I wondered what he’d do or say if I did.
A while ago, after I got hooked by The Joy Luck Club, I read a book by an American woman about her experiences teaching for a year in China. Although it was depressingly negative (Mark Saltzman’s Iron and Silk was a good antidote), I remember her describing two of her students, two men sitting side by side with their arms around each other in a very casual manner, one of them absently tracing the curve of the other’s ear. She said that in China, it’s not uncommon to see young women holding hands with one another walking down the street, or young men leaning against each other in conversation. It was very shocking to her, but the image it conjured up for me was lovely. That unabashed physicality was one of the few things I liked about Paris too.
When I was a kid, my cousin and I used to have that sort of relationship. We were both only children, just 2 months apart in age. From the time we were about eight, we spent six weeks of the summer and a week at Christmas together. She was the closest thing I had to a sister. We brushed each other’s hair just for pleasure, sat up against one another, held and hugged each other, undressed in front of each other, gave each other back rubs, sometimes we got in bed together and snuggled. We had a comfortable familiarity with each other’s bodies. I guess this is what sisters do, but I wouldn’t know—none of my close friends had any very near them in age when we were kids. Anyway, for a long time, we measured the depth of our friendship by how honest we could be with one another about our bodies: “You have crotch odor. ” “That big zit on your nose just popped.” And the dreaded yet ubiquitous, “You’re getting fat.”
She didn’t come over the summer I was home from my freshman year at college. Instead, she called me up to tell me how guilty she felt about all that touching, all that closeness, all that familiarity, as though it had been wrong. Suddenly, that closeness had become tainted with sexuality to her and she drew away. It caused a huge rift in our relationship. She’d always been kind of embarrassed by sex anyway; it was one of the few things we didn’t really talk about, even though we went through all those horrible hormonal changes together. There’s still none of that “girl talk” between us. At the time, I felt like she was accusing me of being a lesbian because I was the one who wanted to hang on to that physical closeness we had. I’d only just met any lesbians that year at the women’s college I was attending, and didn’t have a real good grip on what it was all about anyway, so her guilt made me feel guilty in a way it wouldn’t now. In hindsight, I think she was just as afraid she was one because she liked it too, and even more clueless about it than I was.
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Laurie (who went to college with me) read me a poem that contained a line about getting into bed with a female friend. We were critiquing each other’s work and she suddenly looked up and said, “Is somebody going to read that like we were, you know, in bed together?” Truthfully, I’d thought that too, at first, and it saddens me that I did. It’s not at all what she meant, and it was perfectly obvious from the context. But now that I’m a grown-up, everything has been sexualized: kissing, touching, holding hands, snuggling under the covers, hugging, even a back rub. My cousin’s guilt was only the first manifestation of an attitude I realize is way too common. My freshman year at college, the rumor mill ground out that my friend Cathy and I were having a gay affair because we’d been seen hugging one another on the Commons during Spring Weekend. The truth of the matter was that we were in the early part of our friendship and realized that we’d found soulmates in each other, and it was a marvelous feeling that needed an embrace to express it. All these many years later, we’re still soulmates and good friends, but not lovers—and I still hug her in public.
This attitude toward touching each other drives me crazy, Nick. I used to be a really touchy-feely person, always ready with a hug, always willing to hold anybody for the sake of a little human comfort. I hate the fact that holding someone or even just putting your arm around them or holding hands is reserved in this society for lovers and children. It’s made such a mess of our relationships to each other, whether friends or lovers. That’s one of the things I really enjoy about being with Mike and Pablo. As South Americans, they’re not squeamish about hugs and kisses like North Americans are. They’re affectionate with each other, their friends, and their lovers, and unembarrassed expressing that affection. I’m not sure they even think about it. They make it seem the most natural thing in the world—as it is—to kiss and hug at greetings and partings, or any other time. In case you didn’t know, this is also one of the things straight women like about being with gay men. The sad thing is, it’s been so long since I’ve been treated to any casual affection that I almost cringe from it now. I’m so wary of being misinterpreted (as often happens) that I’m really reticent about giving anybody a hug.
But we all need to be able to hug or hold someone, or be on the receiving end, without thinking about sex all the time, to just get a little comfort, to just reassure each other that we’re alive. I remember reading about a study that found people had a better attitude toward cashiers and clerks who just brushed their hands in returning change. That’s such a small gesture, almost unnoticeable and certainly unremarkable, but I don’t doubt it’s true.
One night a bunch of us came up to your apartment on the Upper West Side near Birdland (that place with the amazing black bathroom). You had this little tiny room with a futon on the floor, books all around and a tv—and not much else. I think we were all there for your birthday or something else that you were too sick to celebrate by going out. In my usual obsessive way, I was the first one there. Crashed on your futon in jeans and a T-shirt, you asked for a back rub. After you got sick, you lost any reticence you might have had about asking for contact like that. “Hug me, hold me, give me a back rub,” you’d say. I don’t know whether it was fear of being abandoned that prompted it, or just need, but you could never get enough affection from us.
When Jen, Mike, Pablo, Maggie, and Steve arrived, we ordered pizza and flopped down on the futon with you. We were watching “Boy’s Town” with a very young Mickey Rooney, complaining about how sappy it was (I, of course, was sniveling). You fell asleep in the middle of everything, with us sprawled around you in a warm circle. We laughed about you falling asleep at your own party, but all of us being there together was as good for us as it was for you, I think. The next time any of us were together like that again was in the intensive care waiting room, and we were all hugging each other. It shouldn’t just be crises that bring out that warmth in us.
I guess remembering that—and his striking resemblance to you—is what made me want touch this guy on the train today. After a while, he rested his cheek against his fist, his elbow on his knee, so two Hispanic women could talk over him. It scrunched up his face a little and made him look sad, and I really wanted to touch him then, and ask him if he was okay. With so much space between us, I wonder if any of us are okay.
Yours, feeling touchy.
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Dear Nick,
I keep thinking about the night you died, and wondering why I remember so little of it. I know, it sounds like I really remember a lot, but that’s one of the strange things about memory. We spent a long time in the intensive care waiting room, and beside your bed that Saturday night, almost twelve hours, but most of the evening is just kind of a vast, grey expanse in my mind. Only the little things remain, what Virginia Woolf calls “moments of being.” I don’t usually do that with significant events. I remember the day of the week, because Jen and I had plans, but I don’t remember what the weather was like. I don’t think it was raining—that would have been too stagy for me not to remember, and I recall other rainy days I spent with you at the hospital. I don’t remember any particular sense of urgency in getting there either. I guess we knew you weren’t going to go quite yet, and you did wait until we’d all seen you, didn’t you?
I can’t even remember very well who was there. James and Sammy, of course, and Jen and I; Joel and Steve; Fran and Dave; the guy you’d spent the summer with on Long Island, whose name I can’t remember now. He seemed like a really nice guy, but he didn’t say much. I guess that was understandable, being with a group of people most of whom he didn’t know. Neither your mom nor dad were there, your mom because she couldn’t afford it, and your dad—well, who knows why your dad wasn’t there. I’m not sure I ever knew why. Maybe I’ve forgotten that too.
And Susie was pretty conspicuous by her absence. At the time, I think I was a little angry about that, but I really can’t remember, to tell you the truth. I was too numb myself most of the time to pay much attention to anyone’s reactions, including mine, until much later. Even the writer had shut down, the part of me who observes and stores as material for future stories what people say and do in the most awkward of situations. At least I thought she had. Now, as these stories pour out of me, sometimes at the rate of three or four in a day, I realize she was there all along, recording silently.
Writers are really awful people, sometimes, Nick. I’ve come to realize that about myself. But there are extenuating circumstances; you might call them occupational hazards. The fact that our brains tend to filter out the rough times we’ve been through makes it hard on the writer. That’s often the best material. Of course, remembering them makes it hard on the human being. So I guess we have the choice sometimes of being a writer or a human being. I’m not sure the two are always compatible.
I let Jen read a couple of these letters a while ago and, of course, they
depressed her; concerned, her boyfriend (no, not the Polish Physicist—the
Youngster) wanted to know if she thought I was just doing this for the sake of
drama. Jen told me later, “He doesn’t understand that
writers—”
“—do everything for the sake of drama,”
we finished together. We were both laughing about it, but it’s not all
that funny. We do tend to go into things with the idea that it’s all
fodder for our work. People around us know this, and it makes a lot of them
wary, with good reason. I keep saying that it’s the peril of being friends
with a writer, but that’s not much comfort. It’s also not an excuse
for what we do. When my cousin and I were talking about reconciliation, she
tried to exact a promise from me that I wouldn’t write about anything that
happened when and if we started speaking civilly again. You can see how far that
went. And look what I’m doing with you, Nick. This is about as self-reflexive
as it gets, just a step below metafiction. Everything is material, everything
gets filed away for subsequent analysis and use.
Except major parts of that night in the intensive care waiting room in Beekman Downtown Hospital. I remember really stupid things about it, like taking my journal down with me, and a book, as though I’d really want or be able to either read or write there. (My journal! God Almighty, even then I was thinking about getting all the details down.) I remember not being able to tie up that asinine surgical mask and wondering how I looked in it. I remember being relieved that Fran was crying also, so I wouldn’t be the only one.
I remember more serious bits of it, too. I remember the man in the cubicle beside you—another AIDS patient—dying alone. Standing by your bed, holding your hand, I caught myself observing all the tubes and wires and machinery, where they were hooked up, what the read-outs looked like, what the cubicle looked like. When I realized I was looking at the expression on your face, the pain and frustration there, noticing how the respirator tube was taped down and thinking how I’d describe it all, I knew it was time to get out of the room. I’d become a voyeur and I hated myself for it.
Sitting in the waiting room again, I kept asking myself why I was there. Had I come down to be here with you, with Jen, with the rest of our friends, for mutual support? Or had I come down because this was a better source of material than any play could have been? This was the real thing, this was real life. It wasn’t “Thirtysomething,” or “L.A. Law,” or even “Torch Song Trilogy.” It was “Nick’s Last Night On Earth.” It was a much richer lode to mine than “Unrequited Love” had been, or “Falling For a Gay Man,” or “Going to Europe Alone.” I’ve led a pretty uneventful life, mostly devoid of pain and suffering, for which I’m very grateful. I had parents who loved and respected me, a good education, no major losses or traumas in my life, until you came along. I read somewhere about one writer who’d told a famous Eastern European author that she envied him the ready-to-hand store of serious subjects living under Communist rule gave him. My first reaction to her statement was “What a jerk!” but I had to admit to myself later that I understood what she meant. That’s the kind of people writers are. Suffering may not be good for the soul, but in our view, it’s great for the plot outline and character development.
So here I am, turning myself, turning all of us inside-out, on paper. Do I feel ashamed of what I’m doing, sitting at my computer? A little, I suppose. I’ll probably feel more so, if I happen to make any money out of it. But that’s my job, I’ve concluded, to turn myself and others inside-out for a good story. Guilt’s one of the hazards.
But you’re not just a story, are you? None of us are. You were flesh and blood, you died horribly and too young, and we loved you, and that’s the other reason I’m sitting here in front of my computer right now, typing these words.
Yours, still writing.
Dear Nick,
You know, I discovered a lot of things about myself the night you died. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who was able to cope with pretty much anything. I was always the person who did things that had to be done. People were always telling me what a strong person I was, moving to New York or going to Europe alone; what a good friend I was going to the Rape Crisis Center with a roommate or pouring their liquor down the drain, always doin’ the right thing, that’s me. I’d started to believe them too.
But I don’t think I came up very well on the score card this time, and my only consolation is that I’m not the only one.
To begin with, Jen and I had tickets to a show that night. We were going to see “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” at the Public Theatre—a Joanne Akalatis production. I hadn’t been to a play in ages, and this had s gotten such good reviews that I was really excited about it, and I think Jen was too. I really wanted to see it in part because I wanted to tell Rob about it. He’s a Renaissance lit scholar and it’s one of his favorite plays; living in East Lansing, he doesn’t get much of a chance to see work like this performed. The tickets were relatively expensive on my freelancer’s budget and it was a splurge I hadn’t allowed myself in quite a while. I’d bought them, but Jen had put them on her credit card (mine was at the limit, as usual), so she needed to be at the theatre with me to pick them up. Then she called me up about two that afternoon and said you were in the hospital and things didn’t look good. I could tell by the way her voice sounded you were worse than “not good.” “I’m going to the hospital,” she said. “What do you want to do about the tickets?”
Just the fact that Jen asked doesn’t speak too well of my character, and I have to admit I was torn. I really wanted to go to the play. It’s full of strong, dark emotions, taboo subjects and passion, and I love stuff like that. I always think you see what people are really like in the grip of those kinds of feelings, in sordid situations. What could it hurt? I thought. I can’t save him, if this is IT. A split second later, I couldn’t believe I’d actually thought that, but I had. I still don’t know whether it was fear, selfishness, a self-protective pain-avoidance thang, or just plain denial of the imminence of your death that prompted it, but there it was. “Don’t be stupid,” I said. “Screw the tickets. I’ll meet you at Beekman.” And I went.
I was glad I did, of course. I never would have been able to face myself or Jen again if I hadn’t gone. Jen and I have been friends for a long time, and this was no time to desert her, or you, or the rest of the ol’ Bender gang. We all needed each other and you needed us, especially since your mom didn’t have the money to get out from L.A. and your dad didn’t really care about anything except the embarrassing fact that one of his sons was gay. The large number of people there said something about your character too. Just about everyone in the immediate area who cared about you was there.
Except Susie. Party girl extraordinaire, she wasn’t home when I called her either, so I had to keep trying. Jen asked me to call because Susie’d never really liked Jen much (I think the feeling was mutual if not equally hostile), and I knew Susie better. She and Fran had been the first two new “friends” I’d made in New York, and part of the whole copy editors’ circle of Bender hell that also included you and Steve and Jen. We met in part because we’d both gone to Michigan State (Susie as an undergrad, I for graduate school), in part because she was the most senior copy editor in the group when I arrived and showed me the ropes. We hung out quite a bit for the first six months or so after I moved here, until I started to get to know you and Jen and Steve. After I worked with Susie for a while I wasn’t sure how I felt about her either. By the time I moved on to a new job, I realized how self-absorbed and overbearing she could be (coming from me, that’s no idle description). We drifted apart because neither of us was very bossable and we threatened each other a little, I think, but we kept up a semblance of cordiality.
She was way too obsessed with sex and drugs for me too, but I guess you had that in common. Before she met her current husband—a tall, silent guy named Alex who was a friend of Dave’s—she spent a lot of time moaning about how she hadn’t had sex in four years. It got really tedious, to the point where we were all ready to buy her a dildo just to shut her up. No wonder she and Alex, who you always called “Thing,” were doing the nasty in Fran and Dave’s bed five minutes after the party at which they met ended. The party had, in fact, been thrown by Fran and Dave at their house for the express purpose of introducing Alex and Susie. Fran and Dave were convinced they were made for each other and, in an uncanny show of prescience, they were right. From the moment they were introduced, Susie was draped over Alex’s lap. Not a very subtle tactic, but he didn’t seem to mind. When they were the only two guests left, Fran and Dave went out for a looooong walk around the neighborhood at three in the morning, Fran trying desperately to keep Dave awake. Either Susie or Alex broke a zipper or lost buttons in the process, too. I only know all this because I got the dirty details from Fran on Monday at work. It made a great story, but after that party I knew for sure I was with the wrong crowd.
But you and Susie always liked each other. It was only right that she know how you were doing that Saturday.
Like me, Susie kind of stayed away from you after you developed full-blown AIDS. We both visited you in the hospital whenever you went in, but not with any frequency (although I think she showed up more often than I did). Once you moved home, I don’t think she dropped by as often as I did—which was pretty seldom, I’ll admit. Like me, it wasn’t fear of catching anything from you that kept her away; she just couldn’t stand to watch you dying either. I’m still wondering how I managed to get through it. When I finally got hold of her late Saturday evening, I said something like, “You might want to come down to Beekman and see Nick. It’s probably your last chance.” There was this long silence on the other end of the phone, and you can bet your ass I knew what was going through her head. We were a little too much alike for me not to know. When she spoke again, her voice was all whispery and frantic. Not near tears like I would have been (okay—actively sobbing), but panicked, terrified. “I can’t,” she said, “I just can’t,” and she started to make some sort of excuse that we both knew was a lie.
I don’t really remember whether Susie’s unwillingness to come see you made me mad or not. It doesn’t now. You were just my friend, Nick, not even a really close one, but your death sunk me into a four-month-long depression. That night, I couldn’t bring myself to see you more than twice, and justified it by saying I was letting people who were closer to you be with you more. The truth is I’d finally run up against something I didn’t have the strength or means to cope with. I can’t imagine what your death would have been like if I’d been Jen, or someone else who really loved you. In some ways, I wish I hadn’t been there either. I wish I’d gone to that damn play. Seventeenth Century incest and murder couldn’t possibly have been as wrenching as what I saw in the hospital that night, and I could have gone home and forgotten about it.
Yours, paddling away.
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Dear Nick,
I’m starting to get pissed at all these people running around with red ribbons on their clothes. It’s as bad as those stupid yellow ones that people wore during the Gulf War (yes, Saddam’s still in power). I’m not objecting to the symbology at all, but it’s become a matter of political correctness and peer pressure now, and somebody needs to get a grip. When Elizabeth Taylor was on the Academy Awards last year, and dared to come out not wearing a ribbon (the only star all night who didn’t), one of the people I was watching the show with was shocked. I’m sorry, but I lost it.
“She founded AMFAR, for Pete’s sake. She doesn’t have to prove anything to anybody,” I snapped. “Neither do I. Wearing that stupid red ribbon doesn’t mean squat. You’d have to live in an arctic cave to be unaware of AIDS. Even Jesse Helms knows about it.”
Nonetheless, I must admit to having given in to the icon craze myself. I’ve got a cool little collection of buttons I picked up at the Dance-a-thon (little gems like “Men: Use Condoms or Beat It”). At this very moment, I’m wearing a red, anodized aluminum bracelet engraved with the words “until it’s gone.” It’s like the POW bracelets a lot of people wore during the Vietnam War (good thing we name these wars, we have so many of them). You were old enough to remember those; they were really hip about the time we were in junior high. When you received your bracelet, it came with a little bio of the guy whose name was engraved on it, and you weren’t supposed to take it off until you were notified he’d been sent home, dead or alive. Every now and then, I see someone still wearing theirs. I never had one because, much as I felt for the guys who were missing (as a sort of vicarious army brat, some of them could have been my friends’ dads or brothers), the whole war was a travesty (as they all are) and those bracelets felt too much like symbolic support of it. Diseases, however, are apolitical and indiscriminate. Buying this bracelet felt right, especially since the proceeds went to AIDS organizations in the area.
I haven’t taken it off since I got it, although I contemplated doing that to engrave your name on the back. Then I thought if I started doing that, I’d have to keep doing it, and I knew there would eventually be too many to fit on the bracelet at all. It’s three of you now with Sammy and James gone; and my best friend’s cousin who died of the same weird fungal infection that killed Bruce Chatwin; Laurie’s friend Scott; and more dancers in ABT than either Adrienne or I like to think about. You’re still the only one I’ve really watched it eat alive, and believe me, that’s plenty.
What bothers me about the ribbons is that they’re starting to appear everywhere, in places that don’t seem quite appropriate. They’ve evolved from bits of red frippery with a safety pin through them to Tiffany jewelry. I saw a set of dishes with loops of red ribbon on them for sale at Conran’s not long ago. They’re attractive dishes—white with a thin gold rim and the red ribbon in the center—and, again, the proceeds go to AIDS organizations, but it just reminds me too much of the Burger King glass syndrome: Jurassic Park, Jack the Pumpkin King, and AIDS ribbons. Your choice, only 99¢ with the purchase of any Whopper.
Not to mention the fact that you need to wear a veritable rainbow of them to be considered socially acceptable: yellow for the war, white for domestic violence (I like the irony that one supports violence and the other symbolizes speaking out against it in a different context), pink for breast cancer, and red for AIDS. We’re going to be color-coding all our crises and diseases soon. What’s next? Green for the rainforest, purple for heart disease? Will we go bi-color? Black and white for bigotry? Or tri-color? Red, white and blue for voter apathy? Oops, I guess that’s been done.
True to form, wearing those red ribbons has also become an indication of one’s political enlightenment.Wear one, and you can look down your nose at the rest of the raving conservatives and politically incorrect cretins. “See? I’m wearing a ribbon. I’m aware of the AIDS crisis. Why aren’t you?” If you don’t wear one, obviously you’re a gun-toting, racist, agist, lookist, homophobic, misogynistic, ranting neo-Nazi. Just what we need too: something else to make a small group of people feel superior. And face it, in New York City if not most of the country or world, it’s overkill. Back in Oscoda, Michigan, it might still elicit some curiosity, but here? Please. It gives me cramps just thinking about it. Whether it was intended that way or no, that ribbon has become a symbol of hipness. Try getting into a club without one.
What I want to know is what good those little ribbons ever did anybody? What good did they do you? The last four years of your life you wore more obvious indicators of the presence of an AIDS crisis than any ribbon or bracelet could ever be. It didn’t accomplish anything. I realize that a lot of the people wearing them are also actually doing something about the epidemic—volunteering time, giving money, speaking out. But you can do all those things without a badge. It reminds me too of what Christ warned his followers about self-aggrandizement: “Hence when you go making gifts of mercy, do not blow a trumpet ahead of you, just as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be glorified by men. Truly I say to you, they are having their reward in full. But you, when making gifts of mercy, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, that your gifts of mercy may be in secret; then your Father who is looking on in secret will repay you.” (Matt. 6:2-4, New World Translation). In other words, do the right thing because it’s the right thing and then just shut up about it.
So why did I buy the bracelet? Because I haven’t been able to raise much for the GMHC Dance-a-thon in too long, and haven’t been able to send them money either. Volunteering time is too emotionally wrenching for me yet, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to. Buying the bracelet was a small thing I could do in your memory. It was a way to keep myself from forgetting you. I don’t imagine that it’ll do anyone any good, or that everyone should own one. Besides, there are a lot of other equally pressing problems and diseases in the world. I don’t believe political correctness will solve any of them; I don’t believe anything human will. It certainly won’t bring you back. No symbol or dogma is that powerful.
Yours, in knots.
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Dear Nick,
I was walking through the Village the other night, on Christopher Street, and passed one of the Catholic churches with a sign over one of the doors that read, “AIDS Memorial in the Village.” In one of those “Aha!” moments where lightbulbs go on, it suddenly struck me what the real meaning of that sign was: Life has changed irrevocably in the wake of AIDS. God knows I’ve read plenty of essays and heard plenty of people saying the same thing, as most of us have, but for everyone, there’s a pristine moment of truth when the sheer enormity of consequence becomes aggressively apparent. For me, it wasn’t even your death that did it. It was walking by that church and seeing that sign.
I suppose my personal epiphany was a little delayed because the whole possibility of me coming down with AIDS is pretty remote, unless the thing becomes much more contagious. Drugs have never attracted me, especially those involving needles. I won’t take blood transfusions either, so that avenue of infection is pretty well sealed off. I won’t have sex before I’m married, and the community of faith into which I’ll probably marry—if I do at all—doesn’t sanction it either so, barring marriage to a recent convert or rape, the chances of me getting it through sex are pretty small too. Even with the number of gay and HIV positive friends I have, the consequences of AIDS have been fairly peripheral in my life. None of my relatives have it (so far) and aren’t really that much at risk for it. You’re the only real friend I’ve had who’s died of it, and we weren’t that close. Not that it hurt any less to lose you because we weren’t.
So I can’t tell you why that sign set me off, but it did. At the west end of Christopher Street in the early evening, I had this sudden vision of walking through a plague city, like Camus or Boccacio. That far west, near Washington Street, Christopher is pretty quiet at that time of night, with a few large apartment and church buildings. There’s some traffic, but not a lot, and there weren’t many pedestrians either. The silence and dark were somehow more chilling than bodies piled in the streets would have been. Where was everyone? Were all those unlit apartments empty?
I’ve been reading apocalyptic science fiction novels since adolescence, and I suppose they’ve shaped my view of the world somewhat, as has my faith. A Canticle for Leibowitz, The White Plague, Dhalgren, The Drowned World, Bladerunner (more the movie than the book)—all contain vivid descriptions of decimated populations and abandoned cities. When I lived in the country, the images didn’t mean that much to me—it was always quiet and dark at night—but living here, they seem not only more real, but more possible. Especially now.
Health officials in Uganda estimate that one third to one half of its population is infected with and will probably die from HIV/AIDS. The parallels between AIDS and the Bubonic Plague of the Middle Ages are terrifyingly obvious, it seems to me, but death on that scale from non-violent means apparently isn’t conceivable to people now living in the Western world. The last time any epidemic near this scale swept through this country was the Spanish influenza in 1918-20, and who really remembers that? Twenty-two million people died then, worldwide. Of course, many other diseases were killing lots of people then too: tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid, polio, even dysentery, but not in such great numbers in such a short time. All but TB were relatively quick killers. Victims became ill, and in a week or ten days, sometimes less, they were dead. TB took longer, often years, to finally do away with its victims.
In that sense, the TB and AIDS epidemics are much alike. Once called “Captain of the Men of Death,” TB killed 34 million people during the 19th century. Like AIDS, TB was intially considered a disease of a particular and ostracized population, in this case, the poor. Later, it became an “artists’ disease,” because so many of them died of it (Keats, Byron). Eventually, it was even romantic to be consumptive, a tragic badge of hipness. And like us, people in the 19th Century, even privileged people, lived with TB without giving it much thought. Loved ones and friends died of it, but there were no TB memorials. It was too common, too accepted, too much a part of daily life. We’re becoming equally blase about AIDS. We may walk and dance for it, build monuments around it, but it’s not always in the forefront of our minds unless it directly affects us. Like those 19th Century plague survivors, we now toss around phrases like “living with AIDS,” treating it almost as though it were an unwanted houseguest we couldn’t evict, instead of death squatting in our midst.
Despite our growing and sometimes feigned nonchalance, we walk about with our behavior consciously or unconsciously modified by this plague. We’re fearful our loved ones will get it; we wonder if we’re carrying it, or might get it; sometimes, we wonder which people sharing the street, the bus, the subway, or our work space with us have it. We’re fearful of public restrooms and fountains, of sending our kids to school with others who have it, more terrified of the homeless than we would be without it, worried even about our own doctors and dentists. We talk about quarantines, mandatory disclosure laws, forced testing. I doubt Jack Kevorkian would have gotten as much support as he has if the spectre of AIDS weren’t walking the world. For the first time, blood is a toxic chemical. Surgeons operate in moon suits, rubber gloves are everywhere. When we meet someone new, or date, or go to a bar, we have to consider asking questions that fifteen years ago would have seemed the apex of rudeness. How many sexual partners have you had? Do you use condoms regularly? When was your last AIDS test? A lie can be not just a betrayal of trust, but murder.
It’s the fact that AIDS is a relatively slow killer that works against our continued outrage. If people were dropping like flies from it, not 90 a day, but 900 or 9000, we’d be in a continual panic. Society would break down, probably the way it did in the Middle Ages, where groups of flagellants went from town to town beating themselves to try to win God’s forgiveness, or people let the crops rot in the fields because they were sure they’d all be dead in a week. But we still discretely tuck away our dead. The graveyards and crematoria can still handle the influx. Nobody’s lying in the street yet. There’s no sudden glut on the housing market. So we learn to cope with it, the way we learn to cope with an acre of rainforest disappearing every hour, a rape every 3 minutes, a child dying every hour [check these stats].
On top of this, the entire fact of the disease has—mistakenly—become a moral issue. The Helms/Wildmon camp claims it’s a scourge from God, a punishment for homosexuality, adultery and whatever other sins we practice. While it’s true that abstinence, “clean living,” and refusing blood products are the only sure ways to avoid contracting it, the idea that it’s a direct punishment from God is nothing short of repulsive, arrogant, and divisive, not to mention completely lacking in mercy. That particular attitude has done nothing but pit us against each other, and make us more fearful. First it was Those Haitians. Now it’s Those Faggots. It’s a small step from that to the concentration camps. Look at Cuba. And once we put one small group in concentration camps, its a small step to putting others there, or even just treating them differently. Normality shifts.
The worst part of the weirdness wrought by the AIDS pandemic is that it’s beginning to not feel weird anymore. In ten years, AIDS and those social changes have become commonplace horrors. This is our new normality. And now that it’s this bad, how much worse can it get? Will we go from saying, “Of course I want to know who you’ve else slept with; of course we ought to be distributing condoms in schools; of course I want to know how well those instruments were sterilized,” to having to present a state health certificate on demand, or being liable for prosecution if we don’t use condoms, to wanting to run the autoclave ourselves when we go to the dentist? New York health officials have already started virtually incarcerating some TB sufferers to make sure they complete their course of treatment. It’s just another small step from that to permanently quarantining AIDS victims until they die.
We’ll grow numb to that too. We’ll shove it out of our minds until the next positive test, the next hospital admission, the next wake. Until we find ourselves packing up a loved one for a trip to “camp,” placing a candle, sewing a name, writing an obit—again. Until it becomes habit.
Then we’ll ask ourselves, “My God—what next?” And the answer, as Bruce Cockburn says, is, “The trouble with normal is it only gets worse.”
Yours, in rose colored glasses.
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Dear Nick,
In the bus to Paramus to turn in my grades today, I was reading “Frank’s Place” in Newsday, cracking up as usual. I’m a faithful reader of Frank DeCaro’s column, odd as that seems. I love his sense of humor, for starters, and I guess he reminds me a little bit of you. I don’t know if you ever read him or not (“Read him?! I’ve had him!” you’d probably chortle). By the time he became a regular feature, your choice of reading material had deteriorated from the Sunday Timesto the occasional Post. It’s too bad, because I think you’d have liked Frank. ( “Liked Frank?! I’ve . . .” ) He’s about as out as they come, and his sense of humor is a lot like yours, although I think he’s a bit more of a queen than you were. Maybe not. I didn’t see that side of you often.
Having revealed my enjoyment of Frank’s column, I can see the look you’d be giving me. I can almost hear you saying, “Just walk right out of that closet, girlfriend! Come on!” You never actually said any such thing to my face, but Jen told me you were convinced it was time I came out. And you’re not the first man (and certainly won’t be the last) to think that, either. Legs, for instance, is positive I’m a dyke, and that my friend Lisa, who stayed with me last year for three months, was my lover.
But I know why Legs thinks I’m a lesbian: I won’t have sex with him and have made it emphatically clear that I wouldn’t even if he were the last salami in the deli case. This is unfathomable to Legs. Every woman, he thinks, wants to sleep with him; lots of women do it. I don’t and won’t, ergo I’m gay. Such runs the logic in many a macho male mind. “Dyke!” is right up there with “Bitch!” and “Ice Queen!” as epithets for women who turn down men’s sexual advances.
But I don’t really understand why you thought I was gay. Maybe it was your lack of experience with women. Maybe you’d fallen into believing the stereotype that all strong single women must be gay. One of my friends who “fell into” rather than chose a lesbian relationship paid me the backhanded compliment of telling me I’d be a good lesbian. The ones she knew, she said, were all strong, smart women like me. I laughed when she said that, but if her remarks had been made a year earlier, it might have been a laugh masking discomfort and uncertainty.
See, I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about whether I was a lesbian or not, but I don’t quite know why. Natural curiosity in part, I suppose, and just not knowing anything about it. Maybe it was that so many other people seemed to think I was one. At one point in my undergrad career, my own mother said—very touchingly—that even if I decided I was a lesbian, she’d still love me and stick by me. “But I’m not one, Mom, ” I replied, bewildered. I guess after a while it got to me. Maybe other people were seeing something in me that I wasn’t. The funny thing is, it was mostly my straight friends, except you, who thought I was probably gay. Ironically, I’m a very good example to refute the idea that gays are recruited. Even straight people couldn’t talk me into it.
Granted, I’ve never really dated. I’m not a woman men are instantly attracted to physically. On top of this, I seem to intimidate some of them because I won’t play dumb, and piss off many more because I won’t be talked down to either. I’d prefer to marry in my faith, but eligible men of my age are a relative rarity there, so I’ve had a grand total of two serious relationships with men outside it. One of those was with Rob, who decided he was gay while we were seeing each other. Worse yet, I don’t believe in sex before marriage, which is hard for non-JW’s to put up with. That killed the second relationship. Probably more than anything, it also explains the lack of romance in my life.
Add to these facts my early history as a tomboy; the number of gay friends I have (which isn’t disproportionate either way, actually); my attendance at a women’s college with a large lesbian population; the number of close relationships I have with women; my fascination with Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West; the awkwardness I often feel around men; my outspoken feminism; and a secret passion for “Frank’s Place” and Alison Bechtel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For,” and—well, I can see how people might jump to certain conclusions. The fact that I’ve always hated dresses and other girly stuff probably doesn’t help either.
There’s one fatal flaw in the logic, however. I’m not the least bit sexually attracted to women. I love my women friends dearly, but I haven’t the slightest desire to sleep with them. My friendships with women are often passionate but never sexual. My friendships with straight men never really escape being sexually charged, even mildly. That’s one reason having gay male friends is a pleasure. Beautiful women arouse in me a kind of awe of the human form, the way a sculpture or painting might. But if, say, Harrison Ford sits down next to me on the subway, my hormone levels become toxic; an estrogen haze settles over me. I get just as irrationally, heart-thumpingly weak-kneed as the next straight woman and have to go run around the block forty-eleven times to burn it off. I know Adrienne Rich thinks it’s patriarchial conditioning, but I don’t mind saying I enjoy it anyway.
I will, however, be the first to admit that men very often irritate the Christian qualities—especially patience and long suffering—right outta me, and I’ve been known to talk trash about them with the best of the separatists. Despite this, they fascinate me, and I’d love one of my own to curl up with. But, to paraphrase Henry Higgins, why can’t they be more like us? Even that’s not precisely true; it’s their differences that attract me at the same time they often move me to contemplate murder.
Anyway, I’m still bewildered when people think I’m gay. I think it says far more about society’s fear of “unsupervised” women than about sexual orientation. We’re socialized to believe a certain image of what women are supposed to look like, and how they’re supposed to behave, and anyone deviating from that image threatens the social order. Women have always been “other” in male society anyway, but when we don’t conform to the molds we’re shoved into, we might as well tatoo DYKE on our foreheads and get it over with; that charge is inevitable. Frankly (pardon the pun), calling a woman a dyke or a lesbian is about equivalent to calling her a whore or a witch not too long ago. It’s a way of keeping us off-balance and defensive. Look how much space I’ve taken up explaining myself. Why should I have to? Well, why should Queer Nation have to go to marches shouting “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!”
And aside from the obvious derogatory spin straights give it, calling a woman a dyke shows a certain amount of contempt coming from a gay man, too. I’m still surprised at how many gay men have strong prejudices against lesbians. I’ve heard both you and Paul call them rug munchers in a sneering tone, as though there were something inherently superior not just about the male sex, but about male homosexuality. That’s nothing but cock-talk and you know it. It’s about like Black Brothers calling their Sisters bitches. Get a grip, folks. What’s so scary about women that you all have to belittle us to feel good about yourselves?
Which brings me back to Frank, who was today celebrating k.d. lang and RuPaul, Melissa Etheridge and Boy George, Maya Angelou and Tony Kushner, and “every man, woman and child who grabbed a rainbow flag, a pink triangle pin, or MY DAUGHTER CAME OUT OF THE CLOSET AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT T-shirt and hauled butt to Washington, D.C., for the march.” This is what I like about Frank, and about Alison Bechtel. They’ve both got this “we must all hang together else we shall all hang separately” attitude. Gay, straight, black, white, girl, boy, religious, atheist: the world’s a place unforgiving of differences.
Face it—neither of us conform to the accepted norm. You didn’t conform to mine and I didn’t conform to yours, either. Even so, Nick, there was a shared history between us that you may not have known about, and not just the oppression women and gays face. The gay community’s pink triangles were side by side with the purple triangles of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Auschwitz, with the Jews’ yellow stars. Here and now, you suffered for your non-conformity, ultimately paying for it with your life through no fault of your own. As a woman, I already endure a certain amount of discrimination, and I may yet suffer for my non-conformity too; other JWs have more recently than World War II. If I’ve been in a closet, it hasn’t been full of gays. But thanks for rattling the doors.
Yours, stepping out.
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Dear Nick,
Here it is New Year’s Eve again. Soon it’ll have been two years since you—let’s see, how many different ways can I put it? Went west, left us, passed away, passed on, croaked, gave up the ghost—hell with it—died. Let’s be brutal. The weather calls for it. It’s the kind you hated and I love: cold and snowy, unforgiving and ruthless. Dress warmly or die.
I was having lunch with Jen today and, after checking the weather for the windchill, called her to remind her to wear a little more than leggings or risk getting frostbite. This sounds really condescending, but she went up to Montreal for Carnival a few years ago and about froze off her all-but-bare butt. Everyone else is walking around in down and wool and Polartec and there’s Jen with nothing between the skin God gave her and twenty below but a thirty- second of an inch of cotton/lycra. And she’s been known to walk the two miles to work when the windchill is in the teens and below. Anyway, my warning worked. When I came into the restaurant with my face frozen, Jen, sitting at the bar dressed in velvet and tights, said brightly, “It’s not that cold!” These people from Seattle: no sense of when to come in out of the rain, let alone how to dress for snow.
At least you knew how to do that. You used to come in all bundled up, comically so, with some doofy hat, fleece-lined leather gloves, a couple of scarves, a wool overcoat, two sweaters, and thermal underwear beneath it all. I remember you bitching about having to have a winter wardrobe a size larger to accommodate the longjohns. I kept telling you to invest in some good silk skiers longjohns, but you never believed me. When you got sicker and the weather got cold, I kept meaning to buy you some, to keep you toasty. We were all kind of hoping you’d stay in California for the winter of that last year. The cold really tortured you, and when you lost all that weight, it must have been worse than usual. Believe me, I know what an effective insulator body fat is.
You’d have really hated it today. We got a couple of inches of snow yesterday and it was cold enough that what wasn’t shovelled off the sidewalks had packed down hard and squeaked underfoot like it does back in Michigan, where we walk and drive over it all winter. That doesn’t seem to happen often here; I miss it. And it was windy, which isn’t unusual, but—wow!—was it windy! Gusts up to 40 mph. That takes the windchill well below zero, cold enough to freeze exposed flesh in a couple of minutes. For a change, though, it was one of those dry cold days like Michigan gets on a regular basis; it feels crisp and nippy, and walking around in it tires you out like a long swim does, but it’s not miserable. The air has a sort of exhilarating quality to it in that kind of cold, like plunging into a snowbank straight out of the sauna. Usually, it’s damp and cold here, and that kind of weather goes right through you unless you’re wearing fur. Even Thinsulate and Polartec aren’t warm enough. On days like that, I drag out my grandmother’s moth-eaten seal coat and say, to the ninth level of Dante’s hell with the PETA people. Let ’em all run naked in it, I say.
Which sounds rather like what Jen’s parents said about you when she called them the day after you died. Some comfort that must have been for her, to hear you were probably roasting in torment. After the New York winters you endured though, I’m not sure you wouldn’t welcome the heat. It’s easy for me to joke about, since I don’t believe in hell and I know y ou’re not there, but Jen’s—well, let’s just say that when you grow up with them, those kinds of beliefs never really abandon you even when you abandon them. It really hurt her to hear her folks say that about you because you were gay. I was appalled because it was so totally lacking in compassion for either you or their daughter. Here she’s just watched a good friend die young in an unpleasant manner, and all her parents can say is that he’s probably in hell for his sins? That certainly would have made me feel better. It always makes me furious when people purport to know who’s naughty and who’s nice in God’s eyes. Who appointed any of us Santa’s list keeper? (Of course, these are the same people who wouldn’t give Legs a Bible when he asked for one. Who said the Puritans are dead?) I couldn’t imagine what they thought you had ever done to her to deserve that kind of hatred from them. That’s really what it was too, hatred (and a certain amount of fear) bundled up as self-righteousness.
Anyway, with your luck, you’d have skipped the charbroil level of Dante’s hell reserved for perverts and gone straight to the traitor’s level where everybody’s a popsicle stick. That would have been the ultimate bureaucratic mix-up in your experience. I can’t imagine you ever betraying anybody in your life. In fact, you were usually the one betrayed. Even so, it was hard for you, like me, to abandon people to their own faults. No matter what Sammy did, you really seemed to care for him, even when he lost most of your worldly belongings by not being responsible enough to move them out of your old apartment for you when you went to California that last time. And I remember a long, long conversation we had one day at work about your Dad. You seemed completely bewildered by the fact that, having convinced you to give him your bank card, he’d more or less cleaned out your bank account and taken a lot of your social security money to the track when you were living with him. I mean, God knows you had some hefty phone bills, but what he took from you was way beyond the amounts to cover those. I guess he used to complain about having to feed you, which is beyond belief. For one thing, you weren’t eating much by then because of the nausea, and for another, what real parent would complain about buying food for their own son, who was obviously dying?. And all you kept saying was, “But he’s my Dad. What do I do? I don’t understand.” Frankly, I couldn’t fathom it either. Your mother and grandmother certainly weren’t like that; that must be where you got your generosity from. It’s what made us all want to do things for you, because we knew you’d have been there in the pinch for us.
This sounds like the usual shtick people do with the dead. Funny how when you’re no longer there, people suddenly think you’re either a saint or the devil incarnate just because you’re not there to contradict them or defend yourself. But you certainly had your faults—we all do. The real test of our characters is that people like us in spite of them, and that was certainly true of you. I would find it hard to believe that anything you did in your life was worthy of any level of hell, imagined by anyone. The oblivion of death is an awful enough price to pay for the mistakes we all make and the weaknesses we all have. And the hell we imagine after death is only a blurry reflection of the one we’ve created for ourselves and others right here, no matter what the weather.
Yours, shivering.
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Dear Nick,
The trees on St. Mark’s are in bloom again like they were just after you died two years ago. I remember trying to write a poem then with those two facts embedded in it somewhere, juxtaposed. Of course, it didn’t work. It’s too maudlin. But then, so was your death, and that didn’t stop it from happening.
The second anniversary passed quietly. Jen and I did the female bonding (no, not bondage, you jerk, bonding) and got our hair cut and dyed. Jen got her usual blue-black cellophane and I went straight black because I lost the argument with my hairdresser, Zap (the salon management assigns these ridiculous nicknames to all its staff. This one doesn’t fit very well; imagine a pudgy blond Italian vampire queen. …). Afterwards, we wandered downtown (well, we took a taxi; it was raining and Jen was cold) and had lunch. Neither of us mentioned the fact that two years ago you were taking your last small sips of air in Beekman Downtown. I had a beer and Jen had her usual G & T, and neither of us raised a glass to you, although two years ago I’d wanted to smash every one in my house.
Imagine—Jen and I sitting in a beauty salon with black goo in our hair, in remembrance of you. (Then again …) I don’t know if Jen remembered; I didn’t until I got home, but something had been nagging at me all day. Or at least I’d like to think so.
I hate to think we let you go by this year without some kind of shout out, but already it may have come to that. I always feel somehow that life should change, or stop, or at least pause briefly on days like this, like it once did on holidays, when they were still holy days—the first couple of times they were celebrated, in other words. It doesn’t take us long to forget the purpose of special occasions, especially in this world, and we quickly grow tired of or perfunctory with such obligations, at least when there’s no real faith or belief. On the other hand, I know you’d hate to think you were putting a damper on our day. Killjoy is not an adjective anybody would ever apply to you, even when you were really sick. Still, I know I’d want my friends to be thinking about me after I’m gone. Everybody likes to think they’ll be remembered.
The stark, vicious truth is that we’re not. Life goes on, and it becomes as though you’ve merely moved away and our friendship grown distant, cooler, not that it was abruptly terminated in every sense of the word. I haven’t heard from my friend Lexy, who lives in Bethesda, for about the same amount of time that you’ve been dead. Although I didn’t grieve for her, for our friendship, the way I did for you, the level and quality of feeling about her and you is nearly the same now. The difference, obviously, is that Lexy’s got a life four hours away, with two kids, a husband and a lovely house, and you have—are—nothing. Lexy and I may renew our friendship at some point in the future. I don’t really know when I’ll see you again, if ever, but I can always hop a train down to D.C. and be with Lexy, even if she doesn’t want me to. At the moment, it’s more a matter of choice (whether hers or mine, I’m not sure). With you, neither of us had a say in the matter. That thought alone makes me want to call up all my old friends; it seems silly to lose them merely by letting communication lapse.
But acts like that take commitment, time, and a certain intensity of feeling. As with love, we can’t carry around that raw grief forever, the fire that sustains your memory, lest it consume us too. Some of us are worse than others at sustaining the memory too, or sustaining the ceremony of it, and some of us don’t want to at all. I’m not saying that we should walk around in black crepe for a year like the Victorians did, but I can’t abide the other end of the spectrum either, where one simply allows onself to forget the dead entirely. I refuse to believe that the death of someone you love, or even just liked, is just a hole in the water.
I can’t go by a cemetery without thinking about all the people there, now compost, who had lovers and friends and children and relatives, had lives where they schemed and were thwarted, gave of themselves, laughed, wept, grieved, ate, made love or fornicated. Who remembers them now? Oh, if you’re famous, people make pilgrimages to your grave, as people do to Jim Morrison’s or JFK’s. But what about all the ordinary people, whose lives are just gone now? By far, they’re the majority; they’re what originally interested me in history—not all those great men. I wanted to know how people lived, what they thought about, what their days were like, how they were different from me, how the same.
Maybe it’s the writer in me, the snoop, that attracts me to graveyards and history and archaeology. Maybe it’s just a human impulse. I’ve always been a collector of people, someone who prided herself on having lots of friends. I’ve even been accused of having too many of them, as though that were something selfish, as though I were hogging all the friendly people for myself. I’ve been an object of jealousy for it more than once. But I like people. They fascinate me endlessly, their behavior, our clumsy attempts to communicate with each other, our moods, ideas, opinions, passions, manias. The sheer variety of the way in which human DNA expresses itself, the utter uniqueness of each individual, down to their cell structure and the pattern their life takes is a source of complete wonder to me.
That’s why death seems so terrible. I first thought, of you after your death, that there would never be another configuration of your exact genes, history, and influences ever again, even if we someday learn to clone human DNA.
What a shame. What a loss.
Yours, raising a glass.
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Dear Nick,
One of the things I miss most about you is that I don’t have anybody to eat with anymore. Now that Steven’s in the culinary hell of the Midwest, I’m totally out of restaurant pals. Jen the Rice Cake Queen has never been any good for that, and even Laurie, who used to order pizzas in my name at college because she was finally embarrassed when the delivery guy knew whose it was without asking, is only good for sushi and Ray’s Famous. My friend Carol (whom you never met; too bad) likes a well-prepared meal as well as I do, but she’s a little on the veggie side which, as you know, can be a real pain. At least Jen’s gotten out of her strictly crunchy phase, and neither she nor Carol were ever obnoxiously insistent about it. Still, veggie food, in my experience, is usually badly prepared and poorly presented. Ever heard of a gourmet Vegetarian restaurant? (Well, maybe in California …)
But you, Nick—you understood food, food of all sorts, from gourmet feasts to beans and rice. Like me, you had a relationship with it. Must have been the Bucci in you. Spaghetti was an art; pasta required strict expertise. Even a burger was approached and consumed with a certain reverence if it was done to exact specifications. Medium rare meant medium rare. You were fun to eat with because you did it with such enthusiasm. I think food was as much a sensual experience for you as sex was. I’ve tried to explain this to Jen, but she gives me either a completely blank look or one that indicates clearly that I don’t have the foggiest idea what I’m talking about; how could food be as sensuous as sex, and how would I know anyway? (This tells you something about my sex life—or lack thereof.) But it is, and you knew it too.
Food is magical. Food transforms—and not just by making you fat or raising your cholesterol level, either. The French and the Italians understand this, and so do most Latinos. Look at “Babette’s Feast,” or “Like Water for Chocolate.” In the former, a sumptuous French meal transforms a bunch of up-tight, sticks-in-the mud into people who begin to take pleasure in life. In “Like Water for Chocolate,” carefully prepared meals become a medium for expressing love, or sorrow, or rage, or hate, with astonishing consequences.
The first time I ate at an Ethiopian restaurant—up in Harlem—was like that: a transforming experience. The food—spicy and unusual to me—came in small mounds heaped on a platter covered with soft, flat bread. We sat at a round table, facing each other. No utensils or plates were supplied; you ate by scooping the food up with bits of bread, all from the same platter. It was a communal experience that gave me a clearer idea of what it used to mean to “break bread together.” Sharing food from the same plate you literally rub shoulders. You have to make sure your hands are clean, not reach and grab, pay attention to others, breathe each others breath. The only vestiges of it we seem to have in our culture is the bride and groom feeding each other cake, or sharing a pizza with your pals, neither of which really approach it. The wedding cake thing has become a joke or, worse, an excuse for one to mash cake in the other’s face; and pizza is still a fairly solitary experience. We all get a separate piece.
You and I shared a passion for good restaurants too. I still use your fork classification system for swankiness, four forks being something like Le Cirque, and no forks being McDonalds. Not that either of us got to four-fork places very often. The last one I was at was in New Orleans with Steven—Commander’s Palace in the Garden District—and business paid for it. You would have really appreciated both the restaurant and the expense account, and probably the company too. But most of the places we went to rate two forks, tops, if we were splurging. Maryann’s, which has a great menu and colorful characters, was more typical for us: not too chi-chi with great margaritas.
Wherever we went, you could you put it away, too. I’ve always envied men that. A guy can sit down and devour a Big Mac, large fries and a milkshake, then go for dessert, and nobody thinks twice about it. If I do the same thing, I’m a pig no matter how hungry I actually am or when I last ate. One guy Jen went to dinner with actually had the balls to comment on how much she was eating. I’d have been on the floor in convulsive laughter if I’d been there. Jen, eat a lot? Please. What he didn’t know was that she hadn’t eaten all day, beyond a couple of crackers, in preparation for a good restaurant meal. Nobody said anything when you put away a couple of beers, appetizer, salad, everything on your plate, and then had dessert and coffee, which wasn’t unusual for you.
Which is why it was so hard to watch you waste away. You’d always had a great appetite and when the nausea got so bad you couldn’t keep anything down, all you could talk about was food, even when it made you gag. Conversations with you for about the last six months of your life were punctuated with you gagging—an awful sound to listen to. Being the kind of person who was always holding up the drunks in the bathroom at college, my first instinct was to run for wastebasket or bucket, but it didn’t come to that often, except when you were in the hospital, and by then, it was usually dry heaves.
That was one of the most obnoxious symptoms you had to put up with. I know you were more afraid of losing your mind and your eyesight, but not being able to eat led to so many other unpleasant things for you too, like having to walk around with an IV stuck in you all day while the doctors pumped high protein goop into you. It put weight back on you, but it was all in your belly, so you wound up with a pot, your ribcage still plainly visible, the muscle fallen away from your arms and legs like some starving child on the news. Eventually, giving you a backrub didn’t actually involve massage at all because it was too painful without that padding of muscle and fat we all have between our skin and bones. Finally, your appetite just went away entirely. By the time it was all over, you were reduced to a morsel a dog wouldn’t chew.
It’s hard still, sometimes, to sit down to a meal without thinking about you. Hanging out with Steven, I’ve been to a lot of good restaurants, some with cuisines I’m not very at home in, like French or Japanese, all of them good, most of them two to three forks. I wish the two of you would have had time to get to know each other better. I think you might have not only become friends, but I think you might have been good for each other. And you’d have loved eating out with us. Like you, Steven’s got an exquisite appreciation for food and I’ve added a lot of restaurants to my reserve repertoire because of him. We’d have had a great time eating out. Steven’s got lovely manners—one of the few guys I’ve met in recent years about whom I can say that—so you can take him anywhere. When we went to Commander’s Palace, that was even a little out of my league, especially since Steven knows the owner’s daughter and we were treated a little better than most. Talk about forks! And way too many waiters for my comfort. But Steven was perfectly at home, the only one at the table who was. He’s also generous to a fault and almost always grabs the check when we go out, except when I get feeling too guilty and insist on taking him out, although it’s hardly ever to the kind of place he usually goes.
But he’s in Cincinnati now, and you’re—who knows? With your ashes strewn in New York and LA, some part of you has probably been in every good restaurant on the planet, including the one in Cincinnati. Too bad you couldn’t get a table.
Yours, counting the silverware.
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Dear Nick,
Almost Christmas and it’s been a year now since my downstairs neighbor Bob went into the hospital with his first bout of PCP. At the time, I thought I was just getting used to you being gone, when the cycle started all over again nine months later. A couple of days before Christmas, one of our landlords, Kevin, called me and asked me to check on Bob, who’d been home alone since Les went back to Chicago for the holidays. Kevin said he sounded really sick, maybe even a little delirious, so I went downstairs to see if he was okay. I found him under a blanket on the couch, shivering like he’d just been pulled out of a snowbank, but sweating from a 103° fever, and coughing that deep, dry cough you used to get. I’ve known Bob was gay pretty much since the day I met him, so I knew right away what it was.
Bob and I moved into this house on the same day, he with his housemate Bruce and a million beautiful antiques; me, all alone with no furniture—just a sleeping bag, a suitcase, and a pillow. He’s a quiet guy, bearded and balding, given to solitaire and beer and taking in strays of all sorts. An auction aficionado, Bob had some truly amazing pieces of furniture and grimple like Toby jugs that my mother would admire. One of my favorite pieces is an old pharmacist’s counter with a marble top and a million little drawers in it that he uses as a dresser. I’ve lusted after it in my heart since the day I first saw it eight years ago. One day he came home with this amazing drum major’s outfit—tall, white bearskin hat, plumes and sequins and satin—which Les (the guy who moved in when Bruce moved out) graciously paraded around in for my amusement. Recently, I saw a leopard skin rug draped over a chair in the living room for a couple of weeks. When we moved in, Bob was kind enough to loan me a table, a lamp, and a portable tv until my own stuff came from the Midwest. We’ve been sharing this house’s two apartments in a sort of communal existence for almost eight years, feeding each others cats, waiting for repair people, sharing storage space, yakking on the stairwell, plotting against our landlords.
Last Christmas, Bob was just barely employed again, having lost his job at New Jersey’s Better Business Bureau. He’d been taking advantage of his unemployment and some savings, loafing around for about six months, drinking beer, and hanging out on the stoop with everybody else who congregates there (which seems like most of the neighborhood, for some reason). During the summer, he’d gotten a nice tan working in the garden where he’d planted flowers and tomatoes and basil with which I’d made us a big batch of pesto. In the fall, he’d gotten a job as a customer service rep at an auction gallery, which couldn’t have been more perfect unless they’d paid him more money. At least he had some health insurance by the time he got sick. He sure needed it. He hadn’t even found a doctor on his new health care plan, such as it was, and I called Jen for the name of your doctor for him. When I went back downstairs to give it to him, Bob said a friend of his was coming over and he’d found a doctor, recommended by someone at work. Two days later he went into the hospital.
This year he’s fine, and there’s hardly a sign he’d been sick at all, although it took him months to recover even after the actual pneumonia was gone. I’m ashamed to say that I couldn’t bring myself to visit him in the hospital when he was sick. Your death was too fresh and raw yet, only nine months previous, for me to be able to face that disinfectant/urine/vomit smell again and see Bob thin and feverish on those white sheets, forced to share a room with a stranger. I could see your last four years repeating themselves all over again and didn’t have the strength to face it. I sent a big bouquet of flowers and a card, but even after Bob came home, it took me days to screw up the courage to pop in and see him. His roommate, Les, actually had to corner me on the stairs and tell me Bob was hurt I hadn’t seen him since he’d been home. I really felt like shit then, but it still took everything I had to walk down the hall and knock on his bedroom door to say hi. And I couldn’t keep from crying, not entirely, when he said how much he liked the flowers and how beautiful they were. (I knew they would be; I ordered them from Mel’s mom back in Michigan to make sure. Paul still calls her from Chicago for the same reason. Crazy, huh?)
For a while, Bob was so sick even after he came home, that we wondered if he’d have to go home to Ohio. (Did I mention we’re a house full of transplanted midwesterners? How funny is that?) Unlike you, he couldn’t stay in the hospital, because he was working and I don’t think his health insurance covered much. You lounged around in there for as long as you needed to, thanks to Medicaid. That’s one of the few things that’s made me feel good about where my tax dollars go. When you went on welfare, let go from one job and unable to get another, I honestly didn’t mind coughing up for the IRS, New York State, and the City, for a change. I would have hated to see Bob go, but at least he’d have had someone to take care of him; his sister is a pediatric AIDS nurse. You should have been so lucky.
When he got back on his feet, I recommended he get in touch with GMHC because I know they did a lot for you. They’re so overloaded now that it’s getting harder and harder to get into their case load, but he made it, getting up at the crack of dawn and using the redial. I think the medical bills have done a real number on his financial situation. The mail gets dumped into our common hallway, and I often see those nasty little letters with the red stripes on them, marked confidential, that collection agencies send out. (Gee, sounds like I’m more than a little familiar with those myself, doesn’t it?) He’s sold some of his antiques too, including the leopard rug and the drum major’s suit. Before he got sick that never happened. I know there are still a lot of medical bills in the mail too, and AZT ain’t cheap. I wish the Clinton gang would hurry up and get this health care package pushed through. I can think of a couple dozen people ( including myself) who could really use it, many of them HIV positive.
I’m still kind of in avoidance mode, but not as bad as I was. Les and I seem to talk more than Bob and I, which may be a function of the fact that Les’s room is at the foot of my stairs. Bob works late a lot now too, so I don’t see him as much. We chat a lot in the summer, through my kitchen window when he’s in the garden. Since he’s back at work, it’s gotten kind of wild again, overrun with purple morning glories on one side and sprawling tomato plants, and bushy chives on the other. The hammock didn’t get much of a workout either. It’s funny, but Les and I can talk about him getting tested for HIV, but Bob and I never mention anything about it, specifically, anymore. He was very open about it after the PCP was diagnosed, but I guess he must have known there was no way to hide it since I’d talked a lot about you in some of those stoop schmoozes we’d had over beer that summer. But whenever I do happen to see him now, I can’t look at him without thinking, “Is he doing okay? Is that a cigarette cough or a PCP cough? Has he lost weight?” I can’t look at him anymore without seeing you.
Yours, wanting off the merry-go-round.
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Dear Nick,
I’m beginning to feel sort of like an amoeba in a lab experiment, the living embodiment of the psychological behavior theory which posits that everything we do is either to enhance pleasure or avoid pain. If you put an amoeba in a petri dish and run a current through parts of it with electrodes, the amoeba will squash itself into almost any shape to avoid that current. I’ve always been a bit of a hedonist, but I’m appalled at how expert I seem to be getting at pain avoidance. I never used to be this way. When one of my friends threatened suicide in high school, I jumped right in and got myself involved in getting her help. When another friend exhibited all the signs of being shell-shocked from a rape, I jumped in again and tried to help her too. I remember my Dad being angry with me when I did stuff like this, and now I know why. He was always angry whenever I got hurt physically, and he didn’t want to see it happen to me emotionally either. I’ve only recently figured out that we share more personality traits than our volatile tempers.
He hasn’t said much about his mother slipping away beneath the cumulative weight of strokes and a brain tumor this winter, but I know it gets to him. He’s the only kid who doesn’t live in Pittsburgh still and he’s made no plans to go back to see her, although it doesn’t look like she’ll be here much longer. She’s been wandering a bit for the past couple of months but nobody suspected it was more than just senility after such a long life; certainly nobody thought it would be a tumor. Dad’s sister Betty, her oldest daughter, is devastated. She won’t let them do anything, not even a biopsy, because she’s afraid it’ll cause Mum pain. After watching how you went, that’s a decision I can definitely respect. Mum doesn’t know anybody right now, but she’s not in any pain and that’s a small consolation. She’s almost ninety-four, after all, and she’s been sharp as a tack and stubbornly healthy until the last few months. You’d have had a hard time guessing she was as old as the century the last time I saw her.
Watching Dad, and my two cousins who’ve lost their mother and two aunts in the last six months, I’ve been wondering lately how we decide who to grieve for, or if we really do decide at all. I’ve lost four grandparents, three uncles, an aunt, two cousins and assorted friends so far, mostly people I loved more and was closer to than to you. Some of those deaths shook me more than others; some of them, I thought at the time, should have made me sadder. But none of them blew a hole in me quite the way your death did. I keep trying to figure out why your death made me prefer turning myself into an emotional pretzel rather than deal with the new pains. Is it cumulative?
I was pretty young when my mother’s father died and, although I loved him very much, I had that childlike assurance I’d see him again sometime in my life. He was only going away for a while. The other relatives I’ve lost were people I never had very close relationships with because I was just a kid. I saw them a couple of times a year, maybe. In the same way, I never felt very close to my mother’s mother, even though she lived with us for several years. She made my Mom’s life hard, and I was relieved when she moved in with my uncle, and just a little sad when she died there.
But my Dad’s brother, Elmer, whom we all called Whoop for some unfathomable reason, was a different story. He taught me to fish when I was little. I was seven or eight, I think, and he made me bait my own hook, which is one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever been given. When I was in college I spent a fair amount of time with him and his wife Phyllis—weekends, shopping trips, a couple of Thanksgivings and two weeks in bed at their house with pneumonia my junior year; he was a lot like my dad, and I came to think of their house as my home-in-Pittsburgh.
When I found out he had cancer, I went all hollow inside. I was living in East Lansing then, and the night I got the phone call, I stayed up frantically cleaning my apartment all night, as though that could somehow ward it off—or at least keep me from thinking about it. He died a couple of months later, without either me or Dad ever seeing him again, and I miss him a lot. I think Dad does too. But when he came back from the funeral, he said what stood out the most for him was Whoop’s youngest son Eric, who’s a couple of years older than me, crying. That seemed to shake Dad up more than anything, perhaps because Uncle Whoop and Eric had been at each other hammer and tongs for years, I suspect because they were more alike than he and Gary, the son who followed him into the Marine Corps.
Recently, my favorite uncle on my Mom’s side, Dave, had surgery for prostate cancer. That scared the snot out of me too, as did his wife Eltha’s surgery for several abdominal aneurysms. Uncle Dave is a great smiler, with a warm, funny, kind disposition, and Aunt Eltha I’ve always felt a akin to because we’re both little and bossy. They’ve both been really good friends to my Mom and Dad when they’ve had health problems and I’m grateful for that too. And they’re both people I’ve just always liked and cared about. They and their kids have always felt most like family to me, outside my own, and I worry about them almost as much as I worry about my own parents.
Going through this litany of deaths and illness, I think it might be my age that’s changed my view of mortality. I have the same hope of seeing people in a resurrection someday, but the process of dying is less abstract to me now than it was when I was young. My own, after all, is creeping up on me. I lost somebody about every five years when I was growing up, but it wasn’t until Uncle Whoop died that I was old enough to understand what the process of dying entails, old enough to start to feel like I was growing older, instead of growing up.
I’ve also realized I’ve got quite a different reaction to death than either of my parents. When my Uncle Art died not long after my maternal grandfather did, I started to cry during the funeral service, partially because I thought I ought to, and partially because it was hard to fathom him being gone. He’d died unexpectedly of an aneurysm while still in his 50’s. Catching me with tears in my eyes, Mom squeezed my hand and said “what are you doing that for?” It was her favorite brother, and she wasn’t crying. I had no good explanation, so I stopped. Dad didn’t show much either, when Uncle Whoop died. I don’t know how or which things they feel, and I may never know because neither of them show it much. Too busy being tough, both of them, because they’ve had to or think they’ve had to.
I think moving here, to New York City, has changed my reactions too. During my first winter here, I saw a homeless man trying to fry an egg on the top of a ConEd manhole cover leaking steam and wondered if I could actually learn to live here and still love it the way I wanted to. Those sorts of scenes have driven off at least one other person I know. Pain is everywhere in this city. It’s raw, right under or just at the surface of so many people’s lives, so that you can’t help but feel it in the air, vicariously or sometimes directly. By the time my best friend Melanie’s dad died of cancer right after I moved here, I’d begun to have some of the protective skin we grow over our feelings flayed away. I never had very much anyway, and Mel doesn’t either; she was the one who understood best what I was going through when you died, what I’ve been going through writing these letters to you. I suppose it’s one of the reasons we’ve remained friends since first grade.
Having given up trying to conceal my reactions, I find there’s a huge difference in how or if I grieve for people. In part, I think we sort of expect old people to die, although it never really feels right. The younger they are, the more shocking, the more outrageous the death. I feel worse for my Aunt Betty who’s devoted her life to her mother, than I do for my grandmother herself. Ninety-four years is a good long life, and she was almost absurdly healthy during all but the last six months of it. Aunt Betty’s probably got another twenty years in her too and the whole foundation of her life is disappearing. What will she do now? I felt worse too for Melanie than I did for her dad, although he was only in his 60’s and I always liked Bolly a lot. I know it hurt her immensely to lose him. But although I feel bad for your Mom too, Nick, it’s losing you at not quite thirty-one that hurt so much.
I’ve written a lot of condolence letters since you died, to other friends and family, sent more get-well cards and flowers than I thought I’d ever have to, called more people in the hospital. They’re all tasks I dread like I dread nothing else in my life. I put them off and put them off and squirm and justify. I loathe my cowardice, the way I’ve come to shy away like a skittish horse from anything resembling pain, but I can’t seem to act otherwise. The avoidance started when you got PCP the first time, and it was suddenly almost impossible to make myself visit you. It just got worse after you died. I mean well, I want to offer comfort, I want to be strong and helpful, to offer a shoulder to cry on. I used to be able to do that, but now I more often end up doing the crying while the person I’ve called consoles me. I find myself thinking about how much they hurt, and knowing just exactly what it feels like for them, because it still feels that way for me too, almost two years later.
Still, not all of us have the same reactions at this age. When we were all at the hospital with you that last night, I was really amazed at how cool everybody was. I don’t mean emotionally cold, just collected. We were all distressed, but the range of reactions was pretty small. Come to think of it, pretty much everybody was cool but me and Fran. Jen wept a little, but did a pretty good job of holding herself together and making sure all the right people were notified. James was angry and aggressive, getting medical things done for you. Sammy was very tender and warm, staying with you most of the time. Steve was totally amazing. Not only was he calm and reassuring, he knew how to mop up the details: exactly what funeral home to call, what legal arrangements needed to be made, how to get your leftover drugs into the AIDS underground. Why is this, I want to know? Why do I so often feel like the designated mourner, like my appointed task in life is to cry when no one else can? When does it start to scar, or is it always just a scab that softens up with tears or gets ripped away every so often?
I want out of this experiment. Nobody asked for my consent anyway. And don’t tell me your problems anymore.
Yours, chewing at the cage.
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Dear Nick,
In all of this so far, I haven’t addressed the fact that you were gay and I’m not only straight, but a morally conservative Christian, and I think I should. In that light, our friendship seems a little idiosyncratic, but when we met, I didn’t even know you were gay; all I knew was that I liked you. After I found out you were gay, I couldn’t very well say I suddenly didn’t like you, could I? It would have been patently absurd, not to mention unchristian. You and I never talked about you being gay, or if it was a factor in our friendship. We didn’t need to because it wasn’t, though I was a little disappointed that you were, when it became apparent. It was disappointing not for moral reasons, but because I thought you were a pretty attractive guy, and it only seemed to confirm the adage that all the good ones were either married or gay.
I say I’m morally conservative, but I don’t identify at all with the so-called Moral Majority, in the sense that I don’t think it’s my business to impose my morality on people who don’t happen to agree with me. If Jehovah saw fit to give humanity free will, none of us have any business telling anyone else how to use it. Because I’m a member of a religion that actively proselytizes, people tend to think I’m just another Bible thumper and lump me with evangelicals. But it doesn’t work that way. I know what rules I’ve chosen to live by, and I know what rules I think the rest of humanity should try to live by, but all I can do is show others who are looking for a moral guide where those rules are and let them make their own choices.
Nonetheless, I guess it’s time I talked about…you know…faggots. I finally learned the other day (courtesy of Gloria Steinem’s book Revolution From Within) where that term came from. Apparently during the witch hunts of the Middle Ages, homosexuals (who were always men then because medieval priests couldn’t figure out how women could possibly have sex with each other—or why they’d want to) were routed out of the village and burned at the stake first to make the fires hot enough to burn witches, transformed by the flames into the wood faggots stacked around their own feet. An interesting fact linguistically, but one which makes the term all the more horrifying as an epithet, carrying with it that whiff of violence and smoke, like the Holocaust’s ovens.
I’ll be blunt and say that I think the Bible’s pretty clear on what Christianity’s view of homosexuality is, no matter how any church or church officials choose to interpret those words in I Corinthians 6:9, 10: “Do not be misled. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men kept for unnatural purposes, nor men who lie with men, nor thieves, nor greedy persons, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit God’s kingdom” (New World Translation). The Bible’s pretty blunt too.
But there’s a long list of morally reprehensible acts in that scripture, a list some of the televangelists who thunder out damnation for faggots from their pulpits ought to pay a little more attention to. Greed, for instance. Or extortion (remember “You received free, give free” ?). Or, particularly in this case, reviling. I would like to remind all of them who would dare stand in front of you on your deathbed, stone in hand, that even a man without sin did not revile those around him who could not help but sin. No human has the right to cast stones at another.
I’ve also never believed that AIDS was a scourge sent from God to punish anyone, gay or straight. Having studied medieval history for a good chunk of a long undergraduate and graduate career, that strikes me as a pathetically superstitious and dark age attitude. Is cancer a punishment? Is heart disease? Random gunshots? Falling off a ladder? In a way, yes, they are, but only for our universal imperfection. Making Jehovah into a werewolf hunter who sends special bullets to destroy any particular group of people for something they’ve done or failed to do is nothing but the wishful thinking of people frightened by things outside their experience, the same kind of thinking that inspires genocide. Is this the same plague aimed at poor Africans too? Or is that too blatantly racist?
We like to blame God for things beyond our control, like diseases or natural disasters, but we like to blame him for our own folly, too. It’s that same folly that makes us susceptible to the horrors of a world we’ve made progressively worse for ourselves—and to chance. “Time and unforeseen occurrence befall [us] all” (Eccl. 9:11). Build on an earthquake fault, your house collapses; build on a barrier beach, it washes away. Practice unprotected sex, share needles, or take blood products, there’s a good chance you’ll get AIDS.
Having some sort of religious faith—a good, strong one based in knowledge—actually makes this part of living easier to deal with. You don’t run around like the proverbial headless chicken asking, “Why? Why me? Why her? Why him?” because you know the answer is “just because.” I suppose this is a little fatalistic, but it seems to me that thinking God plans for us our deaths, our illnesses, our misfortunes, indeed our lives, is irresponsible and not a little blasphemous. It also negates the entire concept of free will, although I know there have been many philosophically hair-splitting debates on what free will is, precisely. Most of all, it relieves us of responsibility for our own mistakes, and that’s a cheap cop-out.
A friend from my old Michigan congregation dropped in this weekend and we got talking about Paul, who was also in town for a brief vacation. She asked if he had any marriage plans in the offing and I couldn’t think of anything to say except that he’d come out a couple of years ago. She paused and then asked me how I felt about it, as though it should have changed our friendship. While it’s true that Paul’s changed a lot over the years, it’s also true that I have. When he went through a fraternity scene phase in college, I could hardly stand to be around him. I don’t know whether he was trying really hard to do the macho thing then, but he was so fake and so…heartless, that I wondered if we’d ever be friends again. Now that he’s come out and found someone he really loves, he’s a very different person, one much more like the kid I went to school with, the one that I really liked, and much more himself.
Which is to say that I don’t know whether gays are “born” or “made.” I dunno if anyone else does either. Paul swears he’s a “true queer” and has been from day one. Another of my friends has found herself in a lesbian relationship after having been both hurt and dearly loved by and loving men. Neither she nor her partner think of themselves as lesbians or bisexual though. I dunno. I’m just glad I don’t have to sort it out myself. I barely know what I’m doing most days, let alone trying to decide how other people should conduct themselves. What makes all of this all right, is that I believe in a loving, merciful God who sees into our hearts and knows the incorrigibly evil from the merely imperfect, and that the job of making the final moral judgement—and I believe one will be, must be, made—belongs to the person who knows all of us best, and not to any human being.
So my Michigan friend’s attitude really bothered me. It stems in part from the idea many people have that gays can be recruited, a very post-modern concept. We tend to say, if our lives are a mess, that it’s because we’re co-dependent, because somebody else strangled our inner child, because we had PMS or were temporarily insane. We—and I’m speaking of my contemporaries in the west because that’s where my experience lies—have disavowed too much responsibility for our own actions. Lots of things are beyond our control: weather, natural disasters, being hit by a car, whether or not we’re attracted to someone. We can be seduced only by our own desires, which is probably what really scares most people who are afraid to be around gays; that certainly accounts for quite a lot of homophobia. We too often forget that we do have control over and responsibility for what we think and do, if little else.
It’s our common impulse to judge people and then beg for mercy when it’s our turn. I catch myself taking vindictive glee in the punishment of people who’ve done wrong every time I watch the six o’clock news, and hate myself for it. If we want mercy, we have to show it ourselves, but it’s easier said than done. All I know is the love I have for you and for Paul and for my other gay friends is only the poorest imitation of Jehovah’s love for all His creation, and that this is the same god who told the Israelites what an abhorrent sin it was to throw their children to the burning faggots of Moloch.
Yours, looking for a bucket of water.
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Dear Nick,
More things I learned about myself during your argument with AIDS: I found out that I’m as susceptible to irrational fears as anybody else, but also that I can force myself to overcome (some of) them. I confirmed the annoying fact that I’ve become more squeamish than I was when I used to eat in the college dissecting lab; I’m glad I never wanted to be a doctor. I also found out a lot about my own principles and morals.
There’s a moment when every kid starts to examine the received wisdom of her parents, but I feel like I’ve always been holding ideas up to the light to see what’s inside them. It started in earnest when I was toying with feminism. Some of its concerns don’t tally with my Bible-based moral code, so I found I had to think through issues like abortion and submission and lesbianism. I came out of those flames as one of those more-common-than- you-realize feminists who would never have an abortion herself, but who also realizes she can’t make that decision for anybody else and that no other human being should either. Eventually, I realized that abortion shouldn’t be a method of birth control; that submissiveness should not be equated with slavery; and that—well, I’m still working on all the ramifications of what being gay means in my moral universe.
But these are all theoretical issues for me so far. These particular principles have never been tested by pregnancy, marriage, or being gay. You, however, really put me through some serious fire. Watching people die throws many of your ideas about right and wrong into the furnace, and it’s hard to tell what they’ll look like when they come out. Because of you, I found myself mulling over suicide, euthanasia, patients’ rights, sex, drug abuse, parental responsibilities, friendship’s responsibilities, living wills, the right to die, my parents’ looming mortality, God’s mercy, and civil disobedience.
I even caught myself thinking about where to get an ounce or so of pot for you.
About fifteen years ago, a friend’s mom was dying of bone cancer. Peggy is about ten years older than me and something of a mentor at the time. She's funny, smart, beautiful, and took her religion very seriously without being dogmatic or self-righteous. Her mom had had quite a lot of chemotherapy which had absolutely no effect but to make her throw up constantly and lose her hair. She was dying by painful inches and unable to eat, like you were, only worse. I was about fifteen or sixteen at the time, I think, and gobsmacked when Peggy told us about suggesting a reefer to her mother to ease the nausea. Peggy’d never smoked the stuff either, but she knew that was one of its effects. Her mother was just as shocked as we were, but Peggy was dead serious. What shocked us was that JW’s don’t do things like this, as a rule. We don’t even smoke, let alone do drugs—or contemplate offering them to our mothers.
So it should have been a surprise to find myself seriously considering acquiring an illegal drug for you. I think Jen and I discussed and suggested it; it’s a common enough idea and practice in the AIDS underground. I certainly didn’t disagree with it, and I didn’t really distance myself from it either, despite its illegality. It was surprising in one way, and not at all in another. I have a pretty healthy—sometimes too healthy—respect for authority figures, and am generally law-abiding, but I’ve also got a strong dislike of hypocrisy, a streak of rebelliousness that occasionally comes out as civil disobedience, and a clear understanding that there are laws and then there are Laws and above those, there is human decency.
God’s laws and one’s own moral and ethical principles shaped by those laws supersede anything enacted by Congress, as far as I’m concerned. This is something I learned as I learned the tenets of Christianity, but it is not to be confused with anything like “liberation theology.” Where there is no conflict between God’s laws and human laws, one obeys the laws of the land: pay taxes, keep the speed limit, stay away from illegal substances. But there’s a limit to that obedience. For instance, there’s no justification for one human being killing another, whether in a drive-by shooting, or state-sanctioned war. In self-defense it may be necessarily unavoidable, but is still wrong and the consequences must be endured. Told to take up arms or stop speaking about God, I would respond as did the Apostle Peter: “We must obey God as ruler rather than men.”
So how does this apply to scoring some grass for you? I’m not sure it does, directly. But life is full of gray areas and hard decisions and even the best of Christian training does not cover all the contingencies. Sometimes one goes out on a moral limb and hopes no one’s sawing it off behind. If I had known someone (as I have in other places I’ve lived) who had access to marijuana, and no one else could get any for you, I probably would have done it, to alleviate some of your suffering. Technically, my action would break U.S. federal laws; ethically, it would be an act of mercy, falling in that grey area between dogma and the spirit of the law. For someone else who was raised with a Christian conscience, it might have been far enough into the stark area of black to be clearly wrong.
Trouble is, once you venture into one smokey grey area, it’s easy to get lost in others. Could I have assisted in your suicide if it had come to that? No. But when the nurse skittishly said giving you morphine those last few hours might kill you, I was still in favor of it, and that’s a very, very fine distinction. Perhaps that injection did hasten your death; if so, what’s the difference between that and helping any already terminal patient kill him/herself? Now that we have the technical ability to meddle with where life ends to a certain extent, how do we decide what the “normal course” is? Dying an agonizing death, Jesus refused the sop of drugged wine offered him to meet his sacrificial death clear-headed; does this mean that we, dying without purpose, should suffer without painkillers too? I don’t think my or most people’s ability to imitate Christ extends that far, and it seems a useless gesture.
About the time you died, my mom developed a very painful nerve disorder that’s restricted her activities much more than she guessed they would be at her age. Her quality of life—the new medical measuring stick—has diminished enough to leave her frustrated and depressed, but still largely healthy, if in quite a lot of pain, more on some days than others. The treatment is sketchy at best, and will never cure her. She gets around yet, but with effort and at a price. Before she was diagnosed, she told me, the pain was so bad, so all- encompassing, some days she wished she were dead. Right now, she’s no more “terminal” than I am, might even be healthier, and I could not justify active euthanasia, no matter how severe the pain.
Or maybe I could, if I had to sit at her bedside every day and watch her suffer the way I watched you suffer. Maybe I’d get her a bottle of sleeping pills and help her swallow them, if that’s what she wanted. I dunno. Although both of my parents have living wills that stipulate no extraordinary measures be taken to preserve their lives, I don’t know if I’ll be able to make myself invoke the “Do Not Resuscitate” order. Will I be able to be that selfless? I couldn’t even bear to tell the vet to put my cat to sleep the year I graduated from college. I’m not sure I’ve gotten any tougher or more pragmatic since then. Quite the opposite, in fact. When you died, I knew it was only a foreshadowing of worse things I’d have to endure with one or both of my parents. For a time afterwards, I thought I’d never be able to go through that with people I cared about as deeply as I care about them, more deeply than I cared about you. I still wonder. You see, it seems so much harder to be the one left than the one leaving.
I haven’t figured out yet what I’ve learned from watching you slowly deteriorate over four years, except that the burden of friendship is greater than we ever anticipate. Those four years burned a lot of dross out of me, but they also made me a little brittle. I’ve always considered myself a good friend. I’m the kind of person you can call at 2 a.m. and I’ll be there for you if it’s humanly possible—or so I thought. I don’t think I did very well with you. I was okay at the crisis points, okay with the mopping up; a miserable failure at the day-to-day requirements. Maybe I’m being too harsh, demanding that much response, but I can’t help thinking I failed to hold up my end. I’ve loaned you money, moved your belongings, bought you necessities, offered to cook for you, brought you toys in the hospital, but I don’t think I was there enough when things weren’t bad. I just couldn’t bring myself to stop in and see you, even when I was in your neighborhood, which was fairly often. It’s the little stuff that’s hard for me.
So it’s probably useless to speculate what I’d do in this situation or that, because one never really knows until one is confronted with the predicament. I’ve often thought that, if I were ever raped, the first thing I’d do when I got to the hospital is ask for a morning-after pill. Try as I might, I can’t think that flushing away those few dividing cells within the first twenty-four hours is an abortion, although I’d never use anything that prevented implantation as a method of birth control. Smell smoke? You bet. But would I really have guts enough to do that, or not to do that? I don’t know. No one else does either.
This doesn’t stop me wondering how I’ll do this again, when all the burden of being responsible for someone else falls on me, or how much more time I have to spend in this furnace. Do we ever get out of it? Will I like the end product? Sometimes, I wish things were a little more black and white, that I was a little less aware of the flames, that someone would quit pouring gasoline on them.
Yours, a little burnt around the edges.
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Dear Nick,
You wouldn’t know this, but for the past two years, we’ve had a Democratic president whose number one campaign promise was universal healthcare coverage. Needless to say, this made him very popular. We should be more ashamed than we are of the fact that we’re the only industrialized nation in the world without universal health care coverage. Like food, shelter, clothing, safety, dignity, and education, I always considered access to good, affordable health care a human right. Health care especially, because what good is everything else, if you’re sick?
I was lucky in that my family had free healthcare when I was a kid, and my parents still do. My dad, being a career serviceman, had earned us access to any military hospital in the country, me until I was 22, them for life. This, however, is a a dubious perk, military hospitals and personnel being what they are. The President regularly goes to Bethesda Naval Hospital, you say, but Bethesda Naval Hospital is not, was not, and never will be Wurtsmith Air Force Base Hospital, where my mother’s successive high blood pressure, allergies, slipped discs and spasmodic torticollis were diagnosed as Bored Housewife Syndrome and treated with Valium she refused to take except when the pain got so bad she couldn’t stand it. This is not to say that it hasn’t improved over the years or that there aren’t some truly excellent doctors in the military system, but they don’t serve in the boondocks, as a general rule; they usually serve at Bethesda or one of the academies. Regardless, it was free, and if you were a patient and insistent enough patient, they would eventually find out what was wrong with you and treat it without cost.
I only experienced what not having health insurance was like when I went to college and watched my roommate go without treatment for severe hormonal imbalances because she couldn’t afford it. I didn’t understand the dilemma of wondering whether you’d get better without help eventually, or whether to go into debt for years and be treated. Thanks either to my parents insurance, the schools I attended, the jobs I’ve had, and my general good health, I’ve never had to worry much about the cost of medical care.
I haven’t had health insurance for the last two years, since I stopped being able to afford my COBRA coverage a year after I quit my job. Luckily, I’ve only had one bout of bronchitis since then that my doctor, who’s all too familiar with my episodes of it, treated by just calling the pharmacy to prescribe antibiotics without charging me for an office visit, bless his heart. Having done the smart thing and gone on welfare when you got sick, you had free coverage too, courtesy of Medicaid. My taxes helped pay for that, and they help pay for my parents’ then-military now-Medicare health coverage, and I don’t mind a bit. It’s one of the few truly good uses I’ve seen my tax dollars go to.
What I resent, is two things: one, that I can’t afford my own health care insurance, and two, that there’s such a huge discrepancy in the kind of healthcare rich and poor get in this country. This is where Laurie comes in.
A few weeks ago, she discovered a lump in the palm of her hand. At the moment, she’s covered by her school’s insurance plan which pays 70-80% of the cost when she goes to a doctor outside it. She went to the same doctor who did her mother’s carpal tunnel surgery, and was told it was a tumor and would have to come out. Fine. She schedules surgery at Columbia Presbyterian, 100 blocks from her house on the upper West Side 70s. The surgery will run her about $2,000.00, plus office visits, etc., most of it paid for by her insurance. Laurie can cover the rest herself without much of a stretch since she has a separate income aside from teaching. It’s ambulatory surgery and she has it under a local, but they won’t release her without someone to pick her up, so I volunteer.
On my way up to the hospital, I glance at a New York Times box on the sidewalk. The headline reads something like: “Health Care Bill Declared Dead in Congress.” Great, I think, all that work by Hillary for nothing, and the men who purport to represent me still have free health care and I don’t. Typical. This turn of events is hardly surprising. I knew it would never fly in this country. It smacks too much of socialism and too many people are going to lose money if we adopt a universal health care system, especially one that leaves out individual insurance companies. I’ll just have to work harder to make that extra $200.00 a month, I guess.
As you well know, Nick, I hate hospitals, not least because of the one you were in. I’ve never been in either Bellevue or Harlem, but I suspect they couldn’t be much worse than Downtown Beekman, where you were admitted when you were sick and where you died. Beekman is everything I loathe about hospitals: small, crowded, understaffed, smelling of disinfectant that never quite covers the underlying aromas of vomit and urine and shit. What a miserable place to die, or even be sick in.
I’m expecting more of the same when I go to pick up Laurie at the Milstein Medical Building on Fort Hamilton and 168th—not the nicest part of town, Washington Heights, bad enough that it’s hard to get a cab up there, though there are loads of gypsies. In the middle of this blue-collar hispanic neighborhood is the fortress of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and its donjons of various medical buildings, many connected by skywalks so one need never descend to the street. The citadel itself is the Milstein Medical building. It’s a little bigger than the Helmsley Palace. Leona would be right at home here.
Now, New York is, to state the obvious, a city of big buildings, and I’m a short person. Regardless, I don’t very often feel dwarfed, even in the World Trade Center. I’m used to the view from down here and it takes a lot more than a big building to awe me. I was pretty amazed when I came here for the first time, even having been in London. Americans have audacity and hubris when it comes to skyscrapers. But after eight years, I hardly see it unless it has interesting architectural details.
This is the most intimdating building I’ve ever been in.
At six p.m. it is not very busy, which probably makes it seem larger than it is, but this place is cavernous. It is not only cavernous, it is, of course, spotless. And new. Filled with high tech. The receptionists are pleasant, if a little New York-abrupt, and helpful. And Nick, it doesn’t smell. Not at all. Anywhere. I go first to the second floor and find the ambulatory surgery closed. Still no smell. I’m rerouted to the third floor, down the usual ward corridors with nice wood railings, automatic doors, and big windows. Things are quiet. I pass the occasional medical person in blue scrubs and finally find Laurie in the recovery room which looks like a cross between a posh hair salon sans sinks and some kind of futuristic dentist’s office with fancy chairs. Immaculate, odor free.
I wonder if people shit in this hospital. If people throw up. If they wet their beds accidentally or because they’re too sick or pull out their catheters. Of course, they do, but there are plenty of nurses and orderlies around to take care of them, clean them up, change the sheets, and mop up the messes. Most of them are white or Asian-American, unlike the personnel at Beekman, many of whom are African- or Carribbean-American. Obviously, Columbia Presby pays more. The kind of people who come here have excellent insurance or can afford to pay well for medical care themselves. I wonder how many people in the neighborhood come here.
By the time Laurie and I leave, I’m fuming. I could never afford Columbia Presby. I couldn’t afford Laurie’s doctors. Hell, I can’t even afford her veterinarian, let alone her doctors. I can barely afford mine. None of this is Laurie’s fault and I don’t resent her for it at all. I’m glad she can afford an excellent (if arrogant, according to his colleagues) surgeon, especially after having watched my roommate get sicker and sicker because she couldn’t afford a doctor at all, and another go into surgery unnecessarily because the one she could afford was an idiot. Again, this is not to say that there aren’t good doctors who don’t charge an arm and a leg, who take on Medicaid patients like you. Nothing could have saved you, not the best, most expensive doctor in the world. The one you had was great, in fact, and you both knew that didn’t make any difference.
For that matter, my parents, thanks to Dad’s twenty years in the Air Force, go to a really good group of doctors in Midland now, much better than the people at the base, and still don’t pay for it. And truth be told, Columbia Presby sees a lot of poor people from Washington Heights in its emergency room. But I couldn’t help thinking that, if you had to die in a hospital, it would have been nice if you could have died in one that didn’t smell like Bedlam, just because you didn’t have any money. Now, you have to be wealthy to even die well.
Yours, watching the widening divide.
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Dear Nick,
I started writing these letters to you as a way of getting through my grief, and it’s getting harder to write them now because it seems to be working.
It’s not that I don’t feel I have more to say to you, or more that needs to be said about what happened to you and what it did to your family and friends, but I don’t feel the urgency I once did to sit down and purge myself at the computer. When Carol’s relationship was in the process of fizzling, she faxed me some poems that she’d written one afternoon. The coversheet said something like, “Help! Word vomit!” referring not to the quality but to the sudden disgorging of all these emotions onto paper. For a while after I started writing these, I felt like that too.
A couple of years ago, I got food poisoning for the first (and I hope, last, time); throwing up was the only thing that made me feel remotely better, at the same time that it was horrible throwing up. Some of these letters came pouring out of me like that. I wrote four in one day, once, sobbing all the while I was doing it. And like being sick, even though each episode didn’t last very long, it was still exhausting. When I felt those four first drafts were done, it was as though I’d been shoveling wet snow all day, or swimming for hours. I don’t remember ever being as intensely involved emotionally in writing anything this public, even my poetry. But then, these letters have never really felt all that public to me; even though you’re gone, I still feel like I’m actually writing to you. Even though your presence fades day by day, this is, in some ways, a way of keeping you with me always, the way I’ve held onto your shirt.
Sometimes I sit writing and I don’t know where I’m going. Things just come out of my fingers and appear on the screen, as though I’m transcribing tapes. Sometimes the things that come out surprise me. Often they scare the living shit out of me. The emotions that your death roused, that forced me to write these letters to you, made me look at myself in ways that I haven’t really wanted to (True Confessions of a Writer). To make these letters a collection worth doing, to make them true, and real, I’ve had to drink a lot of emetics. What’s come up has seldom been pretty. Most of it has surprised me. Unfortunately, I think this might be what one of my grad school profs meant when she said that very good poets are often young, but very good novelists seldom are.
When we were in our 20’s Paul and I had this running joke that we’d be the only two people we knew at a convention of adults with normal parents and healthy childhoods. I don’t know if Paul’s opinion has changed, but mine sure did. It’s as though when I turned 30, all the guano in my life suddenly hit the fan. The weird part is that I didn’t even know I had a fan, let alone any crap to throw at it. Your death was something like an earthquake that shook loose all the stalactites in my head. It often feels like there’s nothing but rubble and bat droppings up there. Some days, I just think, “Where did all this come from? Do I have to take delivery on this load? I don’t think I ordered it.” I guess the only thing to do is scoop it up and sell it as fertilizer and landfill.
I won’t bother to enumerate everything that’s been running through my head. Suffice to say, I’ve talked about therapy with friends who are in it; I’ve stooped to reading self-help books. I wonder if my brain chemistry is out of whack. Maybe I need Prozac. I’m suddenly afflicted with the angst I should have stayed up late nights during college discussing, and I don’t like it. At the same time, I keep trying to visualize myself sitting down in front of a therapist and trying to answer the inevitable, “Why are you here?” or “How would you describe yourself?” One of my friends asked me once what I really wanted and I was at a total loss for words, although I was desperately sad at the time, grieving for you. I literally couldn’t think of anything I wanted. I knew the grief for you would pass, and that underneath that, I was—am, dammit!—a person who’s usually happy.
Certainly, nothing material popped into my mind when she asked me what I wanted. Well, yeah, I’d like a loft with a roof garden and maybe a lap pool, but I like the little one- bedroom I’m in now, too. I have ambitions, I have secret wishes like other people, but I’m also delighted with time to sit on the Brooklyn promenade on a sunny day. Necessity has pared down my life during the past few years, and I don’t seem to mind it. It’s inconvenient to be broke sometimes, but it makes you look harder for and appreciate more the pleasures you don’t have to pay for.
But if I’m generally a happy person, I’d like an explanation of why I seem to spend a lot of time crying. I’m not really depressed now, though I was after you died, and I’ve never really had any major depressive episodes besides that. Maybe I’ve just begun to twig to the fact that hardly anything is really all right, anywhere. It’s as though, if this were a movie, the soundtrack would be R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.” Making a pop song out of the notion—or even just writing it down—threatens to trivialize the idea, but that fact is what makes literature, cinema, drama, and music work: conflict, pain, and how we cope with these things. And so we come to the notion that suffering makes great art. Gag me.
Believe me, Nick, you’re the last person I would have sacrificed for the sake of my writing. These last two years have been hell, and it may have been good for my productivity, but it sucked living through it. If somebody asked me now what I really wanted, the words would come out without a thought: I want you to be here and healthy again. I want AIDS eradicated. I want to be able to take off this damn AIDS/POW bracelet that says, “Until it’s gone.” I want to be able to quit writing these damn notes to you.
Yours, sick of puking.
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Dear Nick,
It’s funny how much your death has become part of my life, how it still shapes the way I think of people.
I had some friends over for dinner last night, a couple I hadn’t seen in, oh, ten years, I guess. She was an exchange student during my senior year of college and we got to be fairly good friends during that year, since she lived down the hall from me. We had Marmite teas and watched soaps—the only time I’ve ever done that on a regular basis, believe it or not. Anyway, in the intervening ten years, she’d gotten her masters degree, married a church musician, bought a house, moved to London, and begun writing these terribly chatty Christmas letters, detailing her French and Italian vacations, and excursions to the West End theatres and the Proms. When she imitates the American accent she had lapsed into during that year, it sounds positively vulgar.
You might say we’ve grown in different directions.
I’ve been hoarding her little missives, sharing them around and giggling. They’re like reading Make Way for Lucia or Bertie and Jeeves novels, bits of Britannia I’d thought long extinct. This spring, she called me from London to say she’d be stopping in New York on the last leg of their three week American vacation. I said of course we’ll do dinner, she agreed, and mentioned she was on her way to a champagne brunch the next day. With gloves and hat? I inquired, joking. “Long gloves, of course!” My usual reaction to this sort of bridge-club-and-garden-party respectability is to break out in hives and immediately decide to turn up in something at least mildly outrageous (hanging around Jen and Legs too long), which is more or less what I did.
Jen would have approved, although it was really nothing special for downtown. When I met them at their hotel in Times Square, I’d gone, for me, the whole nine yards: black bike shorts; a low-cut, sleeveless denim shirt in purple and white stripes; my usual spiky summer haircut; the usual six mismatched earrings and earcuffs, my new leather biker watch; and (provocateur that I am) my nose clip and Doc Martens. I even put on make-up, which you might think was a concession to propriety, except that I wore this wonderful maroon lipstick that makes me look positively ghostly. I’d have done eyeliner if I’d been able to keep it from running. Not a bad costume, though I wish I’d had a fuchsia stripe running through my hair, or a long skinny braid, or something. Well, I underestimated just how much her British stiff upper lip had solidified; I got nary a raised eyebrow. Very disappointing.
However, your picture in my rogue’s gallery evoked an entirely different reaction. First she scanned my collection of photos on the bookcase: Dad in Germany in uniform on a horse; Dana and her squeeze Jerry (twice); Adrienne, Laurie and I; friends from work here and Mom’s congregation in Michigan. A slightly different mix of relatives, undergrad and grad school pals, and childhood friends hangs out on the staircase, although you’re in both places. The picture of you that’s hanging on the stairs is great: you’re in good health, grinning, tanned in the California sun. She thought you were Paul (It’s been a while since she’s seen his photos too). “How’s he doing?” “No,” I said, “That’s my friend Nick, actually. He died a couple of years ago of AIDS.”
Say this to a New Yorker, and you’ll elicit suitably sympathetic noises, a brief discussion of how many people we’ve known who’ve died, where I’d met you. There were noises, all right, but they were shocked, not in that horrified display of sympathy people exhibit in acknowledging what an awful death it is, but the sort of shock you’d expect had I said you were my friend Ted Bundy, executed in prison. The subtext was, I think, “how could you possibly know such a person? He was one of yourfriends?” I might be over-reacting, possibly even misinterpreting. There seemed to be an awfully quick change of subject though, and it wasn’t the reaction I’m used to.
Come to think of it, for being the theatre mavens they are, they both showed no interest in seeing Angels in America, playing just up the street from their hotel, and the only thing on Broadway that’s not in London and probably won’t be for a while. I thought that was a little odd at the time, because it’s something I’ve been trying to gear myself up for since it came out. (Jen finally managed to see Philadelphia and warned me I’d cry, so I think Angels in America might do me in.) It’s always in the back of my mind somewhere, like you’re always there, along with everyone else I know who’s suffered, is suffering.
But it doesn’t seem a part of my British friends' world, the way it’s become part of mine, and it astonishes me that that can still be so. I wonder whether they’re living in denial or it simply hasn’t affected them at all yet. I admit that talking about dead friends is not the most appetizing of conversation topics before dinner, and I know her mother just died six months ago, but the undertone of abhorrence I heard really pissed me off. I was angry all of a sudden in all those stereotypically rebellious ways: I hated her husband's khakis and polo shirt, the cook’s apron they’d brought me from Fortnum and Masons with its Baroque cherubs, the talk about all the lovely paintings at the Guggenheim. I wanted to create one of those awful scenes and tell them half their dinner was cooked in your saucepans; that it was a good thing they hadn’t stayed with me, because the sheets on their bed might have been the ones I’d bought you and reclaimed after you died; that there were probably germs lingering on the knobs of your TV.
And what’s the use of that, really? It serves no more purpose than my costume did. People care, or they don’t. I hate the fact that I can’t change that, but I can’t. No one can. I understand the impulse people who join ACT-UP have, I even admire their courage in standing up for their ideals as far as jail. I hope I’ll be able to have that courage myself when and if the necessity appears. We’re such a complacent, blind, utterly stupid society, that it takes spectacle and outrageousness like ACT-UP, like Serrano’s Piss-Christ, like Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, to stir us out of a TV and overwork-induced stupor. Even then, nothing really changes. White politicians still don’t care how many faggots or spics or niggers or welfare mothers AIDS kills. It’s easy to see why people believe in government conspiracies. There are days when I half do myself (probably from watching too much of The X-Files on your tv.)
Still, the impulse is there. But you can’t make people care, any more than you can tell them to stop grieving, or stop dying. We had a lovely dinner, and they went on their way, no self-righteous scenes, no offense, nothing changed.
Yours, fatalistically.
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Dear Nick,
You started a trend, you know. Frankly, however, it’s one I could do without. Since the year you died in April, nothing good has happened to me in that month of the year. I suppose it’s a month already doomed by the tolling of IRS bells on the ides, but it’s gone far beyond that now and I wish it would stop. The year after you died, my cousin Roger was murdered. Two years later, my Aunt Phyllis went into the hospital for angioplasty. Three years later, I lost my job and had to put my cat to sleep. Four years later, my Mom was diagnosed with colon cancer, the same thing that killed my Grandfather. This year, oh, this year we’ve come full circle in some ways: my new friend and supervisor Harold has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and given six months to live.
I’ve only known Harold about 18 months, as long as I’ve been working at this environmental consulting firm. Hank was one of the people who hired me, and I knew the moment I met him I was going to like working for him. He’s a stickler for details, but a good teacher, and patient, and kind, with a sarcastic and yet self-deprecating sense of humor. The house style is painstakingly correct and four months into the job, Mom was diagnosed with cancer and I lost the use of most of my brain cells for coherent thought. Things I should have remembered, work I should have checked and didn’t was gently brought to my attention. My frequent absences were not just tolerated but actively not-minded; of course I had to go; work would be there when I got back. Throughout the shuttling back and forth, he was a real brick.
The atmosphere in the company is pretty relaxed, to say the least. Every day is casual Friday. I wear leggings and t-shirts most of the time. Nobody cares. Even the partners don’t dress up much, if they can help it. It’s a small company, and everybody knows everybody else, even at the satellite offices. Parties are frequent. People like and respect each other. There’s no sense of false comraderie here; it’s genuine. I’ve bonded with people here, not the way I did at Bender, through shared adversity and mutual loathing of our jobs, but because there are some very cool, very smart, and very funny people who work there. Hank’s one of them.
He’s been there for ages, sung in the Christmas choir each year, knows everyone. He’s a former actor, an opera queen, ballet fan, well-read, opinionated and knowledgeable. We’ve had some wonderful conversations during breaks and on slow days: literature, choreographers, plays, actors, music, therapists, the meaning of life, God and religion, and of course, opera. Now that’s going to stop, much sooner than I expected, than any of us expected. The office has been pretty subdued, in its own frantic way, and there are regular updates on Harold’s condition on our morning E-mail.
Despite this latest shock—which I sort of half blame on you and half on the ghost of T.S. Eliot, who is getting back at me for disparaging his poems for lo these many years—I also have to thank you for everything I’ve learned in the intervening years, since you were the catalyst for that, too. I’m still practising a sort of avoidance like I did with you, meaning that I haven’t been to the hospital to see Harold yet, and haven’t called him, but this is partially because he has loads of visitors and is more worried about not having any when he gets home. After seeing you in Beekman and seeing Mom in St.Mary’s and Midland last summer, I’ve had about enough of hospitals. I did organize a pool of folks to send flowers with, and I’ve started sending him goofy cards, and I’m going to keep doing that. Unlike I did with you, I’m also going to go visit Harold at home, when all the hoopla dies down and he’s got the day to day struggle of getting on with life and fighting back without the constant attention of nurses and visitors. I’m going to return the kindness that my best friend Mel and her mother showed when they called and sent flowers and baked fresh bread constantly for my folks last summer. In a way, it’s also going to be an atonement for having skipped out on you when you needed someone. I know I can’t make that up to you, but I can learn from it and do better the next time around. This time around.
I know it won’t be the last time this happens, that I have to struggle with the deterioration and loss of someone I like or love. I wish I could say with certainty that it will be, but that promise hasn’t been fulfilled yet. I’ve never liked the way I dealt with your sickness and death, Nick, but I did the crisis-management better last year with my folks, having gone through it on a dry run with you and seeing what I did wrong. I think I can do it right this time. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to cry—that’s impossible, anyway—Hank and I probably both will. When he had to put his dog down several months ago, we had a couple of good commiserating sniffles.
The real change is that I don’t feel so hollow and hopeless and empty. I don’t mean that I think death and dying are any more natural than I ever did. Death is still the enemy. It’s still wrong, especially when it happens younger than 80 or 90 or 100, when people still have lives ahead of them. I don’t think I’ve latched any more firmly onto my faith to counteract the emotional trainwreck death leaves behind, either. No matter how strongly one believes in an afterlife, or a resurrection of the dead, when they are gone, and when they’re going it still hurts. I still don’t think dying can be beautiful. It’s never going to be anything but a nasty fact of life in this world, for me, like “natural” disasters. In fact, I’m not sure I can say what’s changed about me that’s giving me a certain amount of sang froid about Hank’s illness. Maybe I’ve finally just grown up. Better late than never, I suppose. At least I had the opportunity. Maybe, unlike you and maybe Hank, I’ll get one to grow old, too.
Yours, waving goodbye to Tinkerbell.
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Dear Nick,
Tonight, Jen and I were sitting in a new little cafe on St. Mark’s called 9.
We’ve been meeting here for cafe au lait and cappuccino for a couple of months now,
making jokes about meeting at eight at 9, although we’ve managed not to mix up the time
with the place somehow. Tonight our date was nicely symmetrical: nine at 9. We met so I could
deliver some work to her, and while we were in there, it turned into a dark and stormy night, so
we wound up staying later than we probably would have, lingering over second cups of caffeine
concoctions and talking about our therapy—a not infrequent topic as we share the same
shrink. Somehow, inevitably, you came up. It’s been a tough week for both of us, more
frenetic than either of us had planned. Jen was high on caffeine, I was just about done in. I think
we were talking about her new love object/ obsession, the jujitsu instructor at her gym.
They’ve been dancing around each other for a while now because he’s fairly newly
divorced and still smoking around the edges from the frying pan. Jen asked me if I thought one
ever got over a divorce. Ever the optimist and totally ignorant of the subject, I said, yes, of
course. One gets over everything, including death. After a moment, we looked at each other and Jen said, “I don’t think you ever
really get over a death.” “No,” I admitted. “You don’t.” I’ve written through all of these epistles to you of what your death put me through,
what it made me think about, how it made me feel, what kind of person I’ve become
because of it. It’s not an experience I want to repeat, ever, although I know I will.
It’s changed me irrevocably, as momentous events in life do. I’m not sorry for
many of the changes, and I’m not sorry it helped drive me to therapy. In many ways,
I’m grateful for what’s happened to me because of your death, but I can’t
stop believing that there are other ways that humans can change and grow than by being battered
by death, war, disease, and everyday brutality. I’d like to think that not all of us are so
thick-skulled as to need such bludgeons in our lives. I’m ashamed to say that when Jen and I were sitting together tonight talking about
you, I had to ask her what day you died, Nick, and I’m sorry. But we forget, even if our
bodies don’t. We both started to miss you again this year, the way I started to think
recently about my cousin Roger who died last year on the second of April. I managed to put him
out of my mind until tonight, when you came up. I’d been meaning to write to my aunt
and uncle, the way I couldn’t last year when it happened, but my subconscious had other
ideas and pushed it out of my mind until a week after April 2nd, which was the first anniversary.
I guess I’m still not ready to deal with that yet, the way I’m not ready to deal with
the fact that my Aunt Phyl is in the hospital having angioplasty today. It’s what I’ve
been going round and round with in these letters to you, I think, my inability to confront this
final, ultimate pain, to experience, to be there when you most needed your friends, to help ease
you into your death. I’ve been writing about my removal, as it were, from your
bedside. I was, as my friend and fellow writer Roz pointed out when she read these letters, at a step
removed from the experience just by not being that close to you as a friend. When people die, she
said, there are those around them who are exonerated, released from responsibility by their
proximity to grief. They are so close to it, engulfed by it and by their loss, that they are unable to
do anything else but grieve. They don’t need to think about it, they’re not expected
to. Their mourning needs no excuses, and it excuses their actions, whether it’s throwing
themselves into the coffin or shutting down completely. There are well-documented stages of
grief they go through. This is what happened to Jen, to your mother to Sammy and James, to all
the people who really, really loved you and knew you best. What happened to me and some of your other friends was something different, somewhat
less painful for a somewhat lesser period of time, and perhaps not worked out in the stages of the
most intense grief. For the past couple of years, for the first year, certainly, I’ve been
circling around and around the desert of your death like some lost Legionnaire. This writing has
sustained me, given me purpose, provided me with closure. I’ve worked out a lot of my
own feelings in these letters, and discovered a lot of things about myself, some of which I
don’t like very well. Some of them I want to change, some I’m going to have to
learn to live with. Some, just by being described, have vanished on their own. I have, for instance, finally figured out why your death hit me so hard. You were the first
person I lost who was in no way connected to either side of my family, and I had no obligation to
filter my reaction to it through any of theirs. For the first time in my life, I was allowed to own up
to my feelings about what a horror death is, and how much it hurts. I’ve lost a lot of
relatives in my life, being one of the youngest children in both families. My parents, aunts, and
uncles were none of them young people when I was growing up. Some of my cousins were
already marrying when I was in grade school. But when people died in our family, in Mom or
Dad’s family, I was supposed to take my cue from their reactions. Dad doesn’t talk
about it; Mom doesn’t think it should matter, since we have the hope of seeing them again
in a resurrection. I’m not like either of them, in that respect. I believe just as firmly in the resurrection as my mother does. I hope to God I’ll see
you again, Nick, and I think there’s a very good chance I will. I know that your death was
easier on you afterwards than it was on us. It’s always easier being the leaver than the one
left. I know you’re not in hell, suffering, merely “sleeping” in God’s
memory. Death expiates whatever you might have done wrong in your life. None of this changes
the fact that it hurt like hell to watch you suffering as you were dying, to know that you would
die so young, and that it hurt people around me that I cared about. It hurt to miss you. Unlike my
Dad, I can’t not talk about it. In grieving for you, I was grieving for everyone else in my
life that I was never allowed to mourn. You see, in a way, you were everyone I’d ever lost, all those people I’d never
been allowed to grieve for because I had the hope of seeing them resurrected. Somehow, you got
elected to carry the burden of my grief for all the people I’ve known who died during my
lifetime. You were almost the only person I lost who wasn’t family, the who was only
mine not my family’s to lose, whose death I was free to interpret for myself, whose loss
could only hurt me and my friends in New York. You were Grampa Allam, my mother’s father, who died when I was about eight, and
whose death I was supposed to be too young to feel, although I understood it perfectly well. I
wasn’t supposed to miss him, although I was his favorite grandchild. I was the one he
asked for when he was hospitalized with colon cancer, the one who cheered him up after his
colostomy by singing German drinking songs. He taught me to whistle, blow bubblegum
bubbles, and tie my shoes; to count by twos, fives, and tens, and wrap coins; to write my name at
his oak secretary. He left me with a love of neon and old beer signs, of diners and antique
jukeboxes, of driving fast in big cars. His was the only other deathbed I was at, and my mother
was furious when my uncle called me in to say goodbye to him when he was already slipping
away and probably didn’t know me. She didn’t want me to remember him like that,
she said. But I wanted to remember him that way, as well as the other ways he’d been when we
went out to pump water or gas together, or played cribbage together, or just bounced a ball back
and forth. It was important for me to see him go, to know that he was okay with it, that it was as
natural as death ever is, that it was, somehow, a relief to him, as it must finally have been to you
that night. I didn’t go to his funeral either, but that didn’t seem to matter as much;
by then he was already gone, and I’d said goodbye, even if he didn’t understand it,
as I’d said goodby to you. You were my Uncle Art, Mom’s favorite brother, whose funeral I did go to a few
years later, but wasn’t allowed to cry at, because no one else did, and my Gramma Allam,
for whom only her two youngest children—her favorites—and my cousins wept. And
Uncle Ed, Mom’s other favorite brother, whose funeral was in Florida when I was in
college in Pennsylvania. By the time I found out about it, it was even too late to send flowers.
You were my cousin David, Art’s son, whose weak heart finally gave out after a few years
of very happy marriage and whose widow “made a scene” at the funeral by wailing
and throwing herself on the coffin in grief, the only one who seemed really devastated by his
loss, it seemed to me. You were the cancer deaths: my Dad’s brother, Whoop, killed by it after surviving life
as a Marine in World War II’s South Pacific front; my Grampa Kottner whom I
don’t remember but am said to be the spitting image of, and who also apparently loved me
to distraction before he died. You were my best friend’s dad who lived long enough to
walk her down the aisle and see her married to a wonderful man. You were my friend Debbie’s father, Tom, both of you wandering your own mental
landscape and dying of pneumonia; Linda’s grandmother, who raised her after her mother
died when she was seven, caught by a heart attack; Rita’s mother and father killed by
cancer and stroke within weeks of each other; Bob and Gary’s dad dead of a heart attack;
Don’s dad murdered by Hiroshima’s radiation; my cousin Roger murdered by who
knows whom in Chicago; Dad’s mother killed by a brain tumor after 94 years of
belligerent good health. Nick, you were death itself. No, not death, you were Grief, the carrier of my grief, a
scapegoat, a sin-eater, the symbol and embodiment of all the pain death had ever caused me or
those I loved. Whatever I had never been allowed to feel or never allowed myself to feel became
focused in the horror of losing someone my age, someone immediate, in such a horrible fashion.
I suspect now that if my cousin Roger and I had been closer and he had been killed before you
died, I might have placed that burden on his pyre, because his death was tragic in the same way
that yours was, more tragic than most of the others I’ve known. It was sudden, unexpected,
and brutal, striking down a young man whom we all thought had time, yet, to live, as you should
have. With your death, I was, in essence, learning how to grieve. Neither side of my family does it
very well, if they do it at all. They are either too well-bred in the way that only the middle class
and WASPs can be, or too embarrassed by its excesses to give it free reign. I think that’s
why I’ve always been fascinated by banshees and the descriptions of the “keening
wail,” they were supposed to have given to announce someone’s impending death.
No one ever made a sound at the family funerals I went to. There were mostly dry eyes, and not
even muffled sobs. You’d have thought the deceased was going away on vacation, or
moving to some distant land temporarily. It’s why that scene from Fanny and
Alexander has stuck in my mind all these years, where the two children watch their mother
walking up and down before their father’s coffin in the middle of the night, wailing her
grief. I was those children for years, but the grief I was watching was my own, bottled up inside
me. I wondered, sometimes, how I’d ever finish this group of epistles, if I ever would, but
I knew when I started writing this one on the train last night, that this would be the last one, and I
knew it in the way I know a poem is complete. There’ll be a little editorial tinkering to do
yet, but I feel now that I started at the beginning, went on until I reached the end, and can finally
stop. Whatever I hoped to accomplish by writing these, I’ve either done it or I
haven’t. Only my readers, if I have any, will be able to say what that seemed to be for
them. Anyway, it feels complete to me, and I have the answer I’ve been looking for. Ciao, Nick, and thanks. See you again some time.