Remembering Brad: On the Loss of a Son to AIDS (21 page)

I have learned some things about how grief is shared, or often not shared. I have seen how compassion felt and expressed can bring enormous solace, but I have also realized how difficult it is for most of us to reach out more than superficially, or for the bereaved to invite such reaching out. As a result, there is, almost inevitably, a terrible isolation attending grief.

The isolation may be self-chosen. Some who suffer the loss of love, of reputation, of station, are like the wild duck in Ibsen’s play. When wounded they plunge to the bottom of the lake and attach themselves to the weeds. Unwilling to confront their loss, or to encounter others who would remind them of it, such die a figurative death under water. But the majority of us who suffer grievous loss need to feel, I think, that the world has noticed and that the world cares. If this is so, why is it so hard to break through the barrier of isolation? Why, when we want so badly to express our puzzlement, our frustration, our woe to sympathetic ears, do such real encounters occur so infrequently? (I speak here of conversations that go beyond the well-meant but perfunctory expressions of sympathy: “We heard about your loss, and we are so sorry.” “Thank you.”)

There is a variety of reasons. To begin with, we who grieve are often too reluctant to broach the subject of loss. Perhaps we feel that to do so is to compel others to commiserate with us. At the most that seems presumptuous, at the least not sufficiently stoic. Ironically, others may interpret our seeming reluctance to mean that we do not wish to talk about our loss. They respect what they mistakenly believe to be communicated by our silence.

Sometimes kind acquaintances who would like to take the initiative simply lack the courage. They do not want to cause us pain, and they fear that bringing up the subject of our loss will be painful to us. Often they feel that they have not the words to articulate adequately, kindly and delicately, the consolation they would like to bring
—
so they remain silent. There are others
—
more than a few, I believe
—
who are themselves subconsciously troubled by the unpredictability of existence, by the threat of nihilism lurking in the shadows. Our problem is an unpleasant reminder of that which they would prefer to forget. And so they act as though life, ours as well as theirs, were proceeding calmly on an even keel.

Most troubling of all are those instances when the circumstances associated with one’s loss are related to taboos, such as homosexuality or a disease like AIDS, taboos which arise from religious convictions, from simple prejudice, or from fear. When such conditions exist, the would-be comforter has difficulty dealing with the ambiguity of his feelings, or may despair of being able to express her honest sentiments without giving offense
—
and simply avoids the subject altogether.

Whatever the cause, I have been continually aware of people who knew of my loss and grief and probably would like to have reached out to comfort me
—
but couldn’t, didn’t know how to get across that abyss. (Sometimes it was I who could not bridge the gap, held back by pride, afraid I’d appear foolish if I expressed my feelings; on the other hand, a few times when friends indulged me, I have pinned them like Coleridge’s wedding guest and unloosed upon them a flood of suppressed perplexity and outrage, until I recognized with some embarrassment my excess and their discomfort.) So many times I’ve been aware of pregnant opportunities when two persons could have talked about matters deeply important
—
when we could have spoken candidly of our humanity with all of its paradoxes and uncertainties
—
and those conversations died in embryo, impotent to be born.

But in another way, Sandra and I did get a more than usual number of opportunities to talk about our loss, including opportunities to speak with largely sympathetic groups. It was because AIDS was just then in 1987 much in the news, and awareness of its potential impact in the provinces was growing. So we were invited by church groups
—
Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists (sadly, never by our own Mormon congregations)
—
to come and describe what our individual and family experience was like, isolated as we had been. We were invited by various health care providers and educators to explain in group settings how, without much support, we had fared in contending with a frightening set of circumstances. We always took advantage to say that our experience had to be seen in the context of societal and religious attitudes toward homosexuality.

Furthermore, I had written an article-length letter to one of our church’s leaders, a letter in which I expressed much of what I felt in the weeks following Brad’s death. Eventually, in altered form, that document began to circulate widely, generating a number of mostly friendly and sympathetic responses. It soon became known that we were willing to talk with people who were troubled by personal and familial experience with homosexuality or AIDS. Sandra especially became a kind of one-person, multifaceted support resource. She collected articles, books, pamphlets, tapes dealing with homosexuality and AIDS and became the center of a surprisingly active information service. We met and shared our experience with a good many people in varied contexts.

We undertook these activities partly out of love for Brad, as a way of belatedly trying to let the world know of our acceptance and support of him (which had not always been unconditional and obvious). Perhaps we hoped that in some mystical way he would know what we were doing. I think we believed it was a way of pursuing fairness and love in the world and of attempting to minimize the pain that many others feel. Undoubtedly we became involved to meliorate to some degree our pain. What we confronted in our loss was absurdity, and our activism was an instinctive, reflex effort to combat it. On the deepest level, we were satisfying our own psychological need.

Whatever the range of motivations, we were fortunate. We found opportunity to examine methodically our experience of loss, to sort through it with people who would listen, and thereby to alleviate the effects of grief stemming from isolation and silence. In this we have been more fortunate than many, who, grieving, have but limited opportunity to express their feelings, and who lack a purposeful cause to which they can redirect their emotions.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” writes Joan Didion at the outset of
The White Album
. She is referring to a time when culture and the events of her life seemed particularly devoid of coherence:

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely… by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

We are thus driven, Didion implies, because the human psyche does not wish to confront ontological chaos. Existence must be purposeful, its elements connected, and when we are confronted with the prospect of absurdity, our minds go quickly to work imposing patterns of meaning that have their real origins in ourselves. It is defensive action. Ingeniously
—
perhaps desperately
—
we devise strategies rooted in myth, superstition, or other specious correspondences to make existence bearable. Francis Bacon, that severe empiricist, would accuse us of worshipping idols of the tribe, the cave, and the theater. He would concur with Didion: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

With more than a little conviction that they are right, I have seen in myself during the past three years this very tendency, this necessity to impose purposeful coherence in the absurd fabric of my recent experience. Contemplating Brad’s death, before and after, my mind has pursued many an avenue, many a “what if,” that might hold the unthinkable at bay. I am not referring to large order theological solutions, not for example the view that God willed Brad’s death, called him home, has another purpose for him just now. That premise contains several problems for me. Rather, I refer to much more modest evidence of coherence, small connections that might be a sign, however indefinite, of hope.

Let me cite an example. We had a ficus fig tree in our living room that we were fond of. In our previous dwelling it had flourished for several years. But ficus figs are delicate. When we moved to 20th Street, the tree began to lose its leaves. No matter, before long it put out new light green ones. They grew to a little more than an inch in length, then they too fell. Before long new leaves appeared
—
only to abort after several weeks. The plant settled into a cycle, a series of leafings and unleafings, attempting gamely to rejuvenate itself. Sandra, who has a green thumb, ministered devotedly to the ficus, and I thought it would pull through.

Somehow that fig tree’s fight for life became aligned for me with Brad’s simultaneous struggle. I watched them both day by day, looking for any little indications of improvement, any signs of hope. If it could pull off a miracle and survive, so could he. It was not superstition exactly. I knew full well there was no material connection between the two. Yet I understand as a result of my preoccupation with this little tree how a troubled mind searches for correspondences, how it wants to invest the symbol with power. You focus your mental energy, your faith, on the object of your grave concern, and when that seems not enough to infect your desire you cast about to find some external help.

Oh, how I watched that tree. How I wanted it to recover. With each renewed effort it made to put forth leaves, I thought: “Surely, this is the beginning of its return to health.”

Sandra tried this, she tried that
—
more light, less light, varied the watering, fertilized the soil, treated for insects. Gradually, with each new cycle there were fewer new leaves and fewer mature ones. I refused to acknowledge the decline, but several weeks before Brad died it was clear that the ficus was finished.

Another example. It was in late September, and I was feeling particularly burdened with grief. We had come to the point of planning for the end. On a Saturday afternoon I went out alone to hike on Haystack Mountain, just to get away for a few hours, just to get to where I could see the “big views.” While I was up there on the mountainside, a thought came to me powerfully: I would tell Brad that after he died and passed over he should find Paul. The young uncle and his nephew, the first grandchild, had had a special fondness for each other. Paul had been dead for twenty years, he had been over there, he would know his way around. He could be a guide. For Brad to find him would be to find an immediate friend, a familiar haven. This ordinary thought, so predictable in a way, came to me with the force of an epiphany. It brought incredible comfort to me as I descended the mountain.

I must say here that the afterlife for which I hope is not something which normally I feel comfortable or confident imagining in particular detail. Agnosticism accompanies my existential faith. Knowing that Brad’s view was somewhat like my own, I should have been prepared, I suppose, for his response to the “comforting advice” I offered on my return: he disparaged and abruptly dismissed it. One more reconciling story out the window.

Yet another modest example, the following summer, after Brad’s death. Once again I was on Haystack Mountain alone. Descending from the summit, I rested for a short while in an aspen grove on the steep, shady north side of a ridge. Out in the azure, only a little above my eye level, two large hawks were riding the thermal updrafts, effortlessly circling, gliding, rising. It was lovely to watch. They stayed on and on. It came to me that somehow I was watching Brad. At the time of his death, Sandra had said, “He looks like an eagle, and now he is soaring beautifully.” I remembered that image because I liked the connotations of a raptor’s virility and freedom which seemed so appropriate to Brad’s temperament.

Wasn’t it somehow right that Brad would return to this mountain environment he loved? Wasn’t it good to see him up there riding gracefully, so obviously at peace, in harmony with his elements? Wasn’t it nice that he had found a companion with whom to share this hour? And hadn’t he chosen this form and this time and this place to communicate to me from beyond death that he yet lives and thinks of us in the Idaho landscape where his mortal sensibilities were formed? I know this little experience was nothing more than poetic indulgence, an expression of my own deep longing, a small story I told myself in order to live through that particular period. But yes, it was comforting to me.

Dreams also must surely be included among the stories we tell ourselves, although their genesis in the unconscious may sometimes make their intent less obvious. I am not a great dreamer, but I have dreamed of Brad several times since his death with an immediacy and vividness that were more overpoweringly real than waking life. In one of those dreams, he returned to us like Lazarus from death. To me in the dream this was wholly unexpected; it was amazing. He was pale and thin, not merely from his mortal illness but because death itself had been an ordeal. Yet he was smiling gently and his countenance was radiant. Clearly, he was alive and mending, and in the way of becoming transcendent. I believe the reunion was as sweet to him as it was to me. I put my arms around him, and I knew it was he, intact, tangible. At this point in the short dream, I felt a beatitude of such depth and joyousness as I think I have never felt in life. I awoke shortly, but the afterglow lingered through the morning.

What is one to make of such a dream? I dare not conclude that it was an objective vision. It is too easily explained as subjective wish fulfillment, the subconsciously created form in which my love and longing found expression. But who can say for certain where fantasy ends and reality begins. I do know that the feelings evoked by the experience were sublime; it was as if I “on honeydew ha[d] fed,/ And drunk the milk of Paradise.”