Remembering Brad: On the Loss of a Son to AIDS (3 page)

A few months later Brad left to find a different kind of life in Los Angeles. With conflicted emotions, we drove to Salt Lake City to help him move out of his apartment and ship his belongings. We said our goodbyes in an ambience of dazed unbelief.

The decisions he made that spring and summer marked him with tragic potential. Perhaps that sounds hyperbolic. Many young people have broken with their inherited culture with results not necessarily tragic. What I want to say is that the preconditions for tragedy were coalescing. Here was an especially intense young man, earnest and passionate and idealistic, wanting so badly to find moral and philosophical justification for his life in the face of society’s disapproval. The situation called for an easygoing pragmatist, which Brad could never be.

He knew that in coming out and going to live in the gay culture of West Hollywood he was burning bridges. His mother’s and my response at the time was qualified at best, the attitudes of his younger brothers highly uncertain, and he was almost certainly cutting himself off from all but a few of his closely knit extended family. Moreover, he was effectually breaking with his church, a major decision, for fellowship in the church is regarded by Mormons as indispensable for salvation. Not least of all, he was separating himself from the culture and lifestyle he had known growing up in Idaho.

Did he feel ambivalent about these decisions? Of course. But having decided he could not live authentically in his old world, he felt considerable exhilaration, as when in a risky situation one says with some bravado, “What the hell, let’s go for it!” He did not at twenty understand that deeply ingrained loyalties would not allow him easily to lay aside emotional bonds of an upbringing such as his. In this he was unwise, as other tragic individuals who think as they embark on a path leading to extremity that the strength of their desire will overcome obstacles to its fulfillment.

Los Angeles beckoned with all its dazzling hedonism. After a relationship with first one, then another lover proved unstable, he drifted increasingly into the bar scene. Drugs, which had never previously been part of his life, contributed to the dionysian atmosphere in which he was caught up. “Dad, I’m in a new world. You can’t believe how my consciousness is raised.” After a time he was teetering on the brink of addiction, and his friends were worried about him. Then came a bout with hepatitis. We did not know until later how far things had gone with him.

Meanwhile, he had sense enough to see he had gotten into a bad state. He exerted his will, got drug use under control, watched his health, and moderated his behavior generally. Since he was not making a lot of money and was at the same time taking night classes at UCLA, he needed considerable discipline to get through his illness and at the same time make ends meet. He didn’t fully reveal these difficulties to us. It was characteristic of him that, having gotten himself into a mess, he intended to extricate himself by his own means.

Best of all from our point of view, he began to realize that underlying gay life in West Hollywood was a deep-seated nihilism, that the frenzied activity of the gay bars was an attempt to cover despair. He saw increasingly in many around him
—
and in himself
—
the effects of alienation, pessimism, and hopelessness about the future. On several occasions he considered suicide (a couple of phone calls to us in the small hours of the morning were frightening). For all of its excitement, he understood gradually that the aesthetic, hedonistic culture dominant in Los Angeles was incompatible with his real needs. Somehow, though it meant leaving a supportive community, he had to reincorporate himself into the mainstream. “Much as I love this place, I’ve got to get out of here, to somewhere less distracting; I’ve got to get back into school.”

About this time, after three and a half years in L.A., he became acquainted with a young man who also had grown up in Idaho. Drew had been living in Honolulu for a year or so, and, like Brad, he left Idaho originally because, as a homosexual, he was not accepted there. Brad was not prepared to return to the mountain west, but by joining with Drew he could leave L.A. and move to an attractive, smaller urban environment in Hawaii. With Drew he thought he could find a way back to the simpler, more wholesome values he associated with his Idaho upbringing. His enthusiasm for this fresh direction was so typical, another zenith in his psychological pattern of roller coaster highs and lows. But we did not attempt to dissuade him. Anything that takes him away from L.A., we thought, will be an improvement.

Alas, the interlude with Drew did not prove to be paradise. On the positive side, the two young men enjoyed excursions about the island in their free time, hikes in the hills, swimming in the ocean. For Brad, who had been searching for a new kind of religious faith, the exposure to natural Hawaii was at times a mystical experience, an encounter with deities of wind and sky and sea. His spiritual imagination was fed by this exotic environment. Unfortunately, he began to realize that Drew was not his soul mate. Brad felt uncomfortable with the religious simplicities to which Drew was drawn, and Drew did not share Brad’s intense love of the arts. Their romance sprang up quickly, intensely, but planted in shallow soil, it soon wilted in the tropical sun. Sadly, this painful recognition of an inadequate fit came at a juncture when Brad badly needed a secure and loving relationship.

Initially, Brad found employment in Honolulu as a landscape gardener. After several months he applied for a position with a firm that specialized in sophisticated advertising graphics. Underqualified for the computerized work, he talked his way into the job on a probationary basis, brashly confident that he could pick it up quickly. Suddenly he was under tension in a pressured environment. At the end of a month, the owner told him the experiment was not working and let him go. This defeat caught him at a low point. First another failed relationship and now fired! The dismissal magnified in retrospect every setback he had ever experienced, every thwarted ambition. The Hawaiian idyll had turned ugly. He was devastated. Concerned about his health, both physical and mental, we persuaded him to come home for awhile.

It took several months for him to pull himself back together. He had lived so intensely during those four years away, had poured himself so passionately into his quest for a way that he could live, had taken risks, cast prudence aside to see if he could seize love, some purpose, and self-acceptance
—
and at this juncture it all came crashing down. His badly bruised spirit is revealed in the pathos of a journal entry just before leaving Hawaii: “Please don’t let everything I’ve loved so far be a mistake, as it seems in their eyes.”

I am laboring (albeit superficially) over these biographical details not for their own sake so much as to show how Brad pursued vigorously, if not always wisely, self-realization against the grain of his culture, how he insisted on his right to be himself according to conditions thrust on him by his biology and his particular place and moment in history, and how those circumstances continually assaulted and undermined his confidence. I am attempting to convey my perception that if well into his twenties Brad was still trying to find himself, it was because, given his character, his situation, and the choices that flowed from their combination, there was for him no easy road to contentment. Perhaps I have not emphasized sufficiently his romantic temperament. What I hope to suggest is that in his case the nemesis of AIDS came along as a by-product of his insistent quest.

In September Brad enrolled in Landscape Architecture at Utah State University in Logan. He toiled at the curriculum for two years, exhilarated by the aesthetic, botanical, and social facets of the discipline. He struggled some with the mathematical requirements where his confidence had always been shaky. He lived in a dormitory and was a floor resident assistant.

His life in Logan was characterized by continuous intense ambivalence. While he loved the physical environment
—
a striking campus positioned against steeply rising mountains and overlooking the pastoral valley where he had been born
—
it seemed to him that religious provincialism dominated both his campus contacts and the community generally. He hated that. Doubtless he was hypersensitive to Mormon orthodoxy and not altogether fair in his sweeping condemnations of it. He railed against what seemed the smug and unquestioning attitudes of his student peers. Reluctantly, he forced himself back into the closet, feeling he could not afford to run the social, academic, and physical risks that openness would entail. He felt his authenticity sharply compromised. Thus, Logan was, from a psychological point of view, altogether the wrong place for him to be. There his tendency toward depression would be greatly exacerbated. But he reasoned that this alienated life was temporary and could be gotten through.

It would prove more difficult than he imagined. His journals describe debilitating moodswings resulting at least in part from the contradictions of his personal situation. “I feel as if I am living my life in a vacuum
—
no friends, no real stimulating conversation, no night life, no confidante, nowhere to get away.” Frustrated with his isolation and increasingly depressed at the prospect of a continued sentence of residence in Logan, he began to develop ominous health problems late in his second year. As the semester wore on, he felt less strong, and he muddled through something like an appendicitis attack without bothering to seek any medical help.

When he returned home in June, we were surprised that he had lost weight. Within a couple of weeks he was hospitalized for an appendectomy, then a return to overcome a post-operative infection. Tests showed irregularities in his blood, including sharply reduced T-cell levels. The specter of AIDS loomed, but we clung to the possibility of other causes. It was too ironic to think that after his having abandoned gay life in Los Angeles, after his almost monkish retreat to northern Utah, he might now have AIDS. As the summer progressed, the multiple symptoms of ARC (AIDS-related complex) presented themselves
—
loss of appetite, more pronounced weight loss, low grade fever, night sweats, fatigue, sleeplessness, coughing.

By late October Brad developed increasingly alarming respiratory difficulties. Was this pneumocystis pneumonia, a confirmation of AIDS? Fatalistically, he resisted hospitalization, but when it became clear in early November that he must either be admitted to the hospital or die (and he was too ill to know this) we simply could not accept the latter alternative and called the ambulance. Twenty hours later his blood oxygen level fell to a point incompatible with life. Earlier he had said emphatically that he did not want to be kept alive by mechanical means. Again, faced with his death as the alternative, we agonized, then gave our permission to employ a respirator. Later we learned that without Brad’s cooperation the breathing tube could not have been efficiently inserted in the perilously short time left. For ten days we kept a family vigil at his bedside. Neither his doctors nor we really expected him to survive that ordeal in the intensive care unit.

He did. Thanksgiving and Christmas were joyous holidays for us that year. Brad began to recover his appetite, began to gain back some weight. The AIDS, now officially confirmed, was in remission. We knew, of course, about the formal death sentence in that diagnosis, but hope revives with the most slender encouragement. If he could keep alive for a year or two, perhaps the research breakthrough would come, a cure be found. In January, with renewed will to live, he felt well enough to enroll for a journalism course at Idaho State University.

“April,” Eliot wrote, “is the cruelest month.” That was when the tide turned, when the insidious disease reasserted its power. It was a crucial turn, stamped with inexorability. Brad knew, and we knew, that at this late stage he could not afford to give up much ground.

AIDS is a relentless aggressor. It takes a person apart incrementally. From the toes to the brain, no part of the body
—
muscles, nerves, organs
—
is safe from its ravages. One fights it on one front, only to have it attack elsewhere. Gradually, the incursions assume cumulative proportions. In May and June Brad struggled against a growing barrage of ailments, the most obvious of which were nausea, weakness, and extreme fatigue. Above all, he struggled to keep believing that he could hang on, that if he did he might still find some measure of quality in his life.

In late June he managed to finish a month-long history course at ISU but did it like a battered boxer in the late rounds, mostly on instinct and guts. The physical slide continued. His normally well-defined muscles lost tone. He grew more pale, gaunt, listless. Walking became increasingly difficult and painful, his vision was affected, and there were two ominous brain lesions. He stopped driving the Dodge Challenger he had been so proud of, knowing that his reflexes were no longer sufficiently reliable. One day in a grocery store he tried to fill out a check and, humiliated, could not remember how to do it.

I was with him one day in early August when he asked his doctor for an honest estimate of his chances, and that kind man, who had become Brad’s friend and buoyed up his spirits on many occasions in the course of their cooperative effort, replied: “If the rapid decline we are now seeing continues, it is unlikely you can go on for very long.”

That was a difficult recognition. A day or so later, Brad told us he had decided to dispose of his possessions. He wanted to make sure that the things he had lovingly chosen over the years would get into the hands of individuals who would value them too
—
his combined edition of Tolkien, his Beardsley, his Bible, his fairy tale collections, and numerous other books; his classical records and funky collection of popular music; his prints, photographs, posters, and small art pieces; a few antiques. He wanted to do it while his mind was still clear.

In early September his best friend Scott came from southern California to visit. We drove up into the mountains together to see the scenes Brad had loved, to walk along the clear mountain creeks where flaming scrub maples and bold-yellow aspens defined the water course, where the views over the narrow valley to mountains beyond were sharply etched in the clear air of autumn. He could not walk far. A few days afterward, his youngest brother Ted left to be a missionary in Uruguay. These were significant farewells.