Ryan White - My Own Story (32 page)

But Ryan’s heart had not stopped. Jeanne was afraid that he might struggle to hold on to life for her sake. So she told him, “Just let go, Ryan. It’s all right, sweetheart.”

R
YAN DIED
at 7:11
A.M.
on April 8, 1990. It was Palm Sunday. Jeanne gave him one last kiss and then turned off his guardian angel night-light. Andrea hugged him for a long time; she did not want to leave him by himself. So Laura told her, “I’ll stay with him until he’s ready to go to the funeral home.” In a room near Ryan’s, Reverend Probasco gathered Jeanne, Andrea, Ryan’s grandparents, his uncles, aunts, cousins, Elton, Heather, and some other friends in a circle. They clasped hands to pray and say good-bye to Ryan.

As soon as Michael Jackson arrived, he went straight to the Whites’ home in Cicero. He was very upset that he hadn’t gotten there before Ryan died. He went up to Ryan’s room, which was full of his collections, posters, and souvenirs, including his director’s chair from the movie set. In it sat a giant toy gorilla that Ryan had spotted in New Orleans and that the National Education Association sent him. On the walls were Alyssa Milano’s friendship bracelet,
Max Headroom
posters, and the hearts needlepointed by Kris, Ryan’s old girlfriend in Kokomo. Hanging from the ceiling was a real parachute, a present from Aunt Janet, and a thousand paper cranes—Japanese symbols of long life that an Indiana school had folded for Ryan from colored papers. In the closet was the heavy new leather jacket Michael had wanted him to wear.

Michael, a fellow G.I. Joe collector, sat quietly looking at everything for a long time. He told Jeanne he felt close to Ryan in his room. Jeanne offered him anything he liked there as a keepsake, but he asked her to leave Ryan’s room just as it was.

In the Whites’ front yard sat the red Mustang Michael had given Ryan. Now it was covered with flowers and Easter eggs, gifts from children. Andrea took Michael out to show him the car and they sat in it together. When Michael turned on the CD player, Ryan’s favorite song, Michael’s “Man in the Mirror,” began to play. Michael smiled proudly. He knew it must have been the last song Ryan had played.

Jeanne told Michael she had recorded a phone conversation he’d had with Ryan. She was afraid Michael might be offended, but he said he wished she’d recorded all their talks.

For that night, and the next few, Heather, Steffonie, John Huffman, and another friend stayed over with Andrea so she would not be alone when she woke up. The friends camped out in Jeanne’s spare bedroom and on the floor. John stayed on for about a week, washing dishes, walking the dogs, and running errands for Jeanne. He told her about the times the police had stopped Ryan for speeding. They had never given him a ticket, only warnings.
“Now
you tell me!” Jeanne said. “Now that I can’t ground him!”

Elton picked out music and helped Jeanne plan the funeral. Together they went to choose a casket. Ryan had wanted a very plain dark wood casket. But there were so many different kinds that Elton and Jeanne found themselves looking at each other and feeling overwhelmed. Eventually they settled on a walnut one with a cream interior. As Ryan had asked, he was dressed in his jeans and jean jacket, a surf shirt, sneakers, his favorite reflecting sunglasses, and the watch Michael had given him.

The morning of the funeral, April 11, was cold, windy, and drizzly. Outside the largest church in Indianapolis, long lines of people in their best clothes waited to view Ryan’s body. Since Ryan never took his fame seriously, Jeanne thought he’d be astonished. She said, “I bet he was looking down and laughing. He must have been saying, ‘I can’t believe all you silly people are getting wet to see
me.’ ”

Fifteen hundred squeezed inside the church for the funeral service. Elton played the piano, led the congregation in a hymn, and sang “Skyline Pigeon,” his song about a bird soaring toward freedom. The First Lady Barbara Bush, Michael Jackson, Howie Long, and Phil Donahue—who with his wife Marlo Thomas became close friends with the Whites after Ryan answered kids’ questions about AIDS on his talk show—sat up front with Andrea, Jeanne, her parents, her brother and sister, Steve Ford, Ryan’s cousins, and Wayne White. Sitting behind them were some of Ryan’s many friends, including Judith Light, Lukas Haas, and Linda Otto, who had worked with him on
The Ryan White Story,
Dr. Kleiman, Laura Kreich Block, Dr. Woodrow Myers, who had supported Ryan when he was Indiana state health commissioner, and Charles Vaughan, Ryan’s lawyer who had represented him in his fight with Western School Corporation.

Elton John sings “Skyline Pigeon” at Ryan's funeral.

But most of the crowd of mourners were ordinary people and children. There were soldiers in dress uniform, elderly men and women, and many, many teenaged friends and students from Hamilton Heights High School. Jeanne was happy that so many black people had come to say good-bye to Ryan. In dealing with his illness, she said, her family had learned a lot about prejudice. “I think I understand what many blacks have gone through,” Jeanne said.

Ryan’s casket stood in front of the church beside Elton’s piano. On the piano was his yearbook picture that had sat by his bed in the hospital. Around the casket were many flowers, including a giant heart from Elton made entirely of red roses. One of Ryan’s friends counted up to 250 of them. Across the heart ran a red ribbon that read, “Dear Ryan, you will always be with me. You have touched many people. Thank you. I love you, Elton.” There were souvenirs of Ryan’s TV movie and his public appearances, and the Hamilton Heights High School banner.

Before the funeral service began, some of Andrea’s roller skating friends walked up to her in the front pew. Each presented her with a long-stemmed white rose. In addition to the church choir, who had taken time off work to come, Jeanne had asked the Hamilton Heights choir to sing. The dozen girls had been rehearsing only three songs. One of them was “That’s What Friends Are For,” which had been written to raise money for AIDS research. So they joined hands around Ryan and sang. As they sang, the congregation saw the sun break briefly through the clouds overhead and shine through the church windows.

Reverend Probasco gave the eulogy. He told how Ryan and his family had hoped for a miracle—that Ryan would be cured. That hadn’t happened. But the minister went on, “I believe God gave us that miracle in Ryan. He healed a wounded spirit and made it whole.

“Many of you who are here are very successful,” he continued. “Your lives are filled with glamour and fame. Yet you brought Ryan and his cause into your lives and aided him in his mission and showed us how to do the same.

“Now I challenge all of us to accept his faith. For you see, Ryan was successful too, in getting all of us involved. He helped us to care and to believe that with God’s help, nothing is impossible—even for a kid.”

Borrowing a phrase from Ryan, the minister urged everyone to go on working for a cure and to “make AIDS a disease—not a dirty word.”

The hearse carrying Ryan's body moves past the Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis after the funeral services.

Ryan’s funeral was the largest Indiana had ever seen. Six pallbearers carried his casket from the church to the hearse: Elton, Phil Donahue, Howie Long, Ryan’s uncle Tommy Hale, his aunt Janet’s husband Leo Joseph, and his best friend John Huffman. The funeral procession had to travel an hour from Indianapolis to the Cicero cemetery, where Ryan was going to be buried. Two hundred and fifty cars followed his hearse.

Aunt Janet was struck by the number of people, some with their children, who stood alongside the road to watch the procession. Some stood with their hands over their hearts. A few held up handmade signs, saying “God bless Ryan” or “Ryan’s hope is alive.” Janet said, “Most of us don’t know our purpose in life. Ryan knew his.”

Along the highway north toward Cicero, truckers pulled over and kept their lights on as the funeral procession passed. Indiana’s governor had ordered flags at the statehouse flown halfstaff in Ryan’s honor. Along the funeral route, towns and office buildings did the same. People stood at their office windows as the funeral procession went by. When it turned off the highway onto the country road toward Cicero, farmers and their families watched in front of their homes and fields of pigs and cows. Seeing them, Howie Long said, “Every time Ryan heard the bell, he got up and went back into the ring. The only other person I’ve known like that is Muhammed Ali.”

At the graveside, Judith Light remembered Ryan working as a second AD on the movie set. Just advising the actors hadn’t been enough for him, she said. “He needed to be doing something
he
came up with. That tells the story of Ryan’s life. He was not able to choose whether he got AIDS, or other hardships which fell in his path. But he
could
choose to turn whatever happened to him into a contribution to others.” The day of Ryan’s funeral, a new study found that having purpose in life helps people live longer.

Some of Ryan’s friends took red roses from Elton’s heart home with them. Jeanne used them to spell out “RYAN” on the ground, marking the grave.

During the next week Greg Louganis and Matt Frewer came to see Jeanne and to visit Ryan’s grave. Matt promised her that Ryan would have a headstone. It was set in place on Memorial Day. The black granite marker is six feet high. “Ryan would be happy,” Jeanne said. “He always wanted to be tall.”

Today the dirt road through the cemetery has been widened by the many cars and people who have come to see Ryan. Children frequently leave letters, poems, toys, and friendship bracelets. One boy left a He-Man toy in a plastic bag, with a note saying, “You’re my hero so I’m leaving you my He-Man.” Someone left the earring Ryan had wanted, and another child left a cassette of “Man in the Mirror.”

Since Ryan’s death, Jeanne and Andrea have gotten over 50,000 letters, cards, and poems, many from children. Dr. Kleiman also gets mail from children. They write, “What was Ryan really like?” or “You must be sad not to have Ryan any more.” One card came to the Whites from Julie’s mother, whom Jeanne had met at Riley in 1984 when Ryan was diagnosed with AIDS. The two women had wept together every day in the waiting room between visits to their children in intensive care. Jeanne finally learned that Julie had died of a brain tumor in 1985. “It’s still very hard,” her mother wrote. “I still have the doll your mother made for Julie.”

On April 28, John Huffman took Andrea to the Hamilton Heights High School prom. Heather, who had been looking forward to going with Ryan, dropped by to help Andrea put on her dress, a white strapless with a full skirt, and to see her off to the dance.

Heather did get to go to another school’s prom: A neighbor invited her to his. But she borrowed a friend’s dress for it; she didn’t want to wear the glittery green and black tulle gown she had bought for the Hamilton Heights dance. “That dress is kind of far out, but I thought Ryan would like it,” she said wistfully. She visits his grave frequently and stays in close touch with Jeanne and Andrea.

In July Andrea won second place in the regionals. As one of the top three to place, she went in August to the National Roller Skating Championships in Miami. There she cut her foot, missed three days of practice, and had to compete with seven stitches. Even though she simply could not perform some moves, she still managed to place eighth. Now seventeen, she is a junior at Hamilton Heights High School. John Huffman has moved to California, but he and Andrea talk and correspond. Jill Stewart is at Indiana University, where she is studying biology and is still active in student government. Dee Laux is a secretary in Indianapolis and lives in Noblesville. Steffonie Garland is a junior at Hamilton Heights High School and Wendy Baker, who has graduated, lives in Cicero. Like other townspeople, she says she still looks for the familiar sight of Ryan’s red Mustang at the main intersection.

During the filming of
The Ryan White Story
in Statesville, North Carolina, both Linda Otto, the producer, and John Herzfeld, the director, were worried about their own health. They say that Ryan’s attitude toward his helped them keep their own problems in perspective. Lukas Haas’s little brother, Nikolai, who was only five when Ryan died, still likes to mousse his hair in Ryan’s style.