“I would be ever so grateful.” It sounds strangely formal in a Jane Austen kind of way, but a simple Thank you doesn’t seem adequate for what I’m feeling.
I return to the empty waiting room, settling into one of the chairs, groggy and thick-headed, and glad Sandy went home to care for herself and Fernando. I would make miserable company tonight. By now, I’ve gone more than twenty hours without sleep and am badly in need of caffeine. Unfortunately, the hospital cafeteria is closed. There is vending machine coffee, but I’m not yet that desperate. My preferred sources of caffeine are Pepsi and Coke, I don’t care which— I always failed their taste tests— but the soda machine is out of order.
There was a time, back in Melbourne, when these vigils were happening with such regular frequency that I kept a daypack in my car with essential items. You never knew when you’d get the call. (“He went into the hospital, we think for the last time. Come if you can.”) By then, I had it down to a science: No-Doz tablets, thermos to fill and refill with strong black coffee, two novels (in case one was a dud), notebook and pen, change of shirt, toothbrush, toothpaste, razor (some vigils went on for days), energy bars, a couple of apples, extra tissues— not for me but for the others who would come by to sit a while and who needed to talk and maybe to cry— and finally the list of phone numbers when it came time to make “The Call,” notifying family and friends the vigil was over.
But this time I was caught unprepared. Rushing in from the airport, I don’t even have a book and am now left with nothing to read but old issues of Bon Appetit! on the waiting room table. Apparently, the selection of magazines depends on whatever the staff brings from home. So, I scrunch deeper into the chair, feeling bereft without my life support system and with only my memories to occupy myself.
I already know this vigil is going to be different. But then, they’re all different. Unlike the memorial services, which over the years begin to blend and blur together, merging into one montage of loss, the vigils remain distinct in my mind— this specific time, this specific place with its own emotional atmosphere, contoured to fit this individual now dying. Memorial services are communal events; vigils are deeply personal. Often, I’ve been left by myself, after family and friends depart, choosing to remain to keep what the writer Paul Monette called “the last watch of the night.”
No need for you to stay, a kindly nurse or hospice staff person will say. He doesn’t even know you’re here.
But I stay anyway. There’s this sense that much more than a life is ending. An entire world is coming to an end, a multitude of experiences, millions of moments and memories, hopes and goals and desires and dreams, all reduced to this: a biological organism slowly releasing its hold on life, a vast network of physiological processes gradually shutting down. Seems like someone should be here to witness it. You sense the presence that was this person has already departed, a presence no longer present, and not for the first time wonder who or what is actually dying.
With each vigil, a part of my soul died with that person. I seem to have less and less soul left. This vigil will be no different. I close my eyes and pray, Don’t let him die before we make peace, forgetting that I stopped praying years ago.
Chapter Three
On the Art of Dying
(Instructions included)
[Portland, Oregon, February 1994]
I can pinpoint precisely when this epidemic started for me.
There’s talk of a gay cancer back home.
A gay cancer? You mean, like we have our own?
Yeah, seems only queers are getting it. In New York City and San Francisco.
It’s September 1981, in a restaurant in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, talking with Peter who has just returned from visiting family and friends in the States. A gay cancer? We both think it sounds suspicious. We joke that the Moral Majority is probably behind it, coating Barbra Streisand records with carcinogens, and we move on to other, more relevant topics— like the beating the dollar is taking against the yen, or Reagan’s deep compassion for the wealthy, or Peter’s latest infatuation. I won’t give his comment another thought for many months. There’s nothing about a gay cancer in the English-language Tokyo Times or Mainichi Daily. Indeed, I’ll learn there’s no mention of it in most newspapers back home either, so how serious can it be? It will be almost a year— well into 1982— before I begin hearing of friends in Portland becoming ill, and no one knows why; and besides other queers, it seems no one cares.
Fast-forward to February 1994. I return home where over a half million Americans have been infected with HIV; more than 300,000 have already died, most of them gay men, though not, it turns out, from Barbra Streisand records.
• • •
I had been with Columbia AIDS Project two weeks before I met its executive director, Caleb Stern. He missed a lot of time, Sandy told me. Cal Stern had end-stage AIDS. We were in the conference room as people gathered for the monthly staff meeting. He sat next to Steve at the head of the large table, a waxy sheen to his skin as if he were the latest addition to Madame Tussaud’s museum, representing the AIDS epidemic of the late twentieth century for some future generation to stare at. Emaciated, with sunken eyes appearing too big for his face, he had the look of one not long for this earth.
“What’s he doing here?” I whispered to Sandy. “Shouldn’t he be home in bed?”
“He should be dead,” she whispered back. I was always struck by her bluntness. Sandy said what others only thought. “Besides, there’s nothing for him at home. His partner died three years ago. His family’s back in Oklahoma.”
It was like having death sitting in our midst. And yet, as if to dispel that image, when he looked at me, his eyes had a luminous quality I’d seen in the faces of others who had come to this point. Maybe it was their steadiness. Rather than darting about, looking here, looking there, as most of us do, his eyes seemed to linger on whatever they were seeing at that moment, taking it in, as if this might be the last time they would ever see this slant of light, or that person laugh, or this group of friends. When our eyes met, he smiled, nodded, his gaze slowly moving on.
I was drawn back to the other people in the conference room. With few exceptions, they were all young, most in their twenties, a rambunctious, boisterous group filling the space with much laughter and joking. This was the first time I had seen the full staff together. It was divided about half and half, men and women, with quite a few lesbians. God bless the lesbians. They were there from the beginning, in those early days in New York City and San Francisco and Los Angeles and Melbourne, when the hospitals were refusing to take gay men for fear of the uncertain contagion. These brave women, our sisters, joined our care teams, stayed with our friends in their homes, wiped up their vomit and diarrhea, held their hands as they died. I have often wondered, if it had been reversed, say, if there had been some strange little virus targeting lesbians, would we gay men have been there for them as they have been for us? Would I? In shame, I doubt it.
The meeting began with various introductions and updates. Next to Steve and Cal Stern sat Franklin Young son III, the finance director, a tall, thin man in his thirties, blond and not unattractive, but with pinched, narrow features suggesting less a physical disease than some spiritual malaise too deep for any drugs to cure. He held his head aloft, his thin, pointed beak of a nose turning here, turning there, like a hawk condescending to be among all these lowly sparrows. He and Charles, the volunteer coordinator, were the only ones wearing ties.
Steve chaired the meeting. Although it was only February, they were already planning this year’s staff and volunteer picnic in June and the AIDS Walk in September. A heated discussion was underway about the picnic. Most of the gay men wanted to organize an afternoon of Earth Games, noncompetitive group activities requiring cooperation where everyone wins and there are no losers, while the lesbians pressed for a down and dirty softball game, wanting to kick some serious