I’m never sure how to talk about the dead.
When I first met Timothy and Jim and Timmy back in the chat room that would form the playground for our friendships and the fertile ground for our writing relationships, I spoke so much of the friends I’d lost. My grief was new, and I knew that I was talking to people who either shared or feared similar losses. They provided my safe place to exorcise some demons, celebrate some angels, and ultimately, to heal.
Those griefs are older now. They’ve been supplanted by more recent losses. The absences of those friends are no less significant to me, but they’re not as sharp. Even though their deaths cut a deep swath through my emotional landscape, I’m not, by nature, a person who will stand too near an abyss for too long. I move on, and I look for reasons to laugh and feel good and be silly and enjoy what I have.
When Steve died from complications from AIDS on that Sunday, June 14, 1992, the hurt was overwhelming and magnified by my disappointment with our government and my frustration with what tiny progress had been made by medicine and science. And of course, I was much younger then, so it wasn’t surprising that I heard myself saying, I will never feel joy again.
I’m so glad I was wrong about that. I’m glad for my own sake as well as for the people who love me, because how wretched it must have been for them to watch as I got hammered by one blow after another from 1992 to 1997.
And now, sometimes, I feel reticent to speak of those losses because what I do not want, am never seeking, is sympathy. I’m sorry my friends are dead. I’m sorry that they got cheated out of years they should have enjoyed. I’m sorry for the families and friends who cherished them and miss them. I’m sorry for the world that such bright lights–and all the other bright lights who also suffered and were lost–were extinguished. And of course I’m sorry that my time with them was cut short. But I’m not sorry for me, because I got to know them! I got to love them and be loved by them! And I still feel their impact on my life in profound ways.
They are lost in some ways, but they aren’t lost in all ways.
In a larger sense, they were part of one of the most catastrophic events of the twentieth century, and what they endured has helped extend the lives of people into this century. But when I talk about them, to note incidents in their lives or their birthdays or the anniversaries of their deaths, it’s because I believe those millions of the world’s losses must always be narrowed down to real faces, real lives, real friends and sons and brothers (and for others: fathers, mothers, sisters, and daughters).
Timothy was driving us to the gym Sunday afternoon. I stared from my passenger side window and was annoyed to feel tears sliding down my face. Earlier, I’d looked at the clock at the exact time Steve died on that Sunday, June 14, 1992, and I went numb. I didn’t expect feeling to come back when I was doing something so mundane as going to the gym (though it does happen to have also been Steve’s gym). I made myself a promise. If I didn’t cry right then, when I got in the water and no one could tell anyway, I’d get to cry. I don’t know why I make these deals with myself, because if there’s anyone I’ll cry in front of and talk to about what I’m feeling, it’s Tim. He never says anything stupid or unkind when that happens. But whatever, that was what was in my head.
Only as I walked at the edge of the pool to my lane, a man passed me. A familiar face.
“Charlie?” I asked hesitantly. He turned, trying to place me. “Becky,” I said. “John’s friend.”
Through Steve I met Jeff (died 1995). Through Jeff, I met John (died 1996). Charlie was John’s roommate when John died. I haven’t seen Charlie since 1997, when he came to The Compound one evening with some others to sign or add things to a Names Quilt Panel made for John by our friend Pete (died 2002).
We talked and caught up, in that rapid-fire way people do, then he said, “Sometimes I still feel John’s presence very strongly.”
So do I, Charlie. I feel all of them still working their miracles of friendship and love in my life.
I didn’t cry in the pool.