Remembering Brad: On the Loss of a Son to AIDS (12 page)

Contrast this life to that in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s T
he Beautiful and the Damned
, which I just read, where people are only concerned with materialism, temporary beauty, and are cynical, oh so cynical. It made me feel awful because I recognized in it much of myself and my years in Los Angeles. I felt sick inside.

I have long thought of becoming a monk of
some sort
, withdrawing from the world into a life of work and contemplation. Somehow I have to find my way back to my god. I have yearned for this and hurt for this for so long.

On the one hand, celibacy seems so desirable. For me anyway. I am so tossed and whipped by my desire at times, it seems impossible to deal or live with it. I feel I have become a slave of that of which I ought to be the master. And yet I believe and know that sexuality can be a wonderful, God-given gift.

AUGUST 13, 1986: “
He would go on a journey. Not far—not all the way to the tigers . . . three or four weeks of lotus-eating . . . in the lovely south …
” —Death in Venice

Looking back over my journal, I realize that a great change in my attitude concerning my illness and my imminent death has taken place over the last few months. As it has become apparent since those entries that dying soon is my fate, I have spent such a lot of time (I had little else to do) thinking of death and preparing for it that I have come to hunger for its release. The thought that it could be denied me for now, that I could go into remission again petrifies me. I ache now to be released from this life. The waiting seems unbearable and cruel at times.

I am worn out physically. Some days I can hardly move from my bed for lack of strength. My weight has dropped far from the return to 140 during spring to 120. My appetite is poor, and I look very thin. My hair is also coming out like it did when I was so ill before. I show all the symptoms that I displayed before I had to go into the hospital except the daily fevers. It is my hope that by September or October I’ll be gone. I am so tired of this.

SEPTEMBER 5, 1986: Thoughts—Scott’s here. Arrived this afternoon. Many effects—on self, family. Good to see him.

Feel more in control. Situation will not run me anymore. Making more effort with family to be less defensive, less caustic, and quit playing old games. Decided to transcend somehow. Scott here for a few days only. Last time to see him. Have to be careful not to be caustic with him also. His importance to me is beyond measure. How will I be without him? My eyes keep closing—tired. Listening to Rachmaninoff (“Isle of the Dead”), Debussey. Favorites. I feel ambivalent about death again. Yet I am so tired of this. Family has been very weird lately. So wonderful to have Scott here.

Being home destroys any confidence I have gained. My parents are
never
wrong.

I’m going to die soon—nothing to do about it. I miss Genesee [the street where he lived in L.A.]. That was a cosmic point for me. It goes with me in my heart. I can’t describe it.
Personal
. Scott would know.

OCTOBER 22, 1986: Further adventures—My illness is progressing nicely. I have lost my ability to be mobile on my own. I hardly have the strength to get out of bed and my legs have atrophied. There is talk and a lot of thought about the need for canes and wheelchairs. I’m losing the peripheral sight in my left eye and find myself surprised that this bothers me so little. My appetite is good—maintaining weight between 110 and 115. I have been sleeping literally all day and most of the night. Socially I have withdrawn from everything. I feel ambivalent about having my California friends call for news and would be content never to hear from them again. (Writing is becoming difficult. I feel spastic.)

Got a card from Joyce Parsons today.Really fine to hear from her. Nice to know that my feelings of affection for her and fond memories are still reciprocated. Must admit I was a bit surprised.

Listening to Firebird. Top ten. I’m losing it. Can’t concentrate anymore. Have to stop.

Chapter 3

Letters to Brad

In January 1979, when Brad left home for the University of Utah, we began corresponding. That June he revealed his sexual identity to his mother and me. In the early fall he moved from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, where he lived for a little more than three years. He then spent several months in Hawaii.

The distances that separated us during those four years were in some ways a metaphor for the distance in our relationship. Though there was no definitive break between him and us, his move away from conformity, his search for new values, and his decision to embrace his sexual orientation softened the ground that separated us, made it boggy and difficult to negotiate. He needed space in which to work out his self-definition. We recognized that. He felt stiff with us, not surprisingly since our resistance was unmistakable; we were diffident about intruding when it might be unwelcome, when it might be misunderstood. There was, I am convinced, a desire on both his part and ours to overcome this strain, to get comfortable with one another again, but it was more easily desired than accomplished.

One result of this was that our contacts with him were less frequent than I might have wished. He came home once or twice a year, and we visited him in Los Angeles twice. The telephone was our easiest means of connection, probably once every three or four weeks. He wrote fewer letters than we did, but we did not overburden the postman.

As it turned out, Brad saved the letters we wrote him during those four years. They were left among his few belongings when he died. Most of my letters to him were follow-ups to telephone conversations, my attempts to give a more enduring, and therefore a potentially more influential, form to my arguments about values. That he saved these letters tells me something, though I know his ties to the past were becoming less relevant at the time.

I have recently reread them. They reveal a great deal about family tensions of the period, about issues that concerned us, about ideological jockeying for position on his part and mine as he went about the business of attempting to create an authentic self and as I tried to exert a father’s influence on that process according to my agenda.

I reread them now with considerable ambivalence. They reinvoke for me the sense that Brad was attempting to navigate treacherous waters and that I needed to share my experience with him. At the same time I am chagrined to recognize the limits of what I then knew outside the boundaries of liberal religious orthodoxy. I confess that as a result my advice was sometimes flawed. I acknowledge that my good intentions were not always helpful.

Both Brad and I in some ways assumed I knew more than I did. He wanted to trust his own experience where it contradicted my advice, but he was intimidated by the veneer of sophistication in which my opinions were packaged. I failed to recognize that the world offers a wider range of legitimate personal possibilities than I had grasped, and that I too was involved in a process of broadening my philosophy.

And yet that is not wholly accurate either. For there is some evidence in the letters that on one level at least I did acknowledge my need to participate in a genuine dialogue. Over and over I declared to him my intent to approach him as an open-minded friend. Because I cared for him I would willingly hear and weigh his truth. I think I was sincere in these expressions. But both of us had a hard time forgetting the built-in power distribution in our father-son relationship.

I realize now that these letters are problematic texts. They demonstrate the contradictions inherent in the prison house of language through which we attempt to understand the experience of others and ourselves. On the surface they contain a father’s well-meant counsel, the best advice he was able to give at the time. But they are filled with subtexts that run counter to the explicit statements.

These contradictions
—
indicative of complexity in the situation and the relationship
—
can be decoded by a careful reader. For example, the text states repeatedly: “I am not now a domineering father, I am your friend; I don’t want to make authoritarian negative judgments about your experience.” Subtext: “Nevertheless, I have much more experience than you, I am demonstrating that by what I write, and here is what I think you should be thinking and doing.” The text reads: “If you must be homosexually active, find a worthy long-term companion and be monogamous.” Subtext: “I don’t even like the thought of your living with another man, and therefore I’ll not be available to meet your lover, not here nor in L.A., not now and likely not in the future.” And again, the text reads: “I want to accept you as you really are.” Subtext: “You’d better be prepared to prove that identity. Moreover, your asserted sexual orientation is so repugnant to me that I can hardly bring myself to say the ‘H’ word; thus my written style is characterized by all sorts of delicate verbal avoidance and indirection.”

Such subtexts weren’t there by conscious intention. But I see them now, and I am convinced Brad recognized them at the time.

I try to give myself the benefit of the doubt. I remind myself that I cared very much about what was happening in Brad’s life
—
not altogether selfishly–and that I wrote letters with his best interests in mind. Nevertheless, as I reread them, I keep hearing echoes of Shakespeare’s Polonius, Laertes’s pontifical father. Besides serving up a generous portion of platitudes, my advice was at times simply wrongheaded. For example, when I said things like “This step has, inevitably, enormous consequences for your future life,” it sounds like a philosophy of fear. I should have lightened up a little. That might have helped him to do the same and to see his life as a natural process of trial, error, correction, growth; it might have helped him look more optimistically at his future possibilities. Instead, with my gravity I weighted him down.

Not the least Polonian aspect of my stance was the sense that he was racing ahead of me in his development, that I was trying desperately to catch up and influence what had already occurred. And weren’t my attempts at diplomacy too transparent and condescending? And didn’t he know that? I did so much want to be his friend, but did I instead rob him of self-confidence?

What I present here are excerpts from the letters, specifically those parts that bear on Brad’s situation and our dialogue about values. I omit informal small talk, family developments, local news and weather, comments on books, films, politics, etc. Although their omission makes the letters seem more formal, such matters are not germane here.

* * *

17 February 1979

Dear Brad
—

We were glad to get your last letter. As your mother read it to me on the phone, I smiled at your poetic description of your butterfly-chasing propensities and said to myself once more: “Yes, he is undoubtedly a romantic.” In
Lord Jim
, Stein, an old Dutch trader in the Far East, says the same thing about Jim
—
and he was right. Sometime you will have to read that book.

Romantic temperament has its positive dimensions; it is idealistic, rebellious, individualistic, intense, glamorously impractical, emotional. It has also its disadvantages: egocentrism, constant unrest, unpredictability, disregard of objective realities. The romantic is a paradox: he is both superior and limited.

I know something about this temperament because I have a bit of it in myself, though I cover it from others’ notice pretty well. This strain of my personality was stronger when I was your age. On the other hand, of course, I have a good deal of the practical “mensch” in me, the side you are more familiar with
—
the rational, even-keeled, cool-headed part of me.

So do you. You are not a
pure
romantic but a mixture. It is useful to recognize that. The trick for people “like us” is to acknowledge both sides of our dual natures, and to maximize the advantages of both while minimizing their disadvantages. To do this is to move away from extreme romantic behavior, of course; it is also to forego cold, unimaginative pragmatism. One needs to avoid the roller coaster ride between extremes, keeping some practicality, some self-discipline while also nourishing a certain amount of idealism, intense feeling, sensitivity, and healthy individualism.

I didn’t mean for this to sound like a lecture or even heavy advice. And in calling you a romantic I intended to pay a compliment. These facts about my life may give you some familial perspective on your own. So look out the window at your butterflies, admire their beauty, chase them on Saturday afternoon for the fun of it. But for the rest of the time, keep focused on your practical affairs. Interestingly, romantic goals can sometimes be realized–but if that happens it is usually because the person pursued the dream by means of disciplined strategies. A nice paradox, eh! …

Stay well, stay productive, stay happy. Dad

* * *

Sunday, June 24, 1979

My Dear Son,

Though I said that your declaration did not come as a complete surprise to us, still we both find that after all we are not, were not, emotionally prepared. You must understand that this requires a radical reorientation of thought about many things, for it is inevitably, inextricably tied to so much
—
in the past, the present, and obviously the future. This awareness has been with you for some years now, and it has taken you this long to come to your present vantage point. You must be understanding, then, if we require some time to come to terms with a phenomenon we do not entirely understand, especially since it involves the renunciation (quite possibly) of some of our fondest hopes. I say this at the outset because it seems to me that we did not measure up to your hopes of us as you declared your situation. You wanted, clearly, that we should understand the matter in all its complexity as you presently do, that we should accept what you now consider to be your course, that we should not cling to the possibility of other explanations, of the possibility of a future change given further experience. You wanted us not to urge our old values and our doubts on you, for that only makes things harder for you. Isn’t that so? Perhaps you went away questioning, if not our love for you, at least our intelligence, wondering if we lacked the courage to face facts, wondering if after all we don’t still mean to exert our subtle tyranny over you.