Remembering Brad: On the Loss of a Son to AIDS (20 page)

We will miss him greatly.

If the weeks ahead afford an opportunity, we will be glad to speak with you about Brad and our experience with him.

Sincerely,

Sandra and Wayne Schow

Some of those who got this letter shared it with others. In an irregular fashion, the word got around. And then, quite suddenly, we were free to talk about it all
—
mostly. After virtually hiding Brad’s illness for eighteen months, his homosexuality for nearly eight years, we had them out in the open. It was as liberating as if a great blockage were removed and real honesty were finally possible. How strange but how good that felt. What a pity that it took us so long.

I say “mostly” free to talk about it. At least there were now no practical dangers to Brad in the revelation. And the ice was surely broken in terms of the knowledge becoming public. The only remaining barriers to openness with others were those vestiges of fear, shame, or inertia within ourselves which sometimes were unpredictably manifested. One ironic example remains fixed in my mind. About three weeks after Brad’s death, Roger encountered at the mall just after Christmas two sisters whom he and Brad had known well in high school. He had not seen them for several years. After some conversation, one of them asked: “How’s Brad?” Clearly, she knew nothing of his illness.

“He’s fine.”

“Is he home for Christmas?”

“Yes,” Roger replied, “this Christmas he’s home.” End of topic.

“And you left it at that!” exclaimed his mother incredulously when Roger told us that evening about the encounter. “Why didn’t you say what’s happened, why didn’t you explain yourself?”

“I don’t exactly know,” he said. “On one level my answers were true, and I didn’t feel like going into it just then.”

The next day he called Margaret and cleared up the dramatic irony in their previous conversation, doubtless with ambivalent feelings. Vestiges. We all showed them at times. I think they lingered somewhat longer in our sons than for Sandra and me, but for them too it grew easier in time to speak with others of Brad’s death and its causes.

How ironic it is that AIDS, which in the United States has found its most frequent target in gay men, has done more to advance understanding of homosexuality than virtually any other influence. Not because AIDS directly explains homosexuality
—
its causes or its particular ethos
—
but simply because for the general public in the United States, AIDS made confrontation with homosexuality unavoidable. By several means, the virus has become the most powerful closet door opener in modern history.

On one level, it made the public aware that homosexual people are to be found all around us, often where we least expect them to be, that they include people whose lives and achievements we have admired. Highly publicized cases have certainly had an impact. But for most of us AIDS illustrates these realizations nearer to home. Today there are but few who do not know someone
—
a family member, a friend, or a colleague
—
who is HIV positive, has AIDS, or has succumbed as a result of it. And where this occurs, it most often comes with a revelation of homosexual activity as the cause.

Public dialogue about homosexuality is commonplace today. What is said in the media and elsewhere would have been unthinkable a decade ago. People talk about real gay men and lesbians rather than stereotypes, reevaluating the premises on which their intolerance was based. Most knowledgeable men and women now recognize that there is not just one homosexual lifestyle but a variety of lifestyles
—
like the variety found among heterosexuals. Public exposure has brought home the realization that homosexual lives, like heterosexual lives, ought to be judged on their merits, and that gay and lesbian lives can be richly rewarding, beneficial to society as well as to individuals.

Paradoxically, the world that was for us not long ago so far out of joint begins now to show some evidence of better alignment as a result of what has happened. I wish we had not lost Brad. It seems so pointless and unjust. But there is some satisfaction in knowing that his shortened life contributed to this adjustment of cultural consciousness, this opportunity to reassess our attitudes and values. His case is not one of the famous examples, to be sure, but among them all he is the person who influenced one particular circle of family members and friends. Through them the rings of that influence continue to emanate outward as when a stone is thrown into water.

Chapter 5

Grieving [Fall 1989]

“I have been one acquainted with the night,” says Robert Frost in a well-known poem. I can edit that line a little and say, “I have become one acquainted with grief.” The verb “acquainted” is precisely accurate with its suggestion of direct and unmediated experience.

I did not realize how much I would miss Brad. Now, three years after his death, not a day passes without his being in my thoughts. There is so much to remind me of him. He lived with a surprising range of interests and enthusiasms: history, politics, urban culture, certain kinds of western landscape, literature, family relationships, philosophy, theology, weather, psychology, music and visual art, the impact of style in all facets of culture. His sticky mind contained a wealth of eclectic information.

To be around Brad was unavoidably to have one’s awareness expanded. I was continually arrested by his views, by his taste, by his way of experiencing the world. His aesthetic sensibilities were strong, his crap detector well-developed. Continually he provoked and challenged my conventional wisdom. That was not always comfortable, but it was unquestionably valuable to me. He was so intense. What he liked he cared for passionately; what he didn’t he abhorred. His moods were similarly up or down. He was not always measuredly rational, and he was not always easy to live with, but he heightened the impact of anything around you he regarded. Any time you spent with him was memorable.

Because so little around him escaped his notice or comment, because his interests corresponded at so many points with my own, my daily experiences in all of these areas continuously reinvoke him.

Certain places are especially potent to release the flood of memory, places like our old neighborhood on South Ninth where Brad and his brother Roger and their friends roamed the yards and alleys, played kid games, got into kid mischief, and learned a good bit about the world; places like our spot of ground on the semi-rural hills of Johnny Creek, south of town, where Brad grew to love the views over the narrow valley and the Portneuf Gap beyond, the sunsets startling the deeply furrowed northeastern hills into sharp relief, dramatic summer thunderstorms, and the solitude of the wooded ravine dropping below our house. It was an environment made to order for a romantic teenaged boy.

During the last year or so of Brad’s life, we frequented a spot up on one of the benches on the east side of the city, which commanded a panoramic view. You can see the mountains cradling Pocatello and the Portneuf Valley to the south, with snow-capped Scout Mountain in the center of this fine vista. This was a spot important to both of us, not only for its austere beauty, which was never quite the same from one day to another, but for the fact that we two walked and talked there, or, as it became increasingly difficult for him to walk, simply sat and discussed what was important to us at the time. Because Brad associated himself so powerfully with these places, I cannot visit any of them without waves of nostalgia pouring over me.

There are those who, with good intentions, attempt to help those of us who grieve by removing from our lives reminders of what is gone. That is not what we want. These memories
—
these crumbs of a Madeleine
—
are not something we wish to be done with. We want to remember.

One of the things I have learned about sorrow is that often we grieve most keenly for the loss of what we really never had but only anticipated. We are sustained in life so greatly by our hopes for the future, by projected scenarios involving ourselves and our loved ones, and when these fail to be realized we feel we have been deprived of what seems already rightfully ours.

When Brad told us in 1979 that he was gay, I denied the validity of his assertion. For a variety of reasons, it was unthinkable. But as weeks passed, and as his truth was borne home to us, both Sandra and I experienced a long period of intense, multifaceted grief. Much of that was our mourning the obliteration of some of our fondest hopes for his future
—
and ours. We mourned the loss of anticipated family relationships that would have been simpler, easier, safer for all of us because they would have been based on conventional unities. We mourned the loss of what would have been a less perplexing life for Brad because he would not have had so much to fight against the current. We mourned the loss of our daughter-in-law, the wife he would never have. We did not even consider that a male companion would bring compensating satisfaction. Especially, we grieved for the grandchildren, Brad’s children, who would never come. It seemed hard that he, who had understood the magic of childhood so well and always responded so warmly to little people around him, would never realize the challenges and joys of parenthood.

Our projected scenario was not to be. It had never really been promised. With time we came to accept by degrees Brad’s orientation and to realize that it brought other possibilities for fulfillment. Yet I think I have even now not entirely put aside
—
and perhaps never will
—
the gut feeling that some things that were rightfully mine were stolen.

Once earlier in my life I experienced the untimely death of a loved one. In 1966 my youngest brother Paul was killed in a one-car accident. He skidded in the rain on oil-slick asphalt paving and plunged over an embankment. He was not quite sixteen. In perfect health, with all of the rich promise of his life before him, he was suddenly no longer in our midst.

As a youth and as a young adult, I had seen my grandfathers and then my grandmothers pass away. I cared for them, and would miss them, but they had fulfilled their years. The young especially do not grieve for long when death comes in timely fashion and releases the old from their burdens. But premature death is something else. When a loved one is erased even as he stands on the threshold of maturity, the event lacks the naturalness that could reconcile us to it.

We came from Iowa to Idaho for Paul’s funeral. We mourned with our loved ones. We viewed the scene of the accident, we heard the explanations. We tried to make some larger sense of what had happened
—
and really we could not. We spent that week somewhat in a daze. It all seemed like a dream from which we would eventually wake.

I saw clearly the great void that opened in my parents’ lives, bereft as they were of their last born. Sandra and I took our children and went back to Iowa, to the demands of graduate school and the challenges of rearing a young family. And our grief softened and soon lost its central place in our daily awareness. We had much else to think about. But that did not happen for my mother and my father. With passing months and years, I saw that such loss is different for parents than for others, including siblings. Parents have so much of themselves invested. Their offspring are their contribution to the future, an extension in some sense of themselves. The good lives of those offspring are the reward for the travail of bringing them forth, of bringing them up. Now, more than two decades later, I know this emotionally, from a parent’s point of view. I understand now that my memories of Brad contain a core of grief that probably will never entirely fade.

Thinking of my parents and their loss, I have sometimes during the past three years wondered which is worse: To have, as with Paul, a loved one wrenched away from you suddenly by accidental death, as though stolen, with no warning, no preparation. Or to lose a loved one, as we did Brad, by stages, with ample time
—
too much time
—
to recognize and then become familiar with the inevitable drift toward death. To be an onlooker as a vigorous body and a quick mind are dismantled by degrees through the agency of a relentless virus, to watch as in the stricken one the desire for life ebbs and the longing for death grows. And to recognize with horror that you have come to share that longing for death’s arrival. To experience vicariously the process that weans us from life’s sweetness and reconciles us to its negation. In the aftermath, is that better or worse?

Clearly, in a case like the latter, one in which a loved one is terminally ill, much of the grieving is experienced before death comes. During Brad’s last months, we reached decisive points at which we could not realistically hope for his recovery, points at which we could not avoid leave-taking and its attendant sorrow. In September when Ted departed to spend two years in Uruguay, the oldest and the youngest brothers embraced and said goodbye, knowing full well that they would not see each other again in this world. That farewell was a harbinger of death.

Another early watershed of grief was Brad’s decision in mid-August to dispose of his valued possessions. The task was symbolic: it was a formal letting-go. There was an undeniable finality about that sorting through and considering who would value his books, his art objects. I did less well than Sandra in observing and talking with him about those decisions, for that process too was a little death.

Grief made another premature claim three weeks before the end when Brad decided to stop taking AZT, the experimental AIDS drug, and Bacterin, a powerful antibiotic. His decision was a considered acknowledgement that a quality recovery was no longer possible. If our sense of loss did not overwhelm us then, it was only because we were still preoccupied with the practical matters of seeing the illness through to the end. That was time- and energy-consuming, and to some extent it postponed the full payment of the emotional debt.