Remembering Brad: On the Loss of a Son to AIDS (4 page)

I cannot say that he spent those last months in a sustained heroic effort to stay alive. Rather, he was caught in a terrible ambivalence, vacillating between the will to live and the will to die. In either direction, the operative word is will. I had supposed that when a person gives up the fight for life, what follows is a passive drift toward death. I should have known that Brad could never drift passively. When the experimental drug AZT was publicized in early fall as a means of arresting AIDS, he quickly made arrangements to secure it in a last effort to seize back momentum. But by the time the red tape was all cut, a month had passed, and his case was too far advanced for the drug to be efficacious. So, if death it was to be, he would have it on his own terms, with some measure of dignity. Suicide was a possibility he considered seriously for the time when his condition became incontrovertibly hopeless. Ultimately he decided to face it out, to let nature run its course. But as he approached the end, he determined, with concurrence of his physician, that he would cease taking the antibiotic that helped him in his rearguard struggle against opportunistic infections, and that if the end came at home or in hospital, no aggressive measures would be taken to keep him alive, only provision of what comfort was possible.

He was no saint, no perfect stoic during those last months. He ran the gamut of emotions. From his volatile nature spilled dejection, irony, irritability, nostalgia, islands of humor, and

not least

sharp anger against the utter absurdity of it all, anger that sometimes lashed those around him. Dylan Thomas’s line, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” exactly characterizes those moods. The light died literally in one of his eyes a few weeks before the end, extinguished by one of those brain lesions. But the mind that could momentarily forget how to make out a check was still capable of insightful reflection as counterpoint against the rage.

And we others stood by like a Sophoclean chorus, filled with lamentation, knowing that our pitiful words were inadequate response to the passion in which the central figure of this drama toiled. This was a trial of spirit that somehow gathered up the personal suffering of a lifetime. And now his struggle had come down to, was epitomized in, this life-and-death wrestling with AIDS.

During the last month and a half the wasted legs would not support him. A wheel chair was necessary for his movement about the house or outside for medical treatment. Before our eyes, he became physically much like an aged man, with thinned hair, sharpened visage. Because of the pain of movement, he found baths difficult and exhausting. We worked out a way that he could shower. From a piece of lumber, we fashioned a seat that could be laid across the edges of the tub. I would help him remove his pajamas, lift him from the wheelchair to the edge of the seat, then assist him to ease the aching legs very slowly, very carefully over the edge. And then he could manage. For me it became a deeply moving ritual. Two men, son and father, were bonded together in a matrix of pain, humility, frustration, and love. The warm water that soothed and cleansed him seemed sacramental.

Ironically, Brad’s quest for religious truth was a core element in his tragic impasse. This might surprise anyone exposed simply to Brad’s pointed, occasionally caustic, irony. But his search for self demanded idealistic validation. When years earlier it had become clear that the religion of his upbringing would not accommodate his identity, he was reluctantly set adrift. The search for an alternative religion led him to consider ascetic Christianity, pantheism, oriental mysticism, new age philosophy. Even his drug experience in Los Angeles was fraught with overtones of a religious quest. But none of these, nor eclectic combinations of them, finally answered his need.

I think it a credit to him that as the sands of his life ran out he disdained to compromise his intellectual honesty or his experiential truth. However much solace traditional faith might have provided, he went as an agnostic to face whatever lies beyond. At the very bottom of his religious consciousness there remained, I think, a soft sympathy with important facets of Mormon theology. I have wondered more than a few times since his death whether the religious upbringing we gave him was, on balance, more help or hindrance to him in his life. Whatever the answer to this question, that upbringing was a large part of the cross he bore.

And so as time passes, I perceive more clearly in Brad’s life the ambience of tragedy. He is not a large scale tragic protagonist, to be sure. But in the face of forces inimical to his just desires, he did not flinch or turn aside. He had wanted so much

love, authenticity, beauty, achievement, self-knowledge, self-acceptance

and after his fashion he had pursued them uncompromisingly. Beginning with his boyhood conflicts, continuing through the trials of his young manhood, and concluding with the body- and mind-sapping illness, his ordeal had extended sufficiently long for his passion and courage to shine forth. In the end he had run out of time, or perhaps there would never have been enough time, to reconcile the inescapable contradictions in his life. But that he never gave up trying demonstrates the largeness of his spirit. In the furnace of this effort was forged the hard-won moral insight from which he looked back and judged what he had done.

Could the outcome have been avoided? Perhaps if those around him had been more enlightened, more accepting, he might have found a companion nearer home, might have chosen self-exile to escape intolerance, might thereby have avoided the path of alienation and self-destruction. Had he followed the advice he was given and, for example, accepted docilely the hand dealt him, been patient, and remained celibate, he would still be alive. But if he had demanded less from life, he would not have been Brad, and the question of tragedy would be irrelevant.

That was just it. He made demands. That was the essence of his attitude. If that was his flaw, it does him credit. If in the last analysis I persist in seeing him as tragic, in seeing his ordinary life as more than ordinary, it is for the reason that he could not

or would not

accept the either/or premises that life thrust on him, would not give up on the one hand his natural necessity (and right) to be gay, including the extremes of his exploration of that identity, or on the other hand his need for respect from the idealistic culture that was formative in his development. He could not have it both ways. His losing bout with AIDS seems to symbolize that fact. But I doubt, had he the chance to live his life again, that he would do it differently.

Speaking as a member of the chorus, I stand in the aftermath troubled by the inscrutability of much that I have witnessed. In this case, the conditions of mortality did not seem perfectly fair, nor easily borne. And I am dismayed that the cultural values we humans have created so often unnecessarily place stumbling blocks for our companions rather than easing their burdens. But as a father I now contemplate my son’s responses with respect. Though he experienced deep discouragement along his way, there was nevertheless a resilient toughness in the core of him, and I do not think he was ever beaten in spirit, not even in the last difficult days.

1
. The difficulty and the damage experienced by gays in a conservative culture are suggested in the following: “From their youth the seeds of low self-esteem are planted. From both adults and peers they hear the deprecating epithets, the scornful aspersions, the biased misinformation about gays which cause them to feel contemptible. They struggle to understand their difference in an environment which demands conformity. They hide their feelings from the world, even from loved ones, and hate themselves for this deception…. They read books confirming their fear that they are flawed or mentally ill. And when they desperately need to turn to the church for comfort and assurance, it proclaims its ‘love for the sinner,’ its ‘condemnation of the sin.’ Ironically, the more orthodox the individual, the more he believes he is wicked, and the more he suffers from this institutional repudiation of his identity. His ‘tainted’ sexuality seems to him the central fact of his existence and colors all facets of his life” (H. Wayne Schow, “Homosexuality, Mormon Doctrine, and Christianity,”
Sunstone
, Feb. 1990, 12).

2.
In the years that followed, my view of homosexuality and its theological implications changed significantly. Based on wide reading together with direct observation of the numerous homosexuals I have come to know, I now believe that this orientation has a biological basis, that one does not choose or learn to be homosexual. Such a premise changes the ethics of homosexual behavior, and changes similarly the ethics of response by the heterosexual majority toward this significant
natural
minority. I believe that our sexuality, however oriented, is one of God’s important gifts, with the potential to enrich our lives. From a Christian perspective, we should judge its expression by the fruits it bears. Just as we assess heterosexual relationships in terms of commitment and whether such relationships contribute to long-term growth and holistic well-being, so we should assess homosexual relationships. The question is thus not
whether
one is homosexual but
how
. Biblical passages that bear on the question of homosexuality are not free of contextual cultural bias. In the light of Christian teaching, we should love all persons as God has created them and assist them in realizing their unique potentials.

 

 

Chapter 2

Entries from Brad’s Journals, 1975-86

 

At the age of fifteen, Brad began to keep a personal journal. Together with friends from school, he was encouraged by his high school LDS seminary teacher to do so. For an introspective youth, it was an activity congenial to his personality and soon became an established part of his routine. During the remainder of his life, he filled seven notebooks and bound journals. They constitute a vivid revelation of his character and temperament, a record of his evolving values and of his quest for self-understanding and personal acceptance. It is ironic that the life path his journals reveal moved dramatically away from the course charted in his seminary instruction.

As with many personal journals, there are lapses in Brad’s entries. That those silences seem so regrettable is a measure of the engaging quality of what he did write. The value derives in part from the candor. During his high school years, Brad wrestled as most diarists do with finding an acceptable persona. The desire to be approved in terms of family or religious or social values censors, consciously or unconsciously, what he records. It is not so much that he expects his entries to be read, at least not immediately; rather he is so conscious of external expectations that he reflects the persona he feels compelled to assume in his life.

Year by year, little by little, he moves toward more honest statements (at times startlingly candid) and a more insightful assessment of his feelings. He makes no effort to hide or disguise his faults, misbehaviors, desires. The writing is truly done for himself, a way of seeking to clarify what is confusing in his life. It is as if the stakes grow larger and he must drop any posturing. This together with his growing intellectual sophistication results in a record as complex as its subject.

Filled with contradictions, paradoxes, polar tensions, it reveals a young man with a mercurial temperament whose perplexing moodswings are unpredictable to himself as well as to others, and for whom as a result life’s joys and sorrows are extreme. It shows a gentle romantic whose sensitivities are encouraged by the sentimental side of his religious upbringing. At the same time, it reveals a rebel, an obedient son who nevertheless bristles against authority, whose dark side causes him to be irritated with those who are complacently comfortable, including family and friends. And because the environment in which he matures implicitly urges suppression of that dark side, his journal becomes a place where he can express it, an escape valve from sweetness and reason. His journal is, as he once wrote, “a place to trash things.”

These journals are remarkable for the degree to which they exclude the external world, or, more precisely, they reflect it only indirectly as externalities contribute to his feelings. If he refers to clean sheets or symphonies or friends or the weather, such references are couched in terms of his enjoyment or displeasure. The focus is primarily and consistently inward. He can be extraordinarily self-reflective, subjectively analytical. Repeatedly he dreams of becoming a significant artist, but he is so preoccupied with personal dilemmas that he cannot marshall the energy and discipline needed for artistic endeavor. His ability to act effortlessly and spontaneously is repeatedly undermined by his cerebral recognition of complexity, ambiguity, irony. Early on in the journals, one sees frequent contradictory assessments. Youthfully naive, he is probably not aware of a number of them. Yet they derive often from his unconscious ambivalence. As he grows older, he becomes more aware, but the ambiguities continue.

His self-criticism is severe and sometimes verges on morbidity. He tries almost desperately to love himself but finds it difficult to do. Why? The idealism of his upbringing, which so many of us take with a grain of salt, he takes seriously. He is intelligent enough to see the contradictions between the moral ideal and the real, but he requires that they be reconciled. His problem is a conscience too highly developed, too dominating, and when he tries to throw it out and live with abandon, he can only temporarily escape the guilt. All of which seems clearly apparent in the record he left. It is painful for me as his father to recognize these effects of moral training that was well intended. I find myself wishing somehow that we had instead trained him as a picaro. He could then doubtless have borne his life more lightly.

In nothing is the perplexity of his life so evident as in the matter of his sexuality. This subject dominates the journals. He does not begin to discuss overtly his homosexual orientation until he is nearly nineteen and entering college, but it is clear both from veiled comments in earlier entries and from what he subsequently has to say that he agonizes over this taboo not only throughout his teenage years but to the end of his life. The issue throws him off stride in virtually all aspects of his personal adjustment.

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