by Studs Terkel
Pitying rain
Nurturing earth
Other ashes
Ashes of those I have loved
Will welcome mine
Smell the sweet wild roses
Gather the sweet wild blackberries
And when a vagrant breeze touches your cheek
You will feel our love and our peacefulness
Down by the river.
I had five kids. David was nearly twenty-three when he died. He was the oldest. I like to think about him now. It was very hard for a long time. Probably four years I think I was just crazy from it, but I learned to live with it. I don’t think you have to get over it—you just have to learn to live with it. He was a wonderful kid. I adored him. That was the worst of all the deaths, because I didn’t get to say good-bye at all. I did go and get his body and take his ashes to the common ground and put them there. But I didn’t get to say good-bye—and that’s very hard . . . Some people are afraid to confront it, and they don’t say good-bye and it just messes up their whole life for the rest of their life. I’m still saying good-bye.
I wrote a song about him not long ago. It’s called “Hitchhiker in the Rain.” [Sings]
I saw him yesterday, standing in the rain
His thumb hung low, his back half-turned, his eyes as far away as Spain
And though he looked all worn out, and near as old as me
His eyes still held some innocence, like nineteen sixty-three
But I hurried, turned my head and drove by faster than a midnight train
I left the aging innocent, just standing in the rain
And their anger grows as their hopes fade
And my nerve goes and I am just afraid
And you and love and fear and memory tangle in my brain
And I leave the children standing, God I hate to leave them standing
I leave the aging children standing in the rain
And you told me once I mustn’t pass the rain-soaked thumbers by
Or I’d spoil your hitching karma and you’d never get a ride
And maybe somewhere in Wyoming the devil deputy
Might cut you down and end the life that started out in me
Well, the word came to me in Vermont that you had truly died
You took yourself away, my son, for anger and for pride
You just spun out one night by the Pacific ocean side
And for years I drove from coast to coast with the eagle and the crane
Searching for your angry ghost among the aging children standing in the rain
And their anger grows as their hopes fade
And my nerve is gone, and now I’m just afraid
And you and love and fear and memory tangle in my brain
And I leave the children standing, God I hate to leave them standing
I leave the aging children standing in the rain.
[A long pause] He used to hitchhike back and forth across the country all the time. He left me a letter telling me that he in no way meant it to be my fault. He really wanted me to know that he had not committed suicide because of anything I did. But that didn’t help a whole lot . . . [A pained laugh] It really doesn’t. You just feel like there must have been something you could have done to change it . . .
I’ve seen my father, literally seen him standing in the lane with his hand out to me. I talk to him all the time. I talk to my mother. I saw my son standing by the road waiting to be picked up a couple of times. And then it wouldn’t be anybody there, or it would be a post, or it would be someone who looked like him. I don’t think you go away. To me, it’s not in my mind. [Laughs] I mean, they’re palpable to me. And God is to me in the spirits that stay, the spirits that live with you. That house is like a ghost almost. The whole house literally holds my family. I live in the house my father built. I’m not home enough, but I live in it. [Laughs] Every stalk, every plant . . . there are raspberries . . . I think I’ll be there for my children in my songs, in my house. My idea of Heaven would be something like what my mother describes in her poem. It would be gathering the roses and the blackberries and being with people I love, and making music, and not having to worry about health care. Hell is the damnation of innocent people. You get plenty of it on Earth, you don’t need any more punishment. [Laughs]
I feel more in love with life than I ever did. I want to leave you with a poem. It’s by a woman named Judith Kuchen. She’s a ranch-woman, maybe from Nevada. It sums up the way I feel.
I want to live to be an outrageous old woman who is never mistaken for an old lady
I want to live to have ten thousand lovers in one seventy-year-long loving love perhaps
There are at least two of me
I want to get leaner and meaner, sharp-edged, the color of the dirt
Until I discorporate from sheer joy.
*A diary of family memories and reflections.
*Henry A. Wallace was President Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture, 1932–40 and vice president, 1940–44. In 1944, during the tumultuous Democratic Convention, Roosevelt, ailing and weak, was persuaded by the powerful city bosses to drop Wallace as his running mate and choose Senator Harry Truman. In 1948, as the Cold War was getting under way, Wallace ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket and became a controversial figure. Many who supported him were considered unpatriotic and, as a result, suffered the consequences.
The Plague I
Tico Valle
A former assistant dean of students at Holy Trinity High School, he is now its director of development.
AIDS is very much alive. I’m scared that what we have seen is the end of the beginning of this epidemic—that many, many more deaths are yet to come. There isn’t really any national policy at all. Until AIDS personally impacts our leaders, nothing will ever happen. When the floods happened in the Midwest, our government moved quickly to allocate millions of dollars of emergency funds to help people by a stroke of a pen. Why can’t they do that for AIDS? We’re the outcasts, the marginal, the people always thrown to the side. That’s what’s wrong about our society: people imposing their value systems on other people.
I’m also very, very involved in the quilt.* People bring pieces of quilts to be submitted to the larger quilt. This is national, but we started a local chapter here to help people create panels. We have fifty thousand panels, exhibits all over the country. It’s names of the gays and straights who have died of AIDS. The quilt represents only thirteen percent of people who have died from AIDS in the United States.
I AM LATINO AMERICAN, gay male, thirty-six years old. I am one of five children, all raised here in Chicago in Old Town—when Old Town was artsy and fun, not what it is today. I’m the only child that was born on the Isle of Puerto Rico. My parents are from San Juan. They wanted one child to be born on the island. Both my parents worked in factories. They wanted the best for their kids, left the island to make sure that their kids got an education and would succeed in life.
I went to Catholic school all my life, St. Michael’s in Old Town, then went to Holy Trinity. I joined the Brothers of Holy Cross at Notre Dame University. I went to Notre Dame for two years, and then I left and went to DePaul. My family raised us to have faith, but I wouldn’t say I’m devout. I disagree with a lot of things in the Church. I sang in the church choir for many years, and still do—that’s what brings me spiritual guidance.
My mother taught us to help others, to never judge anyone for who they are. My mother and father were very much that way. They would give the shirt off their back. My father died about three years ago from AIDS. It was very hard for the family. But when he was diagnosed, we didn’t ask how he got it, we just took care of him. I played a major role in that.
I think it was his sexual promiscuity. It wasn’t a shock to us that he had a secret life—it was a shock that he was diagnosed. We hear so much in the media that AIDS is for gay people, and seldom do we hear that it impacts a heterosexual man, like a father. It was very, very difficult. This was the
eighties.
What’s interesting is my best friend was diagnosed back in 1984. His name was Jay McKinley, a descendant of President McKinley. He said to me, “I’ve been diagnosed, will you take care of me?” I said, “Jay, you have a family, you have friends, everyone will take care of you. But I will be honored to take care of you.” He said, “They will not be there for me when the time comes.” Because it was a scary time, back in ’84. He ended up dying, and I took care of him. It was a long battle. At that time there was very little in the way of drugs. The sickness destroyed his body, destroyed who he was, destroyed his mind. I felt it was an honor to take care of him—that he chose me to end his final days on his Earth.
I was just a very good friend. His lover ended up leaving him. His family came towards the very end, but they were pretty much helpless. They didn’t know what to do. People were scared to touch him, people were scared to even be in the room. So very few people came around. I was living at home at the time. I was so exhausted from going to work and not sleeping at night and giving him his medications that I called my mother and said, “Could you come and help me?” She did—and that’s when she first got the awakening of what this disease was doing to our community and to our people.
Jay chose to die at home, and I would pray for him to die because of the pain he was in. He was thirty-six years old, my age today. He was losing his mind. He was a brilliant person. He worked for the stock exchange, a very intelligent man. It’s one thing to see the body be destroyed, but when you lose the mind . . . I guess that’s everyone’s fear, to lose the mind.
He didn’t want to go to the hospital. His care was at home. We went to the doctor’s a lot. I learned how to give him injections, I learned how to change his IVs, and I learned how to just try to cope with it day to day.
Two years later, my partner was diagnosed. I really believe things in our life happen for a reason. And the powers that be prepared me for what was to come later in life. And that was my partner’s death and then my father’s death. All from this epidemic. It’s made me a stronger person. It’s made me who I am today, wanting to fight for the people who live with this disease. My family has lost a lot to this epidemic. I have a younger brother who’s gay, and he lost his partner two years ago. So all around us is death. It has become a way of life for us.
I am HIV positive. It frightens me. What frightens me more is I don’t want to see my friends and my family suffer because of me. I want to be able to live a good life, give back to life until the very end. I don’t want to see my loved ones suffer because I’m suffering. I think we all fear the unknown. So part of me fears death and another part doesn’t. I have lived a good life. I have been blessed with wonderful, wonderful people in my life. We’re on this Earth for a very, very short time. I hope to try to change people’s ways of thinking, to make the difference in someone’s life. It always comes back to my mother. She had no education. I’ve always said, if she had an education, she could have been president of the United States.
I think it’s part of my faith, too, that things happen on this Earth to prepare you for the next moment in life. I don’t believe there’s a Hell—not with what goes on in our world, not when people suffer and die. These awful diseases. Not when there’s poverty on this Earth. There is no Hell. We live through Hell on this Earth one way or another. But I believe there is something there. When my partner, Jeff, was dying, he and I would always joke about if there is a way for us to communicate in the next life, let’s do that. On the anniversary of his death, a year later, I was very depressed and I was at home. I wouldn’t go out. I went to bed early that night and the phone rang at two in the morning. I said, “Well, who in the world is calling me at two in the morning? This is absurd.” I picked up the phone. There was no one there. I hung up the phone and for that moment I felt this sense of peace, and I looked at the clock and it dawned on me, it was the hour, the moment he had died a year before . . .
I never have asked for another sign after that. I felt so content with that. It was almost as if he was telling me he was fine. If there is such a thing as Heaven, it’s a place of peace, it’s a place of beauty. I feel that I go through this life and the people I’ve lost are always looking out after me, taking care of me. They’re almost like my angels. It is my faith that there is another world out there, whether it’s a Heaven or another universe or whatever. I believe in God.
Every day of my life, though, I get angry at God. [Laughs] Did He create us? Did He or She create this pain? Does He or She have the power to take it away, and if so then why isn’t it taken away? I believe that there has to be something better after this world. For years, I believed that we needed to be buried. But, as I’ve gotten older and studied Catholicism, I think cremation is the way to let go the spirit so that the spirit is set free.
I think it’s the Buddhists who believe that we go through this life, that it’s a cycle, and that each time we come back we are learning a lesson in life, until we break out of that cycle and we have understood the meaning of life. I very much believe in that, that there are lessons for us to learn and that each time we come back, we come back as a better person. You know how you meet people and you feel that they’re old souls. I think they’ve been around and they are finally at the peak of life.
Sometimes I wish I could have done more. When I took care of Jay, the last day, the last couple hours, I was giving him shots of morphine, and I knew the last shot of morphine that I would give him would be the final shot. That was so hard for me . . . to know that yes, he would be at peace, and there would be no more suffering—but that it would be at my hands. I feel that I’ve been honored to hold these people and to let them die in my arms. I think that is a big, big honor.
*The AIDS Memorial Quilt runs wall to wall in the public halls where it is exhibited in many cities.
Lori Cannon
She is an unlikely cross between Sophie Tucker and Olivia de Havilland. We are at a food bank she runs: the Open Hand Society, in Uptown, Chicago’s multi-everybody community. Its clients are people with AIDS, although nobody up against it is ever turned away.
We started on Christmas Eve, 1988. I am the sole survivor of its founders. We serve gay men, white and black, women, gay and straight, Asians, Native Americans, Hispanics, Jews—this virus does not discriminate. Our clients are on disability, Social Security, or just bad luck. Wonderful people who at one time had thriving careers and interesting lives and dear friends. Unfortunately, they lost everything when they got sick. That wasn’t the greatest tragedy, though. They were allowed to die because the government didn’t care. The mistaken thinking in the early eighties is the very same mistake that is going on in Africa right now, as the devastation of this epidemic claims generations. It’s unconscionable and shameful. The attitude of the American government in those days was, “Gee, who cares if a few faggots or junkies die?”
We felt, here in Chicago, the one thing we could do was feed people. We were taking care of our own friends, but we knew there were others living in isolation, in shame, shunned by family, friends, their church. We couldn’t do a lot, but we could figure out a way to prepare meals. These were the gays and lesbians who responded to a crisis when no one else would. Lesbians and gay men were the caregivers. I often wonder, if AIDS had first hit women instead of men, would the gay men have been as supportive to their gay sisters as the lesbians have been to the gay men? My gut feeling says I doubt it. If I’m wrong, I owe everyone an apology.
What happened in the mid-eighties—people became transformed seeing their contemporaries dying in their arms. Young people, well-built people, professional people. What was killing them, killing my friends? In the year 2000, I liken myself to a medieval woman, totally out of touch with the modern world because death has become a constant companion. I’m fifty years old. I never in a million years expected my midlife to be spent alone. I thought we’d grow old together.
WE LIVE WITH RAGE. Fortunately, we at Open Hand are able to channel that rage
and grief into doing something positive—knowing that we’re relieving one burden from the day-to-day life of someone who is struggling. When we started Open Hand twelve years ago, people were in the final stages of HIV. We delivered to the Gold Coast, to Cabrini Green, anywhere there was a need. Especially when you’re dirt-poor and too weak to stand at the stove and make a cup of soup, you call Open Hand. Some people have no history of ever reaching out and asking for help because they’ve always been the one to offer help. Now, they’re saying, “I can’t do anything. How am I going to get to the grocery store? I’d ask my friends but they’re all dead.”
My best friend, Danny Sotomayor, was Chicago’s leading AIDS activist. Half–Puerto Rican, half-Mexican. A child of sexual abuse. When he sero-converted to HIV positive, he turned his rage from a tormented life into something positive. He used his talent as a political cartoonist to zero in on the homophobes. He zeroed in on the government. He zeroed in on the drug companies that were making huge profits, blood money, off the backs of our dead friends. He was this little spitfire who would disrupt city council meetings. We were demanding more funding. I can’t tell you how many times we were arrested.
One night we broke into the budget office of Chicago. We stole the records, we reviewed the numbers, and guess what? We found two million dollars that was unused in the city’s health budget. We ran to the alderman, Helen Shiller. She made a stirring, stirring speech on the floor of the Chicago city council, saying, “Mayor Daley, you cannot kid us, you cannot lie to us.” In an impassioned plea, she revealed the truth to the entire city council that magical day: “How do you explain these figures? How is it that this money has been unspent? And why are you telling the health department and the people with AIDS in Chicago there is no money for services like affordable housing, transportation to clinics, groceries. How dare you! This is unconscionable.” The mayor was flabbergasted because I’m sure he’s thinking, How the hell did you get this information? The vote was unanimous, the bill was passed, and two million dollars that we discovered was indeed available went to the organizations that were involved with the day-to-day life of people living with AIDS. The Chicago Department of Public Health is our number-one funder. Specifically for people living with HIV, Chicago has offered a huge budget. Had it not been for our moles—gay men and women who were willing to work with us, after hours, late at night, in the city hall—and our break-in, we would not have had this funding. When your friends are infected, you are affected. If you know somebody in health, you know them in sickness. And you honor that friendship.