Project Rebirth

by Dr. Robin Stern

Being able to be public as a gay man represented a profound shift for Larry. He was in love and he was living openly, no longer worried about what other people might think. Larry slowly but surely introduced his kids to his new city, new identity, and new partner. Once his eldest son got his driver’s license, the kids would all drive up to New York to see Larry and Gene. They took it all in stride, so much so that when Larry sat them down to have the official talk, one son responded with the “well, duh” reaction so familiar to parents who work themselves up to break the news about something delicate with their savvy kids: “Well, yeah, we kind of figured that, Dad.”

  All three kids immediately took to Gene and appreciated his generous attention. Not long after meeting them, he bought them each magazine subscriptions based on their unique interests. “They called him the fun stepmother,” Larry remembers, laughing.

  Larry was even ready to come out to his parents and siblings. In 1990, he sat at the table in his parents’ mobile home and told them that Gene was not his roommate, as they’d been led to believe, but his partner. At first, his family was a bit chilly, shocked with the news, confused by his past and all the unanswered questions, but through the process of talking, they came to realize that he was still the same Larry. “It wasn’t an easy discussion with my very traditional, down-home family,” Larry explains, “but by the end we were all hugging and laughing.”

  Eventually, all but one brother in his conservative, working-class family would wholeheartedly embrace Larry and Gene. That said, he hadn’t yet told them that Gene was African American. When Larry brought Gene to a large family reunion in Oregon shortly thereafter, they were still nervous. It was one thing for Larry’s family to accept their love in theory, but to be confronted with it in person, along with Gene’s race, might be another story.

  “Leave it to Gene to set everyone at ease,” Larry remembers. Gene headed straight toward one of Larry’s sisters and gave her a big bear hug, exclaiming, “You must be Tootie!” A smile stretched across her face. That’s all it took.

  From moments like these, Larry knew that he’d found the person who brought out the best in him, helped him loosen up and reach out to others, helped him infuse each and every day with joy and humor. His God, he had always truly believed, didn’t care about sexual orientation. His God was more concerned with one’s capacity to be transformed by love and love people well. By those standards, Larry knew he was so blessed. As philosopher Ralph Waldo Trine wrote, “A miracle is nothing more or less than this. Anyone who had come into knowledge of his true identity.”

  On September 11, 2001, Larry and Gene woke up a bit earlier than usual. It was primary day in New York City, and Gene wanted to make sure he avoided lines at the polls. They drank their coffee in the living room downstairs, and then Gene kissed Larry good-bye. They were looking forward to a home-cooked Southern dinner that night—fried chicken and fried cabbage.

  Larry had prepared the meal the night before under Gene’s watchful guidance. Though Gene’s family moved from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., shortly after he was born, his mother instilled a deep love of Southern food in her boy. A typical Thanksgiving at Gene’s house consisted of black-eyed peas, chitlins, collard greens, and headcheese. Larry never could abide by the chitlins or the headcheese but loved to try his hand at other Southern delicacies with Gene’s patient help.

  It was 8:55 a.m. when Larry arrived at his office on Park Avenue in midtown, walking distance from his apartment. The red message light already blinked incessantly on his office phone. Larry called his voice mail and was greeted with Gene’s calm cadence: “Don’t worry. The plane hit the other building. We’re evacuating and we’re okay.” Larry had no idea what his beloved was talking about.

  That was when Larry noticed his co-workers heading down to the trading floor. A co-worker broke the news: “A plane hit the north World Trade Tower.” When Larry pressed her for more details, she admitted that she didn’t know much else.

  The trading floor monitors were, as usual, blasting a variety of network news broadcasts. Though the forty workers at Banca IMI often huddled around the TVs together, they’d always done so with calculating minds, not concerned hearts. Today was different.

  Suddenly, a plane hit the second tower. “Oh my God!” they gasped in unison.

  Larry’s supervisor came over and gently told him to go back to his desk. “I don’t think you need to watch this,” she said. Larry was touched that she was concerned, but he was reassured by Gene’s message. Gene was okay. He had evacuated early on. He was probably headed home to their apartment at that very moment. Larry called home from his office phone and left a message for Gene directing him to call back when he got home and to let him know that he was okay.

  It seemed as if everyone at the office knew people at the World Trade Center. The CEO ordered pizza, feeling compelled to do something, anything, in the face of such shock and confusion. Stricken souls, stunned with the news of the towers collapsing, drew little comfort from numbly eating, roaming around with blank, frightened looks on their faces, calling cell phones of loved ones and friends to no avail.

  Wall Street shut down. The tunnels to New Jersey and Long Island were closed. Larry told several co-workers, “If you can’t get home, come to my place. Gene and I will make up the sofa bed or put blankets on the floor.”

  Larry’s boss, Melanie, walked home with him. When they arrived at the apartment, they both fully expected Gene to be sitting there, glued to the news like everyone else, but he was not. Everything in the apartment was just as Larry had left it. There was no sign of Gene anywhere.

  Larry was surprised and shaky, but far from hopeless. Evelyn, a dear friend, showed up. Melanie, Evelyn, and Larry tried to brainstorm where Gene might be and how they could get in touch with him. As the hours passed with no word from Gene, Larry started to panic. He called the emergency rooms and anyone else he could think of who might know where Gene was.

  The night became morning. The next day became the next. Still no word from Gene. The days seemed endless as Larry waited, in vain, for news. Gene’s company, Aon, a large insurance company located on the 102nd floor of the South Tower, organized a search party for all of its missing workers, but Gene was not found.

  One of Gene’s co-workers called to ask if he’d come home. She told Larry that she had seen him helping people onto the elevator and assumed he got out right after that. Larry pictured his dear partner reaching that graceful hand out to help frightened co-workers and friends into the elevator, generous and optimistic as always. “That was just the way he was, other people before him,” Larry explains.

  After about ten days had gone by, Larry’s best friend, Ollie, convinced him to go to the armory to file a missing persons report. Initially, Larry was in total denial and could not admit to himself that Gene might be gone. Plus, he wondered whether the emergency workers would allow him to file a report on behalf of his gay partner or if they would restrict such reports to only heterosexual couples. Larry rarely experienced overt discrimination now that he’d moved to one of the most cosmopolitan cities on earth, but he felt too fragile to contend with any now. He just wanted his Gene to come home. He didn’t want to have to explain himself.

  The armory was filled with a sea of people and an unmistakable climate of desperation. Larry looked around at the vacant faces and the bodies, stooped with the weight of ready grief. The walls were covered with posters of the missing and tributes to loved ones. Stuffed animals and trinkets were left there, symbols of stubborn hope and impassioned prayer for the return of loved ones.

  Larry went up to the first man in official uniform that he found and requested to file a missing persons report. The detective led him to a private table where Larry spoke quietly but honestly about the nature of his relationship with Gene. He broke down in tears as he listened to himself describe his dear love as lost, as if he were watching the whole scene play out from above. The detective immediately responded with kindness and professional assuran
ce that Gene’s name and description would become part of the official record. Larry couldn’t remember ever being so grateful for someone’s kindness.

  About four days later, two weeks after the towers first fell, Larry finally accepted that his beloved Gene was really gone. He spoke to several people at Gene’s company, all of whom corroborated the first story he’d heard about Gene’s last moments—that he’d been helping others into the elevator. No one had seen him after that point. Larry explains, “I had to accept that he was dead. I knew he wasn’t coming home. I just gave up hope. That’s when I began to grieve.”

  For Larry, the loss of his life partner after nearly fourteen years together left him profoundly alone and unbearably empty. He couldn’t imagine being without Gene in the years ahead. He had always pictured growing old beside him, having his partner in crime for all of life’s adventures, obstacles, and Broadway musicals.

  Gene was so full of life. He had a way of putting people—even the most reticent or socially awkward—at immediate ease with a self-effacing joke, a gentle touch on the arm, or an inquisitive question. Though Larry and Gene would often circulate separately at parties, Larry knew he could always glance over and see Gene dazzling someone with his sweet charm. By the end of any and all social gatherings, Gene was everyone’s new best friend. As Larry’s son Ian describes, “If you looked into Gene’s eyes, you could see straight to his soul.”

  He radiated that energy to those around him, which is why Larry had trouble understanding why his life has been cut so short, at only forty-seven years old: “It just didn’t make sense. I could see Eugene at ninety years old organizing ballroom dancing at the nursing home.”

  As lonely as Larry felt, he did draw strength and comfort from his very close relationships with his family, especially his children and grandchildren. Shortly after Gene’s death, Ian drove up from Baltimore with his daughter, Catie. The nine-year-old, who loved coming to New York City and spending time with Grandpa and Gene, wondered out loud at his absence: “Where is Gene?”

  “Gene’s with his mother, with my father, and with a lot of friends and people that he loves,” Larry assured her. Catie didn’t mention the subject again during that visit.

  The following summer, Ian brought the whole family back to visit. Larry was playing monster and tickling his granddaughter, ever the goofy grandpa, when Catie began to cry and sobbed, “I miss Gene.”

  “It was so funny to see this ten-year-old having that much emotion about this man that she just knew as my partner,” Larry explains. “We spent about half an hour just holding each other, and crying, and talking, and then we kinda got through it.”

  Larry was adept at getting through isolated moments like these, but the grief—writ large—felt like it lasted forever. It was too hard for Larry to accept that Gene was gone. Dr. Leeat Granek, head of the Grief and Loss Project, a cross-national consortium on the study of grief and loss in Canada and the United States, explains, “Grief and loss are normal, expected and constant.”

  Sitting with the grief, as Larry did, is a necessary part of getting to good feelings again. Dr. Granek elaborates: “There is often an attempt to banish the negative feelings because they feel so bad, and while that is understandable in the moment, what happens when you cut out one end of the emotional spectrum—sadness—is that you also inadvertently cut out the other end—joy. We have to fully feel all of our emotions in order to alchemize them into something generative.”

  Larry kept replaying the day in his mind: Gene had left a reassuring message early in the day saying he and his co-workers were evacuating, but what happened after that? Not knowing the details of that day, of Gene’s last moment, drove him crazy—and knowing that he would never really know left him restless. He could not avoid feeling anger as he wondered what had prevented Gene’s escape.

  But the anger was softened by his knowledge that Gene had been helping people out the day that he died. Larry flashed back to their most recent family reunion, in April 2001, when he had fallen ill from severe viral pneumonia. Gene refused to leave his side in the hospital, calling in sick to work and requesting that the nurses bring in a cot so he could sleep next to wheezing Larry. Of course, one would expect that kind of care from a loving partner, but Larry knew that Gene didn’t reserve his care just for his nearest and dearest. Gene felt a responsibility to reach out to perfect strangers with similar tenderness. As much as Larry grieved losing him, he was also proud that his partner had died being his generous, courageous self.

  In early October of 2001, Larry headed to the Family Assistance Center at Pier 94 to file for Eugene’s death certificate. Scores of people who had lost a loved one in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade towers made their way along the West Side Highway to the vast, aluminum-sided building on Pier 94. Larry made his way past the uninviting exterior and into the main hall and was stunned to find the most beautifully decorated space he could have imagined for grieving families. “They carpeted the whole pier in soft blues,” he describes. “It was like being in heaven, surrounded by angels. These people had come from all over the country as volunteers.”

  One such volunteer was assigned to usher Larry around and offer him food and drink. He was taken first to a lawyer, who filed the affidavit, and then to several other stations, including the Red Cross and the Crime Victims Board. Larry couldn’t believe that something he’d dreaded so passionately had turned out to be such a gentle experience, just like his day at the armory. It was still painful, but the kindness of others was a powerful balm.

  That evening, Larry decided to treat himself to dinner at his and Gene’s favorite restaurant, a tribute to having gotten through such a difficult day with such sweet assistance. The maître d’ recognized him instantly and asked, puzzled, “Just you?”

  “Yes, I’ve been at the family center all day,” replied Larry. All New Yorkers at that time knew what the family center was.

  “Did you lose someone?”

  “Eugene,” Larry answered as tears started to well up in his eyes. They hugged each other for a very long moment.

  After all the arrangements pertaining to Gene’s death, Larry wanted to do something to honor his life. In October of 2001, he invited friends and family to a big celebration of Eugene Clark’s indomitable spirit.

  As guests started arriving at noon, Larry stayed at the top of the stairs of his duplex, giving people huge Gene-like greetings and hugs as they came up—a loving tribute to Gene’s warmth and life-of-the-party presence. Larry also bought an extravagant arrangement of orchids that leaned, long and thin, just like Gene, over all the beautiful food that his guests brought.

  Although the afternoon was a blur for Larry, he still has the guestbook from the party, signed by ninety-six people. He also has the transcripts of hundreds of messages left on his voice mail in honor of Gene, dating back to 9/11. These are the artifacts he returns to when he wants to remember how loved his dear partner really was.

  Larry stayed in New York for a couple of years following Gene’s death. He worked hard, spent lots of time with friends, and cooked up plans for a West Coast homecoming with his children, who also had their hearts set on living closer together. (They either already lived on the West Coast or planned to relocate there.) But no matter how much Larry packed into his schedule, no matter how many wonderful friends he managed to spend time with, the Big Apple wasn’t the same without Gene. “I was lonely, even when I was busy,” Larry remembers.

  Larry’s loss left him lonesome, to be sure, but it also provided him with an opportunity to honor Gene’s outspoken legacy. Among the heaps of mail that Larry received after Gene’s death, a letter from Cambridge Insurance caught his eye. It notified him about an upcoming workers’ compensation hearing. Larry had not even considered filing for workers’ compensation, believing that his homosexual relationship, although technically a domestic partnership recognized by the state of New York, would not qualify him for spousal benefits. But as he heard the stories of other widows
and widowers filing claims, he began to grow uncomfortable with his assumption. Why shouldn’t he be afforded the same rights as heterosexual people in his same situation? Gene wouldn’t have been meek in a situation like this. He would have said something. Larry decided to go for it.

  At the first hearing Larry went to, the insurance agent told him that he didn’t have any standing because he was not Gene’s legal spouse. The judge at the hearing advised him to get a lawyer who could fight for his rights to compensation. The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund had been reviewing the cases of more than twenty gay partners of victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and had found that the law did not define “spouse” by the existence of a marriage certificate. Larry became one of Lambda’s pro bono clients, and together they took their fight to Albany.

  The lawyer advised Larry to gather letters from his friends and family, confirming that Larry and Gene had been a long-standing couple. But even with all the strong support (friends responded generously), the judge continued to request additional hearings. Larry’s determination did not wane. At the end of the fourth hearing, the state of New York finally not only ruled in Larry’s personal favor but also instituted a public law that recognizes surviving domestic partners’ right to workers’ comp for those lost in the attacks of September 11th. Larry is now set to receive four hundred dollars a week for the rest of his life.

  Larry’s case became big national news. He was interviewed by Katie Couric and Anderson Cooper. Though he was nervous to be featured on such big media outlets, he drew on a strength born of his relationship with Gene. “He would be proud!” Larry exclaims.

  In March of 2004, Larry made the final leap to a new life.

  The house he found in San Jose, California, was small but quaint. It was a far cry from the dream house Larry has been drafting sketches of since he was a child, but it was a peaceful home, a place where Larry could get away from the New York hustle and heal.