All There Is

by Dave Isay

Linda: Eventually Dad had to go back to Mexico, because he was only here on a work program.

  Dolores: When I told him that I wanted to go down there to see him, he said, “No, it’s impossible.” And I said, “It’s never impossible. I’m gonna be there.” And so I went to Mexico when I was sixteen. A cousin of mine was gonna go with me, but then she chickened out at the last minute, so I had no choice but to go alone.

  I went on a train all the way down to Laredo, Texas. When I was waiting there for my bus, a squad car came by with the immigration police, and they put me in their car. They sat me down, and one officer said, “Who are you and where are you going?” I told him my name. He said, “Do you have your papers with you?” At that time you just needed a tourist card, so I showed it to him. He said, “You’ve got money?” I had to show him how much money I had—I had worked for a while and saved some money to take with me. And he said, “Where are you going?” So I gave him the address. And then he said, “Do your mom and dad know where you’re going?” And I thought, Oh boy, they’re gonna ship me right back. But I said, “Sure.” Then he said, “What about if we called them?” I said, “Go ahead.” [Laughs.] I thought, Well this is the end of it. But he let me go.

  I took the bus to Tampico in Mexico, and I went to your father’s address. His aunt and uncle opened the door, and I told them who I was, and they said, “He’s not here, but we’ll go get him.” They brought him to the house, and when he saw me, he was probably saying, Oh my God, she really did come!

  But that was it. We got married by the justice of the peace. I just had a nice dress and a skirt—nothing traditional. His mother and his brother were there to witness our marriage.

  Linda: Did you wish your mom or dad was there?

  Dolores: Well, I would’ve liked them to be there, yes. In fact, Mom always wrote me letters and said that she missed me and wanted me back home. She said, “Dad wants you back home too, because he misses you.”

  I went back home with my husband, and I guess my dad forgave me. He was just glad I was home.

  Linda: When you came back to the States after being in Mexico, Dad had no job waiting for him back here, and neither did you, for that matter. So you moved in with your parents. Grandma had how many bedrooms in that little apartment?

  Dolores: Just two. So my younger sister and my brother had bunk beds in with my mother and father’s double bed. Then we had another bed off the living room. When I got older I looked at that house, and I said, “Lord, where did we all fit?” But after my third child, we moved out.

  Linda: By the age of twenty-four, you had six children from ages one to six. I am the youngest. And then you had the wisdom to stop having more. [Laughs.]

  Did Dad ever say, “Let’s stay in Mexico and raise our kids”? Or was it just understood that you would come back to Buffalo?

  Dolores: No, he never objected to coming back with me. But when he got older and we traveled back and forth on vacation to Mexico, he often said, “If I die, I want to be buried here.” And when he did die, we were in Mexico on a vacation, but I could not bring myself to leave him there. He had children back home, and they wanted their dad to be with them. So I brought him back again.

  Recorded in Buffalo, New York, on August 10, 2008.

  CINDY WHITE, 46, talks to her friend ERIC ERNSBERGER, 45

  Cindy White: I met the true love of my life on a total fluke. I was living at my parents’ and making the transition into being a single mother when I met Dan on August eleventh of 1990, at a time in my life when I said, No more men! I don’t care who they are, how much money they have—I’m done with it! I’ve been jilted too many times. And so when I met Dan I didn’t try to impress him. I didn’t make up a bunch of stories, because I didn’t really care much if he was interested in me or not. The fact that he was interested in me made me even more sure to give him the signal that I didn’t want him. And I was just totally, brutally honest with him—that I was separated, that I had a son that was three years old, and I had a job, so I didn’t need him, and on and on and on. But before too long I realized I was going to be with him forever.

  About six weeks after I met Dan, my ex-husband—my son Jake’s biological father—called me. I hadn’t heard from him since he’d left about a year before. I was sure that he was calling just to piss me off. When I got on the phone he said, “I tested for HIV, and I’m positive.” And I’m, like, “Yeah, right. You’re full of crap.” In the early eighties, the only thing I’d heard about HIV was that it was pretty much only happening to gay people, or if you were promiscuous or a drug dealer. So I was sure it couldn’t happen to me.

  And yet, when I got off the phone, I had this uneasy feeling. I was in this relationship with Dan, and I hadn’t lied up until then, so I surely wasn’t going to lie about this. So I called him and said, “Jake’s dad called me and says that he had tested positive for HIV. What do you think?” And Dan’s like, “You don’t have HIV. You don’t even look sick—you can’t be sick.” He said, “Just go get tested.”

  I went off to the gynecologist and got tested. And it took about fourteen working days to get your test back at that time. And about three weeks later the doctor’s office called me and said, “Cindy, we botched the test. Do you think you could come down and just give us some more blood? It’ll only take a few minutes, and we’ll get you on your way.”

  The doctor took me back to an office right away, which should have been my dead giveaway that something was awry, because that never happens when you go to the ob/gyn—you always sit out front and wait a long time. Anyway, I get back there, and there’s a wastepaper basket on the floor, there’s a telephone, a box of Kleenex, and a glass of water on the desk. And I’ll never forget that room, because after a few minutes of chitty-chatty, she said, “I just got to tell you that you’re the first woman that I’ve ever had to say this to, and I hope the very last. Your test came back positive for HIV.” I started shaking the minute she said the words to me. I burst into tears. She cried. In fact, she came over and held on to me for about five minutes because I was crying so hard.

  The first thing I thought was, Oh, my God, I’m going to die, and Jake is not going to have a mother. I’m never going to see him get out of high school. I’ll never see grandchildren. Then the next thought was, I’ve got to tell Dan. I’m going to have to call my lover and say, “I love you so much, guess what? You’re going to have to test for HIV, because I got it. So much for loving me, huh?” Then the next one was my parents—my conservative, love them like I do, midwestern parents. That broke my heart, because I had spent my whole life up until that point trying to stay out of trouble so that they didn’t have to be disappointed in me. And here, at a month shy of thirty, I was going to have to go home and tell my parents: I’m not going to give you another grandchild, ever. And guess what? I’ve got HIV!

  Dan got diagnosed HIV positive. I said to him, “You need to get away from me. Why should you have to watch me die—how unfair is that? I mean, after all, I already gave ya HIV, so it just seems like worse torture that you should have to put up with watching me die.” But Dan said, “It’s a blessing that I’m HIV positive, because we can do this together.”

  We knew that HIV could make it impossible at some point for us to survive, but we weren’t going to just give up. Dan’s philosophy about life was that we only had this one to live, and that no matter what, we were going to live it to the fullest we could. Even the days we were sick—I don’t ever remember those days being so fraught with illness that there wasn’t something that we either smiled about or held between us that made our relationship special.

  Eric Ernsberger: As his health failed, what did the two of you talk about?

  Cindy: As he was dying, one of the things that he said that was so important to him was that I was well. “Boys need their moms,” he said. It was almost as if he was dying for me—like if he died, then I’d live, a
nd things would be the way he thought they should be. He was sure that Jake would always need his mom.

  We brought him home in hospice care around his birthday, in October of 2001. He passed away the morning of December twenty-sixth of 2001. Dan had promised Jake and I that he wouldn’t die on Christmas, because he didn’t want to mess Christmas up for us.

  I could not wrap my head around what it was going to be like to be alone. I mean, Dan had been in our lives for a decade. Plus, how can I be a mom and a dad to a teenager?

  Jake’s twenty now, and as far as he’s concerned, he had a dad, and his name was Dan, and that’s all there is to it. Jake is a good kid, and he learned from his dad how to be a kind, honest, trustworthy young man, and he is that.

  I miss Dan every day. He threads in and out of my life in ways that make me see why widows have always been considered a little bit daft. We don’t much care anymore what people think of us. And yet, there’s not a day that goes by that I’m not happy I’m alive.

  The truth is, falling in love doesn’t save us from the big, bad, icky things that can happen in the world. But the thing I’d want for people to know the most about Dan and I is that we had an incredible love story despite a horrible virus. And I don’t believe I’m here because of anything less than his love for me.

  Recorded in Omaha, Nebraska, on June 1, 2007.

  ANDREA ST. JOHN, 28, talks to her friend TOM “BRODY” BRODERICK, 43

  Andrea St. John: At the school where I was teaching, there was this buzz of anticipation that Kevin Broderick was coming back to visit. I said, I have to meet this guy to see what he’s all about. And when he came, he sat down at my lunch table, and I think it just started with, “Hi. How are you?” Kevin had this way of making you feel like you were the only person in the whole world. He was just there for an afternoon, but I was hooked. And then off he went, but there were rumors he was coming back to teach.

  My heart skipped a beat when he walked into the faculty meeting that August. After the meeting he said, “Hey, does anybody want to go have a beer after school?” Everyone said, Yeah sure, we’ll be there. And I was the only person who showed up.

  Tom Broderick: Were you set up?

  Andrea: Looking back on it, I think maybe. It took a while for him to build up the courage to ask me to do something alone. We had a lot of seventh grade–style dates: You know, where a lot of our mutual friends met in one place. [Laughs.] Then in October, we went out to dinner, and that was it.

  Tom: You knew he had been in New York fighting Ewing’s sarcoma before. Was that scary?

  Andrea: No. I just saw Kevin. Not until he went back for the checkup scans did I really think about cancer in his life or our lives. I think at that point it was harder for Kevin than it was for me. He knew where he’d been and where he might be headed, and he was worried enough for both of us.

  When he got the call from his doctors, I walked into the faculty room, and his eyes were red. I said, “Are your eyes okay?” As soon as I got the words out of my mouth I realized, Oh no! And he said, “I think you should get your jacket; maybe we’ll go for a walk.” He told me what his doctors had told him—that the cancer was back, and that it was back in a few places. I had to pull it out of him; he was trying to protect me, I think. He said, “There’s a spot in my thigh, and my ribs, and in my pelvis.” It was December, and he paused and said, “I lit up the scans like a Christmas tree.” [Laughs.] I said, “Not funny!” But he just gave me that smile, and I started to laugh.

  Tom: So he started treatment again, but you guys still did quite a lot, didn’t you?

  Andrea: We did. We never missed an opportunity to enjoy each other’s company. But by the following January, he’d been admitted, and he was having radiation. It’s a different ball of wax when you’re an inpatient. When Kevin couldn’t leave at the end of the day I think it signaled the real possibility that things could change. But we always had hope.

  One night I was telling him, “I consider you my husband, and I love you so much. I just want you to know that.” But he wasn’t very responsive. The next morning he woke up, and I was rubbing his feet. He pointed to a photo of us that was taken in the winter, and he said, “Who do you see when you look at me? Do you see him, the guy in the picture?” He said, “Because I see the girl in the picture, the girl I fell in love with. She’s the one I want to spend the rest of my life with. You are my life and my light, and I’m here now because of you.”

  I said, “I see the guy in the picture every time I look at you. Every time I see you, I fall in love with something new or unnew. Yesterday I fell in love again with your sense of humor. The day before that I fell in love with your freckles all over again.” We both cried, and he wiped his eyes with his hollowed-out right arm, slowly. He took a deep breath and said, “Well, now that that’s over with, will you marry me?”

  That spring we got married with Becket, our yellow Lab. We looked around us and said, “Well, he’s as good as anybody. Why not?” So he’s our witness and our reverend and the keeper of what we share.

  Kevin and I had this wonderful way of being in step with one another without a lot of effort. One morning I woke up and got his tea ready, and I said, “Hey, I need your opinion on something. I want to wear this dress to your wake.” So I put it on, and I stood up on the bed next to his, so that he could see me. And I said, “How do I look?” He started to cry. And I said, “Oh God, I’m so sorry. I’ll take it off. I didn’t mean to upset you at all.” And he said, “No, it’s just that you look so beautiful. I’m so glad I got to see you in that dress.” He kept crying, and I held his hand and sat down on the bed next to him and said, “What’s going on?” And he said, “It’s just that I woke up this morning more ready.” I asked him what that felt like. He paused and looked at me and said, “Well, I guess it’s the same thing you felt when you put the dress on this morning.”

  I loved him . . . [crying]. It was easy. From the beginning to the end, sticking by his side, it was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. It was an act of love. And it was effortless.

  Recorded in Saranac Lake, New York, on June 20, 2008.

  LISA THOMAS, 41, talks with her mother-in-law, ANN JAMISON, 62

  Lisa Thomas: The first time that I remember seeing Mark, I was in a bar. I looked across the table, and I thought, Wow, who is that? Mark had a very ethereal quality. I always said he looked like a fairy or an elf of some sort, because he had these big, wide cheekbones and these eyes that slanted up.

  So I went to my friend Beth, and I asked, “Who is that guy sitting at the end of the table in the fringe leather jacket?” And Beth said, “That’s Mark Jamison.” And I went, “Oops, never mind,” because I knew he was married.

  When Mark got a divorce we became really good friends. We started hanging out, and he invited me over to show me how he made neon. When I started dating him I told him, “Don’t tell anybody we’re dating, because you just got divorced. I don’t want people thinking, Oh, this is just a rebound relationship, and it’s not going to last.” Unbeknownst to me, he blabbed his mouth to everybody.

  We didn’t date very long—only a couple months—but it was an intense relationship. In a matter of weeks we began talking about children, and we were trying to get pregnant.

  Ann Jamison: He told us about you. I think the words were, “Dad, you’re going to love her. She has great legs.” [Laughs.] But we hadn’t met. There just wasn’t the time.

  Lisa: There wasn’t. Everything happened so suddenly. I remember Beth calling me, “There’s been an accident and Mark’s hit his head.” I got in the car and just drove. I walked into the hospital room, and you didn’t know me, but I remember you grabbed me and said, “You made him so happy.” Well, I misunderstood you. I thought you said, “You’ll be so happy.” And I was, like, Okay, okay. There’s hope. And then I looked up at the chaplain, and the look on his face indic
ated that I did not hear you right. I said, “What? What?” And you said, “He never knew what hit him.”

  I had never experienced an implosion of such power. And you were so supportive. I remember thinking, How can she be so strong?

  The funeral was horrible. I just remember being in a haze.

  Ann: When we left the cemetery, I looked over to find you, and you were on the ground. Your clothes were spread out; it looked like you’d melted. It was awful. You still had the high intensity of newfound love and the future ahead. As his mother, at least I had had all the past.

  Lisa: When I first went into Mark’s apartment the night after he died, I looked around at the dishes we had eaten on and the wineglasses that we’d drank out of—everything was still there. And I remember not being able to leave. He loved music, and I went over to the CD player and pushed Play, because I wanted to know what he was listening to the night before. It was a David Gray album. And I sat there, just devastated.

  I missed a week of my dance residency in Norfolk, Virginia, but the people down there were so kind to me. They said, “Just come when you can.” I remember I took a pregnancy test the day before I left, and it came out positive. I’m like, What am I going to do? So I called my friend Beth, and then I called my mom and then I called my friend Linda. And they were so happy, you know? I’m, like, “How can you be happy? I can’t do this by myself.” And they said, You won’t be alone. You won’t be alone. I said, “I am alone.”

  I didn’t tell anyone in Norfolk about it, but my first night I remember thinking, I have to get prenatal vitamins, and I have to get something to drink besides coffee. So I went to the health foods store, and I was standing in the aisle, this frail, feeble person, looking at all the billions of prenatal vitamins and all the pregnancy teas. Finally, after forty minutes of looking, I grabbed some. Right as I set them on the counter, on comes that David Gray song. I ran outside and I just cried. I was talking to Mark: “I’m going to need your help. I’m going to need everything I can get!” And I just remember feeling like he was there. I still feel him—even now, almost five years later.