Joshua Putnam

"Let their moments be brief, but touched with brilliance.".-Jean Genet

Calmly Into Fear

It has been seven years since I sat by your side that other October morning, two days before you died. Now I sit looking at a picture of you and me standing together on Castro Street in San Francisco, only a few doors down from the Zen AIDS hospice where you spent your last days. The picture is from happier times, at least ten years ago. In the picture we are both smiling. I am wearing a black leather jacket. Just last week I lost the jacket and it enraged me, losing another piece of the past, of you...

Seven years ago I was living in Boston with my girlfriend, Sumi, when my friend Robin called to tell me he was dying. Robin felt he had only a few days left. Robin and I had known each other for a little more that four years. During the first two and a half years of that time I lived in San Francisco, and it was there that Robin and I became friends. When I arrived in San Francisco, in 1985, the AIDS crisis was fast becoming an epidemic. The first HIV tests had just been developed, and early studies indicated infection rates of up to 70% among gay men living in the city. Alarmed by these statistics, some of my friends had warned me never to visit San Francisco, but for me the fear of the place only added to the myth of the place. In my first weeks in the city I became part of a web, or webs , of friends. Gay Episcopal priests, gay pornographers, hustlers. Truly gentle men who never ventured our of doors unless clad solely in leather, or in drag. And strangely unquantifiable dreamers like Robin, comfortable in any costume yet discomfited by the everyday world. Some of the people I became involved with in those early days in San Francisco already knew they had HIV. Others, like Robin, would only discover this later on, though they may have suspected as much all along.

Of all the people I have ever known, Robin was one of the gentlest. His door was always open to me. Once when Robin and Sumi and I were on a camping trip in the Sierras, Robin was visibly frightened by small animal noises coming from the woods at night. Sumi and I went out for a walk. Returning, we amused ourselves and angered Robin pretending to be a bear. Afterwards we all stood out and enjoyed the beauty of the starry night, of one another. Since moving to Boston I had visited San Francisco twice, staying with Robin both times. In the spring, when I'd last visited, Robin had been sick but not incapacitated. After that visit Robin was hit by a car while crossing Castro at 18th Street. He suffered a broken hip and arm which precipitated a rapid decline in his overall condition.

When Robin called, I jumped on the first plane to San Francisco.

...There have been many times in these past years that I have regretted not coming to see you more than once during that week in San Francisco. It took until my last day to get up the courage to come. During that time I visited the places we'd enjoyed together. I talked to our mutual friends about you, and about others who had died while I had been away. Although I had known other people who'd died , I never had to confront the process of dying so closely. I wondered about what kind of person I was, having such a hard time doing the one thing I had traveled to San Francisco to do.

When I arrived I was happy to find that the hospice was in an ordinary house on Castro Street, quite similar to the one you had lived in only a few blocks away. That it was run by the people from the Zen center next door seemed especially fitting for an eclectic like you. I thought I was, but was not really prepared for the shock of seeing you. You were in bed and there was some sunlight in the room. There were so many tubes sticking out of you and you were so much thinner. Your stereo and a few of your other possessions were arranged around the room and you were listening to some pleasant New Age music. There was a tray in front of your bed covered with pills and the remains of a bowl of soup. You looked up at me through eyes that betrayed both opiate intoxication and pain. But you greeted me clearly and, though I still could not hug you for all the tubes, our hands warmly embraced...

Robin was not the first of my companions to die. A little more than a year earlier, Sumi and I returned home from a weekend in New York to find our roommate, friend and lover, Jody, dead, having accidentally suffocated himself while inhaling nitrous oxide from a garbage bag. Jody's passing brought death into our lives with an immediacy that transfigured not only my memories of him, but memory itself. After Jody's death I felt uneasy, disturbed, but I could not I identify why. I spent many hours in therapy analyzing aspects of my character and history without ever hitting on the cause of it. Robin's call and the inevitability of his impending death amplified my uneasiness into fear.

...There are a few things that stick out in my memory of our last meeting. I remember the pain you were in, how you had to argue with the nurse who came by to give you more morphine until a doctor finally came by and told her it was okay, to give it to you whenever you wanted it. I remember you struggling to get out of bed, the first time in how many weeks? We went outside on the porch, your tubes trailing from a wheeled contraption that I pushed along behind you. So we could sit outside on the porch and sip one last cup of herbal tea together, outside with the birds and the breeze. We went back to your bed. You talked about the people who had been coming by asking for your stereo and other possessions. Then you told me there was something you wanted to give me and taking off the winged silver scarab which you had worn every day since we'd met you said five words, "I give you my power." As you handed it to me you seemed to relax. Then you took off the pentagram I had given you on our camping trip with Sumi, three years earlier, the pentagram Jody had given to me four years before that. "I think I should give this back too", you said. I remember being overwhelmed with feeling, telling you I loved you, still being unable to really hug you. I gave you a kiss instead.

I told you that I would try to stop by the next day before I caught my flight back to Boston, but I am sure we both knew I would not. We had already said our good-byes...

Robin's death revealed the fear I had been hiding from myself for so long. I was afraid that I too was infected. I might even have infected my closest friend, Sumi. The sheer horror of those thoughts had kept me from thinking them for nearly five years, since my last HIV test. But I found myself unable to bring myself to Robin's bedside until I faced them.

When Robin called I had to make two journeys to reach him. One, that of a few thousand miles, was easily accomplished. The other, inner journey, was harder. About a month before Robin's call I discovered an old letter which Jody had written to someone else, using my computer, shortly before he died. In the letter, Jody talked about fear. He said that ordinary people deal with fear by repressing it, by getting angry or by running away. However, Jody said there was another, a magical or spiritual way of dealing with fear. He called this "walking calmly into fear."

I remembered Jody's words during the week of soul searching I spent in San Francisco before going to see Robin. Each time that week when I learned of a former friend or lover who had gotten sick or died, I replayed them in my mind. Eventually they helped me to enter Robin's room..

When I returned home, walking calmly into my fear got me into the receiving room of the free and anonymous HIV testing center. It also got me through the two week wait for my results. I was completely shocked to learn I had tested negative. I felt blessed beyond what I deserved.

...There is still another good-bye, though, that I wish I could have said to you. I see now that the selfish fear of my own mortality prevented me from seeing the enormity of the tragedy we faced. Today, sitting in the forest with my three year old daughter, I was moved to tears remembering you. I wish I could have shared those tears, the depth of my love and loss of you , with you before you died. I would have hugged you in spite of those damn tubes!

Those tubes and my fear kept us from really making contact at the end. Still, when you said "I give you my power," I know you really meant it. And I was empowered and transformed by our last encounter. Your parting gift to me finally got me beyond myself. I learned to go through my fear. I also learned how to cry. It was big medicine you gave me, my friend.

Today when I cried and my daughter asked me why, I told her it was because I missed you. "But God is still alive, Daddy." She said. I am also alive, and with me your memory, clear and vibrant like the songs boys make each spring by blowing on green blades of grass stretched reedlike between palm and thumb. I told my daughter that I was all right, that it was all right to be sad sometimes about people who died. I told her it also made me happy sometimes to remember you I blew a blade of grass in song for you.

After Robin's death and my testing negative, I realized what a huge burden my unseen fear had been. It took tremendous psychic energy to repress all of that fear. I know now that for years I was not as close to my friends as I could have been, because I was hiding from myself. I can never replace the lost chances for real intimacy that I could not comprehend in my estranged state. I can only go forward.

It is impossible to have sympathy for others until we are sensitive to our own feelings. Robin, who in life was always so sensitive, gave me at the end the ability to be sensitive to my own negative feelings, to drink deep from the river of my own pain. There are many times since when I have wanted to suppress it. Yet always it comes bubbling back to the surface. Though this river's depths are despair, it surface reflects love. When I allow myself to taste it, I detect the flavor of shared suffering. In sorrow, we are one.

Robin's death deepened my appreciation of life, pain and fear. In the glorious and terrible fabric woven of these strands, I have spotted the thread of love. I still nurse these memories, these wounds, tenderly, like newborn babies. Sometimes they cry out fiercely in the night and I can not sleep. They need care. I think I am more caring towards others because of Robin's gift to me.

…So I guess these words have to serve in place of the other goodbyes we never got to share. This is my acknowledgement of all that you gave me, both in life and in death. Of course the enourmousness of your loving heart and the depth of our friendship can never really be conveyed. It is a private secret, unknowable by anyone except us.

Still, I hope that this letter and my reflections on our time together are helpful to others who read them, though most will never know the desperate and terrible times and conditions under which we lived. For there is tragedy and fear of tragedy in every life. You taught me that for each person there is nothing more tragic than to succumb to that fear. You did that not only by the indirect lesson of your death, which shocked me into facing my own fears of mortality; you also did it by your example of generosity, gentlesness and quiet forebearance. At the end, these traits gave you a dignity which other friends of mine who died slowly could not maintain. Although I was not composed to say goodbye to you at our last meeting, you were together enough, in spite of everything, to say goodbye for both of us.

So now I add these words, my echo of your goodbye and of your eternal hello. I take these lessons and the many bright memories you left me whereever I go. Your spirit, which you nicknamed Aza Zaza in Radical Faerie way, still visits from time to time. Occasionally that makes me cry, but more often I laugh, as we so often laughed together. I am sorry that we can not share any more moonlit nights, or practical jokes or unencumbered hugs. Still, in the deepest sense, I am holding you always.