The recent meta-fest after Commonmass' banning called my attention to this group; and browsing through the diaries here - with their poignant testimonies to the enduring value of human love in the face of tragedy and loss - has been both a moving, and inspiring, experience. A recurrent theme in the comment threads tells how uniquely and unpredictably grief strikes among individuals, which made me suddenly realize that I, too, have taken a long and arduous pilgrimage through that grim landscape and may perhaps profitably add a mite to the wealth of witnesses enshrined in this collection. It's not a typical story, in many ways; but it reveals both how insidiously, and inevitably, grief's toll must eventually be paid in the lives where it intrudes. Follow me below the orange winding cloth for one man's protracted journey through the valley of the shadow.
1. The Boy Scout
1966: I was 14 years old and making rapid strides toward young adulthood. A patrol leader in a Boy Scout troop just outside the DC Beltway in Virginia, I'd already completed a troop-sponsored 50-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail in the Shenandoah National Park: a test remembered for the rest of my life as a decisive turning point in creating the man I eventually became. The quasi-military discipline and civic pride of the Boy Scouts appealed to something deep in my consciousness; and I thrived in it.
My best friend in the troop, Eddie, was a year younger than I, but already six feet tall, with a noticeable beard coming in. Lanky and athletic, deeply tanned after three years in Hawai'i with his military family, he was cheerful and decent and friendly with everybody. We played many a pick-up football game with other neighborhood boys, hung out together after school, and went on woodland camp-outs with the troop pretty much once every month, during the three years we knew each other. When I eventually advanced to Senior Patrol Leader of the troop, Eddie became the leader of our old patrol.
One of the troop's financial mainstays (in those days before recycling became a thing municipalities paid any attention) was a regular paper drive, where the boys went door-to-door through the neighborhood and filled a rented dump truck with people's newspapers and magazines to sell to a local industrial paper re-cycler. Anyone who knows anything about teen-aged boys understands how carefully we inspected every stack of papers collected in that effort, hunting intently for the occasional random Playboy magazine (or, praise on high! entire collections of them!) that appeared among the Washington Posts and other ephemera. As Senior Patrol Leader, I admit, to my ethical chagrin, that a considerable stash of these artifacts regularly fell into my possession, during these drives - despite what many of the other, younger boys might have desired.
Safely at home, I spent many happy hours carefully digesting the mounds of information contained in these magazines, searching for every possible hint about what it meant to be a healthy, adult male in mid-twentieth-century America. The photographs of beautiful women in various states of undress were fascinating in the extreme, but what really set my mind to percolating were the letters to the Playboy Advisor: particularly the regularly appearing ones asking one or another question about the practice of homosexuality, which the Advisor always took pains to describe as a perfectly normal variation in human sexual response, unfairly persecuted by the social majority. As though proverbial light-bulbs were switching on in my head, I gradually realized exactly who I was and had always been.
Finally I understood why tackling Eddie in those sandlot football games had always been a source of such profound satisfaction to me: something I usually thought about again, hours after the game was over, with such bittersweet happiness. Why I thought about him every night while drifting off to sleep. Why I yearned to touch him every time we were together - to feel his body next to mine. I, I, I ... was a homosexual.
Unfortunately, the Playboy Advisor's approving this fact was not nearly enough to prevent my recoiling in absolute horror from it. Had there ever been even a single break between classes at high school, where somewhere among the teeming throng of students moving from room to room, some bully somewhere couldn't be heard tormenting a weaker classmate with the spat pejorative, "faggot"? Just because it never happened to me personally, due to my masculine and relatively athletic demeanor, did not make the horror of it any less paralyzing.
No, no: that would have been the worst possible thing that could happen to a boy, I instinctively understood: to be generally known as a homosexual among the thousands of teenagers roaming the hallways and restrooms of that school. That would have been the death of one's reputation forever, even if you didn't get the crap beaten out of you by a bunch of hate-crazed jocks. Homosexuals were all criminals ... or crazy ... or both, or something. It was impossible to trust just anyone on earth with that infinitely damning information.
And yet, there was Eddie, in my life, every day; and the yearning would not die away, but only intensify, the more denied. I made oblique hints about the situation and paid obsessive attention to every response he gave me, looking for any hint of a sympathetic opening; but he was steadfastly heterosexual in his basic outlook and apparently even unaware of the subtle undercurrents in the things I tried telling him. The situation bred hopelessness.
I became Junior Assistant Scoutmaster of the troop, at 16 years old, and Eddie rose to fill my former position as Senior Patrol Leader. We spent a Saturday night at the Byrd's Nest shelter south of Mary's Rock, along the ridge-line of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Shenandoah. Well after dark, as the campfires burned down and people started turning down their sleeping bags, I approached Eddie and quietly said: "This may sound crazy, but I really want to go up to the summit, right now."
"That's a great idea!" he chirped, and we gathered our flashlights and set off, just the two of us, along the mile-long stretch of trail through the woods leading to the summit of Mary's Rock. A huge outcropping of enormous boulders overlooking a precipitous cliff-face toward the west, the apex of Mary's Rock offers an unobstructed view of the Shenandoah Valley at Luray and northward along the Blue Ridge to the distant horizon. During daytime the vistas are breathtaking. On a clear night, such as this was, the twinkling lights of the valley and the endless canopy of stars above can only inspire - as they always have - a sense of limitless wonder and awe in the human heart. We lay on our backs in the darkness on a relatively flat boulder and drank in the sky, while the incessant mountaintop breezy gusting whistled and sighed over and around us. We were side by side, our bodies in contact. I loved him so much. The whole of my being sang and glowed with the power of the love in my heart for him. I had to tell him!
But I could not.
Eddie's father was an Air Force officer, and his tour at the Pentagon finally drew to a close. A new posting in Oklahoma awaited. One last camp-out was allotted us, at a private spot near Bull Run Mountain in Fauquier County, Virginia. As we were approaching our 2-man tent, after "settling" the rest of the troops down in theirs at lights-out, Eddie said: "Man, let's take our sleeping bags out in the woods and get away from all these little brats, for once."
I readily acquiesced and we worked our way out a path along the edge of a steep ravine until the campsite was neither visible nor audible. A huge, flat-topped boulder, jutting out into the maw of the ravine, presented itself, and we clambered up top. It was just the right size! We laid our bags side-by-side and scrunched into them, still mostly fully-clothed. But gravity and the slightly rounded top of the boulder were against us; we discovered that each, or both, of us was inevitably fated to roll off the boulder during the night and disappear painfully into the ravine below.
"Maybe if we hang on to each other," Eddie suggested, "it will be OK."
Maybe! I thought. "We can try it," I said.
So we turned toward each other in our separate bags and each put an arm around the other. It was just right; the formation was perfectly stable and no further danger of plunging to our deaths intruded. We agreed it looked like it might work and, in very short order, with his breath on my cheek and the pressure of his whole body laid against mine through the sleeping bags, the first great love of my life had fallen asleep in my arms.
I, for my part, did not sleep that whole night. I gloried in the songs of the insects, the gentle breezes wafting the leaves in the trees around us, the slow-motion revolution of the stars through the gaps in the canopy above us, and - above all - the face and the arms of the boy who silently gave me the greatest gift he could, on the last night we would ever see one another.
2. The Rebel
I nursed my psychic wounds and redoubled efforts, during Junior year, to become as scholarly and serious, as a student could be. A history class I was taking featured a field trip to the Gettysburg battlefield - of all days - on Valentine's Day of that year. After dark, we all poured into a large restaurant in downtown Gettysburg for dinner. Six of us crowded into a booth together. I crammed up against a huge picture window on one side; directly opposite me, a classmate named Steve, with four girls from the class filling out the table.
Having made a point to be studious, as said, I had sat in the very front row of this class all year, so really hadn't seen much of anything in that room, but the teacher's coat buttons and lecture notes. Steve was a rebellious sort near the back of the classroom: shaggy-haired, wearing torn jeans and work boots, making occasional snide comments to the side and generally taking pride in exhibiting no understanding whatsoever of the contents of the interminably boring history lectures we endured there. I had given him not even a second thought during the many previous months in the class; personally, I found Napoleon, Metternich, Lincoln, and Bismarck to be endlessly fascinating individuals.
Now that Steve sat directly across from me in this restaurant for the first time, however, I discovered to my embarrassment that he was, in fact, an incredibly charming and handsome young man. So much so, alas, that I could barely bring myself to look at him. While he chattered and laughed with the girls at our table, I pretended to gaze out the window into the park across the street in the February darkness, but actually studied his reflection there. Then suddenly I turned my head a little and saw my own reflection in the window, staring back at myself and past me to the other occupants of the table and the bustling restaurant beyond. In a flash, I saw as it were a vision that this was my life: fated to live silently on the edge of humanity, pretending not to particularly care, whilst secretly studying enviously out of the corner of my eye the proceedings I could never completely join. And on Valentine's Day, of all days.
I put this unsettling experience behind me for the rest of the year; but as Senior year began, Steve and I were assigned another class together; and this time I made a point of claiming a seat right next to him. By the end of September, my fate was sealed: head over heels in love, again; and again with a boy who showed every sign of only really caring about girls; and, again, my tongue was frozen to the roof of my mouth.
We spent some time out of class together, double-dated occasionally, smoked pot. Several times during that year, he made cryptic remarks that convinced me he knew exactly what was up with me - and that he might not be averse to having some kind of casual sex with me. Oh, the agony of that! Because, listen: I was no prude; I'd had casual relations with a modest number of people already by that time, both boys and girls; that was satisfying and fine, as far as it went. But when it came to someone I really loved: forget it, he would have had to acknowledge that love and reciprocate it, in order for me to risk the emotional devastation that would have followed for me, if it didn't work out. And I never saw any sign from him that he had any particular special feelings for me, beyond casual friendship. So I kept a lid on it and didn't push it. And agonized for hours every night about the impossibility of my emotions before finally sleeping.
And that's where it stayed. I graduated from high school with a 4.0 and a nagging conviction that my entire life up to that point had been a profound failure. I'd loved two different people intensely and never even had the guts to tell either of them.
3. The Pizza Baker
So I resolved to at least never again believe that I loved someone without clearly telling them about it. I got my chance something more than a year later, after walking into a pizza restaurant and experiencing what people popularly refer to as "love at first sight." George, a boy about my own age, was baking pizzas in the ovens there and everything about him - his gait, his build, face, eyes, hair, attitude, and capable hands - immediately melted my heart. I started making small talk with him when opportunity arose and he actually laughed at my witticisms. What more could I ask?
We definitely hit it off and started hanging out together nights, after the restaurant closed. We drove all over northern Virginia those nights, through the urban areas and along all the many winding, mostly wooded, deer- and fox-rich country roads that still existed in those long-ago days, before everything became a four-lane divided highway with stoplights at every other intersection. One Sunday morning after a rare heavy snowfall, we drove five miles along Braddock Road - long a major east-west secondary route in Fairfax County - through six inches of fresh snowfall that no other car had yet broken, in either direction, until we came across a huge tree that had fallen and completely blocked the road, forcing us to gingerly turn around and return to civilization. Life was beautiful and good.
After some weeks I screwed up my courage and told him how I felt about him. He took it calmly, if not enthusiastically, and simply stated that he was "not ready" to do anything about that. I took that calmly and resolved to wait and just continue being the best friend I could, whilst not denying my own feelings about him.
We rode bicycles along paths through wooded hillsides; and the reckless impetuosity of youth led us to search out every little bump in the country roads around us where I could jump my VW Beetle by approaching at just the right speed. The best of these occurred just at the top of a long, winding hill that eventually led down to the old town of Clifton, in the southwestern corner of the county. One night we approached that hump in the road at the "perfect" speed and actually, literally, unquestionably took off and flew over the crest of that hill and hurtled down the steep incline ahead through midair toward a sharp left turn and a thick stand of trees at the edge of the road. We had time to turn and look at each other in horror as the trees came rushing up toward us, utterly convinced the situation could only end in a horrible crash and death. But the bug landed just in the nick of time and, rather than bouncing, firmly gripped the road immediately, allowing me to make the turn and then pull over to the side and stop, where we just stared at one another again, in shock and disbelief. Boys will be boys.
Eventually, one chilly late winter night, seemingly apropos of nothing, George turned to me at a stoplight and said simply: "I'm ready." I drove out to a secluded spot right on the shore of Burke Lake and - in the front seat of that VW beetle (O! to be young and lithe again!) - made an heroic effort to show him just how appreciated he was. Toward the end, he asked: "What about the mess?"; and I answered: "What mess?" Because the whole point of doing it required taking his essence into me, mingling it with my blood and carrying him forward forever with me from that point onward, to make him a part of me. And I did.
Afterward, he said he had to admit it felt really good, but otherwise just remained uncomfortably silent. For my part, I was also quiet, but obliviously, because this was clearly one of the happiest moments of my life. Several minutes in the ride back home, he said: "Do me a favor, will you? Just don't ever mention this again."
And that's when I learned how quickly one of the happiest moments of a person's life can turn in an instant and become one of the bleakest. I assured him I would never consciously do anything to make him feel uncomfortable, and we naturally agreed to remain friends; but that, of course, was an impossibility. We started drifting apart from that very moment, and I entered into a deep depression. Whether I did nothing or everything, it seemed, the boys I most cared about had no interest whatsoever in returning my love.
4. The Intern
It was finally too much. I had to escape from this place and the profound dissatisfaction the very landscapes around me inspired. Despite having attended the March on Washington the previous year and burned my draft card (an empty gesture, having one of the safest lottery numbers possible), I enlisted in the Army in the Spring of 1972. I hadn't stopped believing the Vietnam War was a tragic and criminal mistake, but was still basically a patriot at heart and - more importantly - had to make a fresh start somehow. They trained me to be an MP and sent me to Mannheim, in Germany.
About a year into that tour, I was detached on temporary duty to the 130th Station Hospital in Heidelberg for an extended period. I was assigned a bunk in a room with several young medical interns from the hospital and immediately found one of them particularly simpatico. We were both McGovern voters, for one thing; both despised Henry Kissinger with a burning passion; both enjoyed world literature and the life of the mind. We started taking all our meals together in the mess hall; playing chess; smoking hashish after hours and drinking - we were twenty-something American soldiers, after all.
Not far into our relationship, I quietly came out to him; he said it didn't bother him, but gently insisted that he, himself, was definitely straight. I took that disappointing information in stride and continued working to deepen our budding friendship, all the while doing whatever I could to subtly seduce him. Because - as stated above from years previously - I'd long been aware that a certain number of straight men can definitely be convinced to at least engage in a casual liaison, even if only once, for a lark, or an experiment, or a diversion from other more pressing concerns. I liked this guy a lot, though was perhaps not ready to actually start talking about true love, yet. He made my mouth water, in any event.
On the last night of my temporary assignment in Heidelberg, I discovered my emotional machinations had hit pay-dirt. My intern piped up after dinner and said let's go downtown and get a hotel room for the night. Score! I thought: hot damn!
When we got to the hotel room and stripped, it started out just as I'd supposed: without reciprocation. But then suddenly he stopped me and pulled me up on top of him and started kissing me: with passion and abandon, like he really meant it. And that was the beginning of the four most incredible hours of lovemaking I ever experienced in this lifetime with a man. We fit together in every possible position, like we were made for each other; there was not one second of awkwardness in any of the shifting tides where we traded roles; every new motion was fluid and tender and intense and sensitive, as though we were bound together by some sort of subtle electromagnetic energy; every second of it was necessary and ecstatic and right. Afterward, bathed in sweat, we were truly spent and immediately dove into profound sleep.
In the morning, I was beyond happy. Surely, this was it: this was what I had waited seven long years for; this was the man who was worth giving my whole heart and spirit to, for as long as I had breath. We showered and went down to the terrace behind the hotel, under the sheer precipice of the Königstuhl and Gaisberg looming over the Heidelberger Altstadt, for breakfast.
I was ecstatic, but my intern remained subdued - actually glum, as I would presently realize. He eventually gathered his purpose and asked quietly: "Do me a big favor, will you?"
With dreadful foreboding, I seized the moment and assured him: "You know I would do anything for you - anything."
"That's what scares me," he responded. "Listen, I'm not sorry about what happened last night; I'm glad we did it. But in the future, if we ever run into one another again, I'd appreciate it if you just wouldn't mention it."
Oh! no! that again! oh! shot through my brain, but then I mastered myself, and quietly said: "No problem. You'll not hear another peep from me about it ever again. Just let me sincerely thank you once, before I go: I'll never forget this night - I'll never forget ... you - as long as I live."
"Yeah," he murmured, "me neither; that's what scares me, too."
And that's where it lay. Crushed, I threw myself back into my work in Mannheim and tried not to brood on lost potential and this latest magnificent failure in my ongoing quest to find somebody to love. But I just kept thinking about him.
After a couple months, I took the train back to Heidelberg one weekend and dropped by the hospital: just to say hey, how ya been, how's it goin' - not to say God, how I've missed you and cried for your arms. But when I walked into the barracks room we'd shared, his bunk was stripped to the springs and there was no footlocker anywhere in evidence. It being a Saturday afternoon, the whole barracks was practically deserted. Finally I found a familiar face down the hall and asked what had happened with my intern.
He didn't relish having to tell me.
He'd killed himself: overdosed on heroin, shortly after I'd left the city. Accident? Suicide? Nobody knew. Nobody'd had any clue he'd ever even been interested in heroin before, so it could have just been a horrible, first-timer's accident. Even so ... even so...
I made all the standard declarations about what a shame it was; how he'd seemed like such a good guy; it was too bad. Then I marched back out of the room and down the seemingly 20 or 30,000 miles of hallway leading to the end of the barracks. I was a fucking MP, after all: we know how to master our emotions and let the training take over. I was an MP; and for exactly that reason there was no person anywhere on earth I could ever share this grief, pain, rage, self-hatred and sheer terror with.
I had killed him ... with my love; however untrue or unfair this idea might be, it was the thought that tormented me in the immediate aftermath of the revelation.
Back at Mannheim, I went painfully through the motions of work for a number of days, or perhaps weeks, and then forgot about it. I didn't just put it out of my mind: I completely forgot about it. I forgot that I'd ever met him. He was gone forever out of my mind - and so was I.
4. The Interregnum
After separating from the service, I returned to the US and moved around from place to place: west, Rockies, south, east, never staying more than a few years in any one place, never really connecting with anybody on any deep level, never finding any satisfaction. I had my share of casual relationships, both with men and women, from time to time; I broke at least one heart profoundly, which have ever since deeply regretted; and every few years, there would always be some new inappropriate "great love," who conquered my heart without even trying or wanting to. I ended up in Iowa for many years - the kind of place that gays traditionally left forever, the moment they graduated from high school - serving as a caregiver for an invalid, aged relative, and safely rode out the worst of the AIDS crisis there by virtue of nearly inevitable celibacy and the deeply ingrained homophobia of the public square.
Long about 40, I experienced the obligatory mid-life crisis and my long-suppressed heart started flailing about wildly, settling on young men at least twenty years junior to me - one after another, as though completely out of control - so one day I took my heart out of my chest, put it on an imaginary rock, and beat it with an imaginary shovel, until it stopped quivering. No more! Never again! I would dedicate whatever years remained for me to creative and scholarly pursuits, political activism in the peace and civil rights communities, and the eternal quest for increased spiritual discernment. The constantly quibbling heart, forever yearning after companionship and intimacy, was dead.
And so it stayed.
5. The Retiree
One day during my early 50s, having given someone a ride to an opthamologist, I found myself sitting in the waiting room where pupils went to dilate. I struck up a conversation with a gentleman nearby, about my age, who volunteered he'd recently retired from the Army, after 30 years of service. Heh, I responded: many times, during the last three decades, I've thought not staying in the Army myself, after just one tour, was one of my bigger life-mistakes. He asked where I'd done my tour; and hearing my answer, lit up and pertly announced he'd done a tour at Heidelberg, himself.
We were off to the races, then. For a good half hour, we shared happy reminiscences of Heidelberg, the Rhine valley, Bavaria and the Alps: of the natural beauties there and the amazing cultural and technical curiosities of the German people, as well as anecdotes about some of the fellow servicemen we'd known. I left that doctor's office bathed in the delightful nostalgic glow of memories from a distant, seemingly idyllic time.
As the day wore on, however, a fly in the ointment started irritating me. I could remember, with startling clarity, so many details about Heidelberg proper, the river, the streets of the southern extensions of the city toward Rohrbach, the heavily wooded heights above it all, and the hospital buildings where I worked; but I couldn't for the life of me recall anything about the mess facilities, the latrine, or the bunk where I'd slept the whole time there. I could remember the varnish on a desk where I'd worked in the hospital proper, but had no clue about where I'd showered or eaten. This bothered me profoundly.
For at least two weeks, I spent some time every day chewing over this problem in my mind, and came no closer to any understanding of it. I pondered it during long walks through the neighborhood, and nights as I lay long awake before finally sleeping. There seemed to be no resolution or possible explanation for this conundrum.
And then, it finally came: my mind's eye saw myself sitting on the lid of a closed footlocker, with a chessboard on another footlocker immediately before me. Just opposite was a bunk with the ubiquitous olive-green blanket covering it; a hand was reaching out to move a piece on the board. I followed that hand up the arm to the face, and a supernova explosion of recognition, memory, and horror rushed into my consciousness, after thirty years in the dark. I seemed to understand everything at once. And then the tears came.
Every day for a month, the tears came, hour by hour. Of course, I couldn't blame myself; of course, I had to blame myself; of course, a judgmental and vicious society had itself shaped every element of this terrible outcome with its pernicious, invisible ideological hands; and of course, finally, the pathos and tragedy of the whole situation was beyond all blame. Whatever had really transpired, the world had sustained an injury in that young man's death that could never completely heal - only scar over and ache forever, whenever psycho-atmospheric conditions align.
Grief of loss and regret is forever and inevitable; only the ways we choose to endure and assimilate that pain is ours to create. For my part, at least once every year, I make a point of climbing to the summit of Mary's Rock and thanking the heavens there for the inestimably precious gift of life and love, with all its trials, imperfections and pain. My heart may be dead, but my spirit will climb that mountain in gratitude to the end of time.
Welcome, fellow travelers on the grief journey
and a special welcome to anyone new to The Grieving Room.
We meet every Monday evening.
Whether your loss is recent, or many years ago;
whether you've lost a person, or a pet;
or even if the person you're "mourning" is still alive,
("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time),
you can come to this diary and say whatever you need to say.
We can't solve each other's problems,
but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.
Unlike a private journal
here, you know: your words are read by people who
have been through their own hell.
There's no need to pretty it up or tone it down..
It just is.