He was one of those people that you liked. He had a ready smile. If you were down, well he could make you laugh or even feel better. He told jokes and seemed to have an interesting store of hope and generosity. He was my friend.
He was dying. It was the early days of the HIV pandemic. He didn’t take care of himself. He went out drinking more accurately drunking. He stayed out all night. He just wouldn’t take care of himself. But he was my friend.
He went out and purposefully infected people with HIV. Hepatitis C was not yet treatable and he never told those he exposed. He lost his home. He lost an apartment. He stored things and Storage Wars would have described his life with the amount of his life that was auctioned off, but he was our friend.
We talked to him, we comforted him. We held his hand. We loved him. He was my friend. He was dying. We reached out. We stayed by him. We felt used.
He went to hospice, but didn’t tell us, tell me. I was his health care proxy but he changed that but no one knew. The chaplain in the hospital called and let me know that no one was coming to see him. He was dying. But we were angry and felt abused and he closed the door. He thought he was protecting us? He was getting what he wanted/needed? Or was his pain so great that he was not able to let it go. He wanted to inflict or perhaps transfer it to us. But he chased us away. And at the end we couldn’t find him until he died.
When he died, his body lay in the morgue, no one to claim his mortal remains, no one to mourn his passing. In the end he did not allow us to care and be his friend.
So, his friends, his alienated, angry, betrayed community found a paupers grave. Some of us gathered to ask God to let perpetual light shine on him and to grant us peace.
He was our friend. We were done. He was gone. But were angry. We hurt in a loss of trust. Promises that friends make that ended broken. We sought to journey with him.
We gathered and prayed. We gathered with tears and anger and thanks giving for having known this loving, caring, hateful and abusive man. We raged, we laughed, we cried and we let him go to his rest and ask that light shine on him and all he loved.
He loved. He was our friend. And no matter how we felt at his passing, we loved him enough to be angry and hurt and sad. We loved him enough to hate him for how he treated us. And to wonder if we could have done better in how we walked with him. We loved him enough to give thanks for the journey together.
We could have just been done.
We didn’t do that, what we did was give thanks for having shared the wonders of life so that we can remember the good and live with hope and healing.
