"lasting impressions" (relationships, health)
I took a nap yesterday. I had a dream that I was in Chicago, where I used to live and where I often returned to visit Michael, one of my closest friends, and where I still go to visit the few remaining friends I have there and to take my little side trips to my home state of Michigan to see the few close relatives who still live there. I dreamed that I was at a favorite spot of mine on Lake Michigan and was thinking that I was never going to see it again because I was dying, and then I started thinking about Michael, who died in Chicago some years ago. I was missing him terribly, and I started bawling. I woke up and I was crying.
Why did I have this dream? I often wonder how much more time I have to live, and have had thoughts about dying as I try to get back to doing some work again. Will it wear me out, to the point where I’ll die sooner? Will I be able to complete any of the projects I start? What will people think if I just disappear? Will they feel hurt, betrayed, abandoned, angry? Will they wonder what happened? How can I let them know? (Of course I couldn’t let them know; how could someone else let them know?) Is it really worth trying to change my life, when I might have so little left?
I get surveys through my email. I usually earn a few points to try to win something in a sweepstakes, or credits toward some sort of premium. I haven’t won anything yet, but when you’re poor and have few options for making money, sometimes it seems like anything you can manage to do is worth a try. Today I did one on health. In it I was asked if I had ever experienced renal failure. Michael was in his early thirties when he died, of self-induced kidney failure.
There are these cultural myths that continue to grow, even among people with HIV and AIDS, that say that all you have to do is take the anti-viral medications and you’ll be fine. Well, Michael was a beautiful Black man, and was taking one of those medications long before those of us in the know knew and before researchers officially figured out that African Americans taking that particular medication were more prone to kidney failure. He hadn’t even been taking anti-HIV medications that long, and was already on dialysis three times a week. After a year or so, he felt that he didn’t want to deal with it anymore and had no other medication options. He was psychologically exhausted from his battle with AIDS, he had had a full and interesting life, and he decided it was his time to go. So one day in august he called me up and told me that he would be dying within a few weeks. He was immediately going off of the dialysis, and they projected he would be dead in two to four weeks. I booked a flight up from San Francisco to say goodbye.
I managed to get to see him twice before he died, although the second time he was not very clear, mentally speaking. He faded in and out of consciousness. I was glad to have had that time with him anyway, just lying there in bed with him, holding him, letting him know that it was okay. I was still in Chicago when he died. His “domestic partner” and his boyfriend didn’t call me, and wouldn’t answer the door when I went to see him the next morning, so I knew he had gone. They had each wanted to have him and control him in different ways while he was alive and they saw me as connected to him in a way that they never could be. When he died they finally had the control that they had always wanted, and could punished me for my closeness to him by barring me from being part of him any longer.
I had taken Michael in when his middle class Black family in the uppity suburbs had thrown him into the street at sixteen years of age because they found out he was gay. I had found him a place to live, helped him find a job, assisted him in moving along in the transition to adulthood. We fell out for a number of years because I decided he was being too whorish and using too many drugs as he explored his newly awakened sexuality, and he felt I was being judgemental about his life; I did what I could to try to help him, but I couldn’t bear to witness it. It all seems to have been a misunderstanding, and ten years later when we reconciled, we learned that each had been secretly in love with the other and we became secret lovers. Whatever was going on in our lives, when we came together it was sweet, loving support and passionate love-making.
When his domestic partner couldn’t let him move on after they broke up, and when his cold German boyfriend – who Michael couldn’t bring himself to leave because of the Damaged Goods Syndrome so common among people with HIV and AIDS – couldn’t possess him in life in the way he wanted, they took advantage of an opportunity they saw in his death. They had always resented the special bond that we had; it was more special than they knew, at least consciously, but in death they could rob me of a little piece of him, of a presence in the rituals surrounding the end of his life. It was a relatively small price for me to pay for them to feel bigger and better, yet I was still sad about it. In a way it didn’t matter, though, because Michael was already gone.
Maybe I had the dream because of my efforts to get back to work. Maybe I had the dream because of that survey question. Maybe I had the dream because Christmas day would have been Michael’s birthday. And maybe I had the dream because I just haven’t been feeling so well myself lately.
