The challenge of loss - my perspective - Obituary

My father, Stan, was an artist and professor who first discovered his voice in 1960s San Francisco. He became an award-winning poet in the brief span of time just after the beatniks started to lose ground and the hippies were gathering numbers. For Dad, homosexuality was a colorful enigma and an intrinsic part of the city he was so madly in love with. After I came out to him at 18, he treated my sexuality in much the same way. Gentle teasing was his preferred method for showing me that my sexuality would always cause me more disquiet than it would ever cause him. I think he knew even then that the struggles that lay ahead for me would cast him on the periphery.

He was right. He stood back and watched as I wrestled with the tiresome questions that confront so many young gay men who've been told they're attractive one too many times. Fads or friends? Tricks or partners? Shame or sobriety? In none of these struggles did my dad play a central role, which is probably why my sexuality played no role at my father's bedside as he waged a four-month battle with inoperable brain cancer.

It sounds strangely boastful to say that I had not one unresolved resentment toward my dad. Surely I had some reason for a tearful confrontation reminiscent of an off-Broadway play, where misunderstood gay son finally speaks his mind to unforgiving father. I'm embarrassed to admit how badly I wanted such a grievance. I craved any self-serving and dramatic distraction from the swift and unrelenting passage of his illness.

From biopsy to death, there were no breaks and no miracles. Before treatment, Dad lost the use of his right side thanks to the tumor's position After finishing chemo and radiation, he slipped into a world of flightening delusions that included knives being driven into his back and burning sheep running across fields. (The radiologist was baffled and had no explanation.) Just as the tumor was brought to a standstill by treatments, pneumonia and a host of other infections landed my dad in a light coma he would never come out of. Worst-case diagnosis for a glioblastoma is usually six months. My dad got four.

As someone who once used his sexuality as a hot button for almost every occasion, I was shocked and humbled by how small a role it played in the biggest upheaval of my life so far. Being gay had been my way into or out of any conflict. At my father's bedside it was neither. Still I searched for an angry distraction, so I shuttled my resentments elsewhere.

I was envious of my older gay friends who had survived the worst days of the AIDS epidemic by gathering around the beds of dying friends and lovers. What a perfect rehearsal for this, and I had missed it by a decade! Wasn't I part of a community that had put forth unforgettable tales of loss and love? Where was my collective frame of reference for an illness this debilitating and swift? I was ashamed of my gay contemporaries who had prepared me only for sudden deaths, specifically the dance floor casualty, where the dying happens too quickly to get your attention, and when it's done there's always the stigma of blame to ease the pain of your loss.

It's amusing to hear "anger" listed as a single stage of grief. For me, anger is the water of grief. It moves everything else, and you're never sure what direction it's going to flow in. When my father died on December 9, it was like a speeding train had squealed to a halt and the conductor ordered my family, still dizzy and nauseated from the ride, to grab our bags and get off. Only now am I starting to realize that nothing could prepare me for all that came before.

Death as a concept is something we can all pretend to be familiar with. We break it down into broad categories that some are more intimate with than others: AIDS, cancer, and homicide are just a few. But as an event, death is terribly specific. Everything about my father is now united by a denominator too common to illuminate who he really was. No sexual orientation and no community can prepare you for the real challenge of loss: the challenge of remembering how a person lived and protecting their true identity from the poisonous power of how they died.

Rice is the author of the novels A Density of Souls and The Snow Garden.

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