TEN
■

 

deanny and i lingered outside the door for most of the afternoon but we were not invited back inside. Occasionally one of the participants would come out to get something or use the downstairs bathroom and Deanny would ask how he was.

“No change,” she was told.

Darcy continued to beat his drum and chant. Although he was very quiet, he could be heard all over the house. My grandmother — who had gone to her room, and did not come back out even when my mother and aunt told her the end was near — asked, loudly but with no authority, “What is that awful racket?”

No one paid her any attention.

Over the next hours, David’s vitals and blood pressure dropped. He became unconscious. My mother sat on one side of the bed holding his hand, my aunt Jeanette the other. They watched as his chest rose and fell, a wheezing coming from his mouth and nose. Someone in that room gave a cry. Deanny and I heard it. We sat up rigid on the rumpus room sofa, listening. Later, my mother told us David had vomited “coffee grounds,” blood that had backed up in his system after the kidneys shut down. Years later, I would understand, from my work with my clients, what this meant. The vomiting of coffee grounds spelled the end. Fred cleared his throat and passageways with his fingers.

At five o’clock, my mother, ever the watchful parent even in the midst of such a tragedy, came downstairs to make sure Deanny and I had eaten. Under her supervision we were forced to fill up plates from the food in the fridge. On the way back up she went into my grandmother’s room to once more see if she could coerce her into saying goodbye to David. Deanny and I heard them from the hallway.

“I can’t,” said my grandmother. “Don’t you understand that?”

“I cannot,” my mother said. “And I will never be able to. He’s your son. He’s dying. I can’t think of one single reason why you should not go in and say goodbye. You owe him that much.”

But in my grandmother’s purview, she owed her son nothing. She had long ago disowned him, and he only came back under her roof under false pretenses, which she had allowed in a weak moment.

At eight o’clock, fourteen hours after we had first discovered him swollen and near death, his vitals and blood pressure dropped dramatically. He vomited once more, again mostly dark blood. The redness of his skin faded suddenly, and the swelling began to go down. He began to suffocate in his sleep. Dr. Fred tried to open his airways again but to no avail. He took one more heaving breath, coughed, and more blood came up. Finally he lay still, his head fallen to one side. His heart stopped. His brain, finally, had shut down.

It was a horrible, painful death.

There was no dignity or nobility in it at all.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

one of the most delightful things about my uncle when he was a boy, my mother says, was his capacity for learning. He started speaking when he was a little over a year. It surprised everyone, and even shocked a few, that such a little child could string together sentences with an almost mature eloquence. My grandfather, who in his practice saw many children and was aware of patterns of their development, knew there was something unusual about his son. He put him through a number of tests, with words and symbols printed on cards. When David was older, he administered psychological and intelligence tests. The results of this testing, he pronounced to my grandmother, was that he believed they might be raising a genius.

I saw no evidence of this in my uncle when I knew him. He was intelligent, yes. And articulate. But I detected no stratospheric iq. My mother says this was for two reasons: David hid it, and actually denied it. He was a precocious child, he said, but he had grown into his abilities, which were barely higher than normal. He pointed out that he had actually achieved little in his life, and as much as he loved being a teacher, it was hardly the place where geniuses ended up.

My grandmother didn’t argue with him. Granddad asked him to read books at the age of seven and eight that most people don’t tackle until adults, if they ever do. They discussed them, and my uncle made cogent arguments for and against points my grand-father raised. Everyone was delighted. My grandmother insisted he would become a doctor or a lawyer or a politician. But by the time my uncle entered the disappointing profession of teaching, she no longer cared where his star rose and how high. My grandfather was dead and my grandmother no longer spoke to him.

My mother and Jeanette continued to idolize David. It was he who had read to them each night before bed, and he who had chosen the books.

“He spent half of one year,” my mother tells me, “when he was sixteen and we were still in elementary, reading us David Copperfield.” She laughed. “Jeanette and I were usually asleep in minutes.”

David had few friends in school. It had bothered my grandmother that he wasn’t as interested in people as he was in books. When he was small and she took him to play with other children, he stood off to the side and refused to get involved in their games. He wasn’t arrogant. There was a natural timidity in him that bothered my grandmother. She complained to my grandfather that he was antisocial, but my grandfather said she should give David time, that he had to grow into himself.

My mother is telling me all this as she sits on one side of me on the sofa, Jeanette in the wingchair across. I tell her I don’t see the point. I had gathered all of this anyway, if not in detail.

“Of course you do,” says my mother. “But don’t you see?”

“See what?”

“How much she loved him.”

“She had an awfully strange way of showing it.”

“I’m not finished yet,” says my mother.

“Gay,” my mother says, “was not a common word in those days. And homosexuality was never spoken about. Your uncle David told me once he knew about himself by the time he was thirteen. This was when he began to withdraw into himself. He became absorbed in books and his school work. It bothered your grandmother. She was becoming surer by the minute that David was a misfit. Dad began asking David to spend more time in his study to talk things out, and he did, though I don’t think they resolved anything. David knew what he was. He knew how the news would be taken if he decided to tell. It was much more difficult in those days than it is in your generation.”

“It’s a wonder he came out at all,” I say.

“But he did,” my mother says. “David got a certain thoughtfulness from Dad, but he could be stubborn like your grandmother. The fights the two of them had over small things when David was a teenager. The angrier your grandmother got the more your uncle dug his heels in. Your grandfather rarely interfered, and if he did attempt to intercede, it was almost always on the part of your uncle. I think he knew David was struggling with something, though I’m sure he didn’t know what. The only book he could find on his condition, David told me later, was a book from the library. He stole it rather than be seen checking it out. It was called Being Homosexual. The book described homosexuality as a disease. No wonder David’s teenage years were a misery.”

Listening to my mother, I have a visual image of my young uncle, an angst-ridden teenager, lying on his bed, the same bed on which he would later die, reading Wilde’s Epidemics of Ireland or Lucretius’s The Nature of Things from my grandfather’s collection in his study. My own pangs about my sexuality when growing up were less about what people would think of me than contracting the plague my uncle had. I denied my sexuality because I was fearful of it, not of people. My mother would accept me, I knew. As would Aunt Jeanette. My grandmother would hate that I wasn’t normal, but she would be kept at bay because of her daughters. The world, however, could not be kept at bay. The sickness that was killing gay men by the thousands, and that we heard about on the news nightly through most of my teens, could not be ignored. It was this that would force me into myself and, unlike my uncle, I would not recover.

I listen as my mother continues her story. I am impatient, and I can’t imagine what she has to tell me would change my mind about much. But she is my mother, and I can’t deny her.

At eighteen, when he finished high school, my uncle announced he was not going to university. He wanted to travel the world. My grandfather asked him where he wanted to go. David answered that he wanted to see everywhere — the US, Europe, maybe Asia. My uncle was ahead of his time. The mass migrations of young people from west to east in search of spiritual enlightenment would not begin for another five or six years. He anticipated it.

My grandmother scoffed. She asked him if he intended to pay for these voyages with buttons and wishes. He had a college fund, but my grandmother would not let him have the money to pay for travel. On this my grandfather agreed, pointing out that David would need something when he came back. He gave his son money to start out with, on the understanding that David would have to earn the rest.

My uncle took a job for a year as a sawyer at the mill. He saved every penny. His mood, according to my mother, improved. He came from work at night tired but satisfied. He was going away. He had long talks with my grandfather in the den on the weekends. My grandmother complained that he did not go out, that he knew no one his own age. He told my grandfather that the things other teenagers cared about — cars and women and alcohol — didn’t interest him. He found them puerile, he said. My mother remembers the word specifically because my grandmother had to look it up.

No one questioned why my uncle said he was not interested in women. Later, my grandmother would say this was their first clear indication, and that something should have been done about it right then. She remained convinced she could have saved him. This made my uncle wonder later if maybe Grandnan hadn’t also read Being Homosexual.

David’s work at the mill didn’t diminish his brilliance one whit. He read voraciously. He talked to his sisters, told them that one day he would send them postcards from all over the world. He kept this promise. My mother still has those cards, and has shown them to me. She guards them as jealously as my grandmother did the wartime letters of my grandfather.

My grandmother, a few weeks after he had been working, began demanding he pay room and board. She didn’t need the money. She was, she said, teaching him life lessons. David believed she was attempting to sabotage his trip. My grandfather put his foot down, informing my grandmother and everyone else in the house that no son of his would pay to live under his roof. He was the provider and it was up to him to say who paid what.

My grandmother retracted, and David got to keep all his money. He barely spent a penny of what he made, and after a year and a half, he had saved up almost four thousand dollars. In the early nineteen sixties that was a lot of money. In July of that year David bought a ticket to New York City. He’d always wanted to see it. From there, he was going to work his way across the US.

The night before he left, David and my grandfather spent all night in the den with the door closed. When my grandmother got up the next morning grandfather was not in bed with her. He was still with David. She scolded them both, informing them that they were sure to get sick, staying up all night without sleep, behaving like children.

David smiled, according to my mother. That day, he was free.

He would end up in Paris, teaching for a few months at a language school. He lived in Montparnasse, rubbing shoulders with ex-pat Americans and Spanish novelists. On one of many postcards he sent, he wrote: I feel as if I’m living in a literary dream. The home of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Parker and Joyce and Stein. You should see the Pont Alexander at night! A golden-lighted vision!

The romantic in my uncle came out. Advocate could not contain him, and not just because of his sexuality. For years he had been reading about the world, but unlike my grandmother and grandfather, he wanted to see it. My aunt Jeanette had also dreamed of seeing the world, but for all her bravado at home, she was, in the end, too timid. Some people grow out into the world, and some grow down into it. Jeanette is one of the latter.

But David’s true liberation did not result from his having left Advocate. He began mentioning in his letters from Europe a young French man he was travelling with. Gaëtan figured more and more in his stories and my mother realized later he was in a relationship. He never said as much, but some of the postcards he sent home from Europe only talked about his companion. My grandmother was suspicious, believing he would be robbed because the French couldn’t be trusted.

My grandmother had never met a French person in her life.

My grandfather responded to these letters and postcards, saying he was glad David had a travelling companion. My mother tells me she thought Granddad might have been troubled by it as well, though not to the extent Grandnan was. It was around this time that he started to need more rest and quiet. He had always had a weak heart, and he was feeling ill or tired more frequently.

My grandmother claimed he began sneaking away for these breaks after postcards from David more than any other time. The postcards, according to my grandmother, were too enthusiastic. They did not remind her of a nineteen-year-old boy and his travel buddy. There was too much yearning. Too much romance. From the beginning she smelled a rat.

In the end, my mother tells me, David stayed away nearly five years. My grandfather, according to my mother, started to feel hurt. My grandmother, as usual, was only angry. “There’s finding yourself and there’s losing yourself.” She thought David had done the latter.

Not once, after those few thousand dollars he took from my grandfather to add to his own meagre pile, did David write home and ask for more. He worked his way through Europe, as a farm hand, or teaching English, and once at a turnip pickling factory. That could be done more easily in those days, when work visas were not required or if they were no one worried about them. After Europe, he went to Turkey, then to India, and then to Japan. He wrote a postcard from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. The picture was of the A-bomb Dome. He scrawled, The evil that men do on the back. My grandmother got tired of the postcards and refused to look at them any longer, but my grandfather, mother, and aunt enjoyed them.

Eventually, grandfather stopped saying what a good thing David’s trip was. Perhaps it was because he missed his son, or perhaps because he’d begun to wonder what world David was actually exploring.

The last postcard David sent was from Hong Kong, and it informed them that he was coming home. I’m flying into Toronto, he wrote, where I’ll set up an apartment and then come back for a visit. My mother and Jeanette had practically forgotten what their brother looked like, and were excited. They jumped up and down like the schoolgirls they were when they were given the news.

But not everyone was pleased. My grandmother harrumphed when shown the card. She had developed a fierce resentment against her oldest child in the time he was gone. Partially, my mother figured, because of what she believed David’s absence had been doing to her husband. His heart seemed to bother him more and more. He missed David, and may have wondered what he had done wrong to keep his son away so long.

They had to wait two months for David’s arrival, while he set himself up in Toronto. This, too, bothered my grandfather. He wanted David to go to medical school, so that he could take over his practice. David, for his part, had made no mention of wanting to be a doctor. He told my mother later that teaching English as a second language in Japan had convinced him that he would be a good teacher. And since he loved books, it seemed natural to him to be an English teacher. I sometimes wonder if his homecoming that summer was anything like his final homecoming in 1984. My mother tells me that the entire family was there to meet the train. Then too they had been shocked by David’s appearance — not because he was thin, but because he had filled out and become a man. He was heavier, though still fit, and he had a beard and long hair.

My grandmother told him that he looked just like the wild man of Borneo. My uncle responded that he had been to Borneo and that it was a nice place. My mother and aunt laughed. Grandnan did not. She still thought David “looked a fright.”

Far from being put out by my uncle’s looks, my grandfather swelled with pride. His son was his own man, and actually looked it. All my grandfather’s worries about school and medicine went out the window, my mother said. He was plain happy to have his son back.

David seemed to have changed completely. The unhappy, insecure, withdrawn boy that they had known was gone, replaced by this confident, self-assured young man. Unlike most people who travel looking for answers only to discover that their problems follow them, my uncle really had found himself.

My grandfather hugged him, then David hugged his mother and sisters. Once home, he gave gifts from his travels: a carved wooden Buddha for Jeanette, a pair of amber earrings made in Germany for my mother, some books for my grandfather — one of them Lucretius in the original Latin bought in Rome — and a Turkish carpet for my grandmother.

One of the first things my grandfather did was to pull David into his den. My uncle laughed and said “Christ, Dad. More Lucretius?” My grandmother heard and informed her son that he may have spent time in godless places, but hers was still a house of the Lord. David apologized to her, but before entering his father’s den he leaned over to my mother on the rumpus room sofa and whispered, “She hasn’t changed.”

Perhaps she hadn’t, but my mother says Grandnan was still happy to have him home. She hung the Turkish carpet in a place of honour on the wall in the living room, and prepared a meal. David and my grandfather spent two hours in the den, until my grandmother called them out for supper. It was a joyous occasion. Uncle David recounted his adventures, and my grandmother ran down every place he had been as dirty, uncivilized, and godless. David baited her. He talked about Hindus and Moslems. He described using pit toilets in India. He told about a murder he had witnessed in New York.

My grandmother pointed out to her daughters that they should be grateful to live in a civilized country.

Apparently New York, to my grandmother, was “uncivilized.”

David stayed one week. He told his parents he’d been accepted at University of Toronto in Education. He wanted to be a teacher. This was no doctor’s position, and Grandnan, my mother says, wanted to dissuade him of the choice, but could not. It’s hard to argue with a man who wants to be a teacher. My grandfather was delighted. If he was disappointed, he never said.

It was partially to get his college fund that David came back to Advocate. His father and mother had been proved right; the day he would need that money had arrived. They agreed to give David his college fund.

My mother says that was the best day of her youth. Even my grandmother was caught up in the atmosphere of celebration. A young life had been nurtured and brought to fruition and the boy was now a man, about to embark on his own life. It was apparent, my mother says, how proud my grandfather was of the man my uncle had become.

My uncle, of course, asked after my grandfather’s health. Was he still taking his nitro? Did he still get his heart checked regularly? All was well there, my uncle was told. My mother still wonders, she says now, if my uncle was testing the waters, seeing how much his father could take. Because it was true he had found himself. He knew who he was, and he knew that he could never fully be that person if he kept it from his parents, whom he loved. He planned on telling them.

The morning his train was scheduled to leave, he asked if he could have some time alone with both of them in the den. My grandmother was instantly wary. She was never invited to den discussions.

“I made a promise to your grandmother,” my mother says at this point, “that we would never talk about what I’m about to tell you. Jeanette and I were never allowed to bring it up. Even between ourselves. I guess we got so used to it that we never did. We should have told you sooner.”

We have been in the living room for an hour, and the time of my grandmother’s funeral is bearing down upon us. My mother and Jeanette seem no closer to the point of this story.

I got to know my uncle backwards instead of forward, like most relationships. Our association before he became sick was brief, and I saw him as someone who had interrupted my life. I did not have enough time to develop a lasting relationship. David was, more than anything, a symbol to me — of injustice, of disease, of small-town narrow-mindedness and fear. He made me an advocate for the cause, much as the Protestants had been urged to be advocates for their faith. Our brief association had determined the entire course of my life. His insistence on being his own man despite the opposition impressed me, though I have never been quite able to manage this myself. And of course he was the first gay man I knew. Hearing about his youth, and my grandmother’s relationship to him, is interesting, but not a game changer. I tell my mother this.

“A few more minutes,” she says. “And we’ll be done.”

“Good,” I say.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

the word gay, my mother says, was not common then. David might have planned on telling his parents he was homosexual or queer. The truth, my mother admits, is she and Jeanette have no idea what words David used.

They were hanging around at the door, the voices were too low to hear, when it was suddenly flung open and David came stomping out. Grandnan and my grandfather followed. My grandmother commanded David to come back, he wasn’t to run off as if he’d just given a weather report.

“What’s the point?” shouted my uncle. “You won’t listen!”

“The Bible is very clear, David Owen McNeil. This is an abomination.”

My grandfather, according to my mother, looked waxy and white. He stood behind my grandmother as she and David faced off in the living room. David was flushed. My mother says she had never seen him angry before that day, but he was then.

“I told you,” he said, “because I thought you had a right to know. Not because I wanted you to change my mind.”

“You don’t have a mind,” cried my grandmother, “if this is what it’s telling you!”

My grandfather put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. Whether it was to steady himself or calm her was unclear, my mother says. She and Jeanette still had no idea what the argument was about. More calmly, perhaps because he seemed to be struggling for breath, he explained to his son that something such as this was not unheard of to him. He had had patients.

“But David,” he said. “These men live lives of secrecy, even blackmail. Diseases. Never knowing the warmth of a loving family, or having children. Do you want to live your life in that manner? “

“I won’t hide it,” David shook his head. “I won’t.” He said this was not something that he could just change, like an old pair of socks. There were no treatments. It wasn’t an aberration. Or an abomination. It just was. “And there’s nothing wrong with it either. Even if your Bible says there is.”

“Blasphemy,” cried my grandmother. “The poor boy is lost already!”

My grandfather looked pained. He removed his hand from his wife’s shoulder to steady himself on the back of the sofa. My grandmother took a step towards my uncle. She said if this was the way he was then he wouldn’t be that way in her house. He could leave and never come back again, as far as she was concerned.

“Is that really what you want?” said my uncle.

“Yes!” cried my grandmother.

“Millicent,” my grandfather said. “Don’t. He’s our only son.”

“No son of mine will be this way. Not in my house.”

“It’s my house too!” my grandfather said, now holding on to the back of sofa with both hands, and his face, my mother says, blanched white. He was wheezing.

Uncle David looked at both of them unhappily. “I hate this,” he said. “But I can’t be something and then lie about it. I’m not built that way.”

“You should have lied,” said my grandmother. “You should have gone off and had children and a wife and never spoke a word of it.”

“You would have me put a family through that?” David said.

“Yes,” my grandmother said. “I would have.”

“Well, I won’t,” he said. “I am what I am, and all the arguing in the world is not going to change that. I wish you would just accept it.”

“Accept it?” cried my grandmother. “I will not!” My grandmother again informed my uncle that if he did not recant and live a normal life he would no longer be welcome in their home. “This is not a home of blasphemy and perversion,” my mother tells me she said. “It is a house of God, and Christian values.”

It was useless for my uncle to argue, but neither could he allow himself to be kicked out of his home as so many gay men had been before him. He loved his father. He loved his sisters. He loved his mother. He could not imagine living his life without them. He had to make his parents see reason. He asked his father to say something.

My grandfather did not. He held on to the back of the sofa, his head down, and when David asked him what he thought he only shook it briefly. “I don’t know …” he said, and stopped.

David pressed him. Did he want him to leave or did he not? Could they not sort this out?

Many years later, David told my mother it was foolish of him to come into the house and expect his parents to accept what it had taken years for him to accept himself. He was young, he told her. Idealistic. It was the sixties. Europe had taught him that there was so much more going on in the world than Advocate had let on. He had developed his own set of principles and expected his parents to live by them. He realized only later that this was wrong.

As he and my grandmother waited for my grandfather to answer, Jeanette saw him sag, and stumble. She cried to my grandmother, who turned around and caught him just as he was about to collapse to the floor.

“For God’s sake, Hal,” my grandmother said. “What’s wrong?”

“Got to lie down,” my grandfather croaked.

My uncle and my grandmother assisted him to the sofa, where he lay on his back breathing shallowly with his eyes closed and his hands folded upon his chest. My mother suggested calling an ambulance, but my grandmother refused. She blamed my grandfather’s spell on shock, brought on by the disgusting news her son had brought home. David tried to argue, pointing out his father’s pallor and blue lips.

My grandfather groaned, and tried to speak. The only word that anyone could make out was “David.”

As my mother relays the story, I again see how my grandmother could think there was a devil at work in our lives — never more apparent than when my grandfather was stricken at the same moment his only son came out to his parents. I do not think it was anything more than an unfortunate coincidence. My uncle’s news was certainly a shock, but not one big enough to stop my grandfather’s heart — especially as he seemed, even in those brief moments, more willing to accept it than my grandmother.

My mother admits now that my grandmother may have felt some guilt herself for what happened. If she had recognized right away he was having a heart attack instead of simply reacting violently to David’s news, she might have called the ambulance sooner. Over my grandmother’s protests David checked his father’s pulse. It was weak. He was having difficulty breathing. When he didn’t rebound after ten minutes, she began to get concerned. She shook him gently, and when he didn’t respond, she asked my mother to call the ambulance.

When the ambulance came, he was loaded onto a stretcher and taken to the hospital. Before getting into the vehicle with her husband, my grandmother told David that when she and his father got back, he would either recant his nonsense or he would no longer be welcome in her house.

My uncle said nothing. He and my mother and aunt stayed around the house. An hour later they received a call from Dr. Bodsworth, my grandfather’s physician. He’d had a heart attack but he was still alive. Two hours later they received another call from Dr. Bodsworth with the news that he’d had a second one in hospital and was dead.

When my grandmother returned home, she blamed my uncle.

“And what did he say?” I ask my mother.

“Very little,” she says. “He was as stunned as the rest of us. He told me later that even he thought it was his fault, at first. She said your grandfather could not live with what David had told them, and died as a result of it. She truly believed this. She never changed her mind about it. She kicked David out of the house and told him never to come back.”

“And he listened?”

“Not at first,” says my mother. “He begged her not to do it. He said he was sorry, and that if he had known he would never have told them. Even Dr. Bodsworth said it was unlikely David’s news had killed her husband, but she wouldn’t listen. While David stood there she tore the Turkish carpet from the wall and burned it in the backyard along with all the things he’d given us. He never made a move to stop her. He was crying, and Jeanette and I had never seen David cry before. Even as a kid he didn’t cry. The whole situation was awful.”

“So what did he do?” I ask.

“He left. When he saw that she wasn’t going to settle down. She threatened to call the police and have him removed. She said, ‘Take your soul sickness and leave here. I never want to see your treacherous face again.’”

My mother pauses.

“He was confused. Grief-stricken. Guilty and horrified. He left for Toronto and did as my grandmother asked. He never cashed his college fund cheque. Perhaps he thought she would soften one day, but she never did. Even when he got sick she didn’t forgive him. Now do you understand? Why she hated him so much? Why she couldn’t be there for him, even when he got sick and came home?”

“It was foolish,” I say, “to think that Granddad died because of Uncle David. And even more foolish to be resentful after he got sick.”

“Yes,” says my mother. “It was. Your grandmother was. She blamed most of her problems on other people, and she categorized human beings into acceptable and unacceptable lots. But your Uncle David forgave her, because he knew she thought he had killed her husband. He hadn’t, of course. But it explains a lot.”

“It doesn’t justify it,” I say.

“Jacob,” my mother says. “The world is not a balance sheet. I’ve given you this information so that you can find it in your heart to forgive her. Your aunt and I have. We think it’s high time you did.”

“I can’t,” I say. “Even if I wanted to, I can’t bring myself to do it.”

“Can’t or won’t?” My mother sighs, and shakes her head. “You’re so much like her, do you know that?”

“I know,” I say. “Believe me, I know.”

2

 

after uncle david’s body was removed from the house by ambulance, Dr. Fred drove Deanny home, though she hadn’t wanted to go.

“Go home, Deanny,” my mother said. “You can come back when things settle down.”

My mother and I and Jeanette sat in the kitchen and drank tea. There were no phone calls, no offers of condolence, though certainly the news must have spread. My grandmother had not left her room. No one checked the extension to see if she was making calls. Once, my aunt checked on her to see if she was okay. “She won’t open her door,” she came down and told us.

“She’ll have to open it sometime,” my mother said. “She can’t stay in there forever.”

“She should have said her goodbyes to him,” Jeanette said. “I can’t believe she didn’t.”

“She’ll regret it,” said my mother. “To the end of her days and beyond she’ll regret it.”

The phone rang at ten o’clock. It was Dr. Fred. He had signed the death certificate and since there was no need for an autopsy the body was to go directly to the funeral home. It had been refused.

“What?” said my mother.

“They’re worried about contagion. The staff is afraid to work on it.”

“Well, where is he?”

“Still in the ambulance. The paramedics are none too happy about it. They’re afraid the virus will jump hosts once the body is dead.”

“What are we supposed to do?” said my mother. “Bring him back here?”

“I’ll ask the hospital to hold him for a while. But we have to find a mortuary that will take him.”

“It’s ten o’clock at night!”

“Have you thought of cremation?”

“David didn’t want that,” my mother said. “We discussed it.”

“Try Trenton, then. Or Halifax if need be.” Dr. Fred then suggested putting all David’s sheets in garbage bags and burning them. “Just in case,” he said.

My mother related all this to Jeanette when she got off the phone. Her eyes were irritated from crying. “What about his funeral?” she said to her sister. “How’s that going to go?”

“Get Mom to call Father Orlis at the rectory,” Jeanette said.

My mother went upstairs and, after what seemed like a very long time, came down. “She’s calling now.”

A few minutes later my grandmother’s feeble voice drifted down. Jeanette went up to see her. When she came back she was more upset. Those brief hours of grief had been replaced already by frustration. “Father Orlis says that they will have a memorial for Uncle David. But they can’t have his coffin and body in the church. And they can’t bury him in consecrated ground.”

“My God!” my mother cried. “Why has thou deserted us?”

▪ ▪ ▪

 

the rest of the morning of my grandmother’s funeral, I pace the house in a welter of nervousness, dreading the noontime. I tell myself all I have to do is get through this day and then I can leave Advocate behind. I am uncomfortable with the half-truths and evasions in the eulogy; I am certain they will ring as false and untrue in the church as they do in my head. I can’t wait to get back to the familiarity of my office in Toronto. Into the comfortable confines of my life in the city.

I vow that after this I will force my aunt and mother to visit me, rather than having me come home. I try not to think about the story my mother and Jeanette just told me.

“For God’s sake, Jacob,” Jeanette says. “Sit down. You’re making me nervous.”

I do. I have already dressed, in the black suit I brought with me for this day. At eleven-thirty Deanny arrives. She is dressed in simple black dress, and she does not mention Pavel, the eulogy, or our argument the last time we talked. She hugs me in the kitchen. I don’t think Deanny has ever hugged me before. I notice that the top of her head only comes up to my chin. She sits with my mother and Jeanette, consoling them until the car arranged by the funeral home comes to pick us up.

My mother asks Deanny to sit with us. “You are as much a member of this family as Jacob,” she says. “Mom would have wanted you to be with us.”

Just before we are scheduled to leave, I ask my mother if she has Uncle David’s St. Jude’s medallion. I know she removed it from his neck shortly after he died, but she never said what she did with it. “I think so,” she said. “Why?”

“I just want to have it with me,” I say, “if I am going to do this. Could you get it?”

“I’ll look,” she said. “Though God knows if I can find it.”

Ten minutes later my mother comes down the stairs with the medallion in her hand, and gives it to me. She expected, I think, that I would put it around my neck, but I do not. I drop it into the side pocket of my suit. We do not speak in the car on the way to the church.

My grandmother had dictated what she wanted for a funeral, but I found myself subverting her by allowing an arrangement of lilies to find its way to the altar. She hated them. She said lilies were God’s way of reminding us that nature isn’t perfect. Jeanette and my mother had also arranged for a bouquet of yellow roses. She had always loved yellow roses, and refused to give away a cutting of the bush that grew in her yard no matter how many times she was asked.

The only thing for me to do as we enter the church is to act bereaved.

Even this I find difficult.

As we step inside, the congregation rises and stares at us as we walk in procession down the aisle. Father Harry stands at the altar, waiting for us to take our seats in the front pew. He wears vestments of grey and white and black that look, I think, like a Halloween costume of a newspaper column. My grandmother lies within the coffin, her body concealed by our angle, and I have no wish to look upon her.

Once we sit down, Father Harry does not immediately start the proceedings. Perhaps he wants to give us time to survey the casket. The entire town has turned out. There are people standing outside because there is no room. My mother takes my hand and squeezes it. Jeanette and Deanny cry softly on the other side of her. There are others sniffling in the church. My eyes are dry. It is still hard for me to believe, in one sense, she is dead, though the evidence lies right before me.

Father Harry begins the ceremony. “Eternal rest give to them, Oh Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.” An altar boy steps forward and lights candles around the coffin. Father Harry offers a series of prayers known as The Office of the Dead. We sing “On Eagle’s Wings,” a hymn based on Psalm 91. My grandmother chose it. I am not much of a singer, and I don’t know the words or tune. I fumble through it. Father Harry says the Mass for the Dead, then sprinkles holy water over my grandmother’s casket. Finally, he motions for altar boys to blow the candles. All in all, the rites take only a half hour, but prayers, the lighted candles, the music have bewildered and exhausted me. When he is finished, Father Harry nods at me.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

the day after my uncle died, my grandmother did not leave her room except to eat and go to the bathroom. I believe she had some inkling of the difficulty my mother and Jeanette would have in arranging the funeral, and she did not want to be a part of it. Whenever my mother or Jeanette called on her for some bit of information she gave it, but she would not come out.

My aunt and mother ceased mourning, for they could not be angry and bereaved at the same time — those are incompatible emotions. Both of them thought, naively, that when my uncle died the persecution would stop. But the town was still fearful of him, and since they had shamed themselves by refusing to support him while he was dying they could not very well step out of themselves and offer help now.

Henry came over. My mother asked him point-blank in the kitchen what they should do.

“It seems to me,” Henry said, in his laconic way, “that you should call a funeral home in Halifax. Maybe they could prepare him.”

My mother had tried the funeral home in Trenton, and they too had given her a feeble excuse. She took Henry’s advice, and had Jeanette call Halifax. It took her a while, but eventually they found one that would do it. “They’ll pick up the body from the hospital, take it back to the city, prepare him, and bring him back for the funeral. It’s going to cost a pretty penny,” my aunt said.

“Mom can pay for it,” my mother said. “It’s the least she can do.”

“As for the funeral,” Henry said, “I can call Lutheran and United on the other side. I know the ministers there.”

“Would you?” said my mother.

Henry spent a half hour on the phone with each of them. “The Lutherans,” he told us, “won’t do it at all. Said he’s not a member of the faith. The United said they would, but not with the body, like the Catholics. The pastor was real sympathetic, and said he very much wanted to, but his congregation wouldn’t let him. Seems they’ve already discussed it. Too many of them think having the body in there will contaminate the place. The pastor called them ‘foolish,’ but said his hands are tied.”

“Idiots,” my mother said.

“Not so fast,” said Henry. “The pastor said he’d officiate if you need him. He suggested you try the church on the reserve if others don’t do it.”

“Forget the church,” Jeanette said. “We’ll just do it outside.”

“You can’t do it outside with the body, Jeanette,” said my mother. “Think, would you!”

My mother didn’t mean this. She was tired, and so busy fighting the town even now that she wasn’t allowed to grieve properly. Henry asked if it wouldn’t be better if he dealt with all these details. “I know I’m not family, and I don’t know if your brother would have wanted it, but …”

“He loved you, Henry,” said Jeanette. “I’m sure he’d be honoured.” “Okay then,” said Henry. “I’ll get back to you.”

After he was gone there was nothing to say, and the house was quiet again. Jeanette said she was going for a nap. My mother asked what I wanted for supper.

“Nothing,” I told her. “I’m not hungry.”

“You’ll have to keep your strength up, Jacob. The next few days will be trying.”

They were. The next few years would be, as far as I was concerned. I went back to my uncle’s room. The bed was still unmade — sheeted and forlorn. I pressed play on the ghetto blaster — my ghetto blaster — Jeanette had placed in the room for my uncle in his final days, and listened to the sweet sounds of Haydn. He was my uncle’s favourite composer. I was not a wistful boy. I did not think in terms of kind recollections and soft memories. I saw only death in that room. The strongest memory of my uncle I would carry in the album of my mind was of the flies around his mouth. I shut the tape player off and retreated into my own room, which is where I would stay pretty much for the next six years.

3

 

“millicent mcneil asked in her final days,” Father Harry says to us, “that her grandson Jacob say a few words at her Mass. So I’ll ask him to come up here and do that.”

Every eye in the church is upon me as I stand before the casket. There must be two hundred people, and they all must be thinking the same thing. What is he going to say? They all know the relationship. They all know what I do for a living. Perhaps they expect vitriol and anger, the way I expected it myself when Father Harry first told me about this.

I do not give them what they want.

I should be nervous. I am not good in front of people at the best of times, and to be up here should be terrifying. But it is not.

I am not a religious man, or even a spiritual one. I believe we make our own destinies, and I do not believe we should put ourselves or our power in the hands of others to absolve us, to let ourselves off the hook. But I feel calm, almost guided.

I’m not sure when the idea came to me, or when I decided to leave Jeanette’s eulogy folded up in my blazer pocket and go it alone. I certainly had no idea of it when I entered the church, and through the Mass I was thinking only of the past, as I always did when it came to my grandmother. But when I got the cue from Father Harry it came to me.

I knew, and perhaps I’d always known, exactly what to do.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

my grandmother stayed in her room for the three days before my uncle’s funeral. The reserve had indeed offered its church and cemetery. My mother and Jeanette picked out his spot. The band council didn’t charge them for the space.

“You can visit whenever you like,” Darcy told them. “Your family is always welcome here.”

It was then my mother and Jeanette asked if they could, one day, be buried beside him. They were told they could. I have been to visit my uncle’s grave, to lay flowers. My mother and Jeanette and Deanny and Henry also go.

As far as I know, my grandmother has not once been to see it.

She could not give him this much.

My uncle’s funeral was at two on a Wednesday. There was no eulogy planned. There was no point, because very few people who knew him would be there. And no eulogy could be given that didn’t mention the awful events surrounding his death, so my aunt and mother decided against it. It was to be a simple funeral. The casket was closed. No one wanted to see his ravaged body. The word aids was never mentioned.

After the reserve offered their church, the United pastor made good on his promise to officiate. My mother had called Father Orlis herself and asked if he was going to attend, but gave up on him when he did not give her a straight answer. Deacon Harry wanted to go, but Father Orlis forbade him. It wasn’t proper, he was told, as Uncle David had been a sinner and had not been given the last rites. Apparently the deacon had not told him about hearing Uncle David’s last confession.

The most noticeable absence was not Father Orlis, or the deacon, or anyone from town. On the morning of the funeral my mother called out the time to my grandmother several times to make sure she was getting ready. When it was time and she was still not downstairs, my mother and Jeanette went to get her. They found her in her housecoat, not prepared.

I was not there for the conversation. I heard shouting from where I sat in the kitchen. When they came down I asked where Grandnan was.

“She’s sick,” Aunt Jeanette said. “She’s not going.”

My mother was crying, and I got the distinct feeling it was not over my uncle. I was only twelve but I understood how wrong this was. I ran past my mother and Jeanette and up the stairs into my grandmother’s room. She was sitting on the side of her bed in her housecoat. It looked as if she had been crying also.

“Grandnan!” I said. “You have to go.” It was my first act of protest, after a lifetime of quiescence.

“I can’t, Jacob,” she said. “I’m too sick.”

“But it’s his funeral!”

My mother came back up and pulled me from the room. “I can’t believe you’re doing this. Your own son, for heaven’s sake. Even Jacob knows how wrong it is.”

“What am I to do, Caroline? Do you want me vomiting all over the floor?”

“If you’re sick,” said my mother, “you’ve made yourself sick.”

“Go,” said my grandmother. “You’ll be late.”

“All the world you care,” said my mother.

My grandmother’s motivation for not going to that funeral is still obscure to me. Perhaps it was her sickness. Or her guilt. Or her fear. Perhaps she didn’t want to face her behaviour those last few months. Her refusal to acknowledge or help her son. I’ve no idea. But it was the final blow.

We went in Jeanette’s Pinto. No one, not even the pastor, asked where my grandmother was. The service was short, as unadorned as the little church itself. The pastor read the more obvious passages from the King James Bible. Whoever believeth in me and In my father’s house there are many mansions and the Twenty-Third Psalm. It wasn’t true.

Not a word of it.

David did not believe in God, so he couldn’t have been comforted by the last rights. I realized then, for the first time, and in exactly the same manner as I knew I was gay, that I did not believe in God either.

The only people we knew in the church were Henry, Darcy, Deanny — who wore a purple dress, because she didn’t own a black one — Fred, Nurse Jones, and Nurse Cassandra, who had driven down from Halifax. Everyone else was from the reserve. No one from the town had come.

When it was over, my uncle’s casket was carried out of the church and across the road into the cemetery by six men from the reserve. This part of the ceremony was most memorable by who was not there. It was defined by absence rather than attendance. When the pastor said the ashes-to-ashes I was stricken by anger. It was then I began to build my most serious resentments against my grandmother and the town, as I watched my mother and Jeanette go through what they did. I hated the town. I swore that when I got older I would make noise. I would never let them forget this.

I kept that promise, after a fashion. I think my grandmother knew, in later years, I could never forgive her for not going to Uncle David’s funeral. She was contrite around me. She let me argue theology and evolution all I wanted, because she knew that I had been watching, that I was, in a sense, the only one who kept the memory fresh and alive long after her own daughters had forgiven her. I did not respond to her authority after that day, and she did not try to enforce it on me.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

with those events from the distant past in mind, I begin my grandmother’s eulogy. Not to shame her, but to place her at the funeral she should have been to.

“On a warm summer afternoon in late July of 1952, a day not dissimilar to today, my uncle David was pedalling up Tenerife Street as fast as he could go. He was eight years old.”

The congregation suddenly sits up straighter, galvanized by my words.

With no doubt about what to say, I continue. “I know this story, for I heard my uncle telling my mother and my aunt about it before he died. He talked a lot about his childhood, and my friend Bernadette and I listened. I think he was trying to relive it, to make some sense out of what his life had become, to explain what he knew was a senseless death.”

I look at Deanny in the front row, sitting beside my mother. She is smiling. Perhaps she knew what was coming. She may have done the same if given the chance.

“The front wheel of my uncle’s bicycle fell off,” I say. “My grandfather had assembled it earlier that afternoon, and he had not tightened all its lug nuts sufficiently. When the wheel flew off, the bike collapsed onto its front forks and David sailed headfirst out over the handlebars and landed in a crumple on the street. His arms and legs and face were scraped. Two of the neighbours heard him scream. They — you — came running out of your houses. And more neighbours came. Soon there was a knot of people gathered around young David. You soothed him. You brushed him off. You brought out warm water and face cloths and cleaned him up and bandaged his hurt. There were no serious injuries. A few minor scrapes.

“My uncle was very sick when he reminded his mother of this story. ‘How good it felt,’ he said. ‘Having all those people worried about me. Taking care of me. I’ve never forgotten that.’

“I wish you had been there. Maybe you would have understood why what was done to my uncle was so wrong. It was a betrayal of the child you helped to raise. I wish sometimes I knew who those neighbours were exactly. I would ask you if you remembered my uncle as a boy and taking care of him that time, if you remember your refusal to do the same when he really needed it.”

And so I give my uncle’s eulogy instead. The one he never had. I tell them more stories about his childhood. The fishing derbies. The brass and the cinema. How when he was fourteen he had a poem published in a national teachers’ magazine. The town was so proud of him then. His picture had been published beside his poem in the Gazette. It had hung framed in my grandfather’s den. I tell them about his travels. To France, Germany, Japan. I wonder, as I’m speaking, if David knew that one day I would bear witness to his life. I talk about his job, his passion for teaching, his love of literature, his failed effort at reading War and Peace, which somehow now seemed symbolic of something but lay just beyond my comprehension. I talk about his homosexuality, and my own. And then finally the aids virus. I hold nothing back. I educate them. I quote statistics. I examine the town’s reaction to him, and to the virus, in 1984. The cancelling of the parade, the manner in which they reacted to his death, their absence at his funeral. I tell the story and speak the words that my grandmother never allowed to be spoken. I expect some of them to leave, but none do. Many lower their heads and refuse to look at me, but all stay in the church.

“In Toronto a few days ago a man I know tried to commit suicide because of the same disease that killed my uncle David. Schooled by people like you into thinking what he had was shameful, that it was somehow his fault. We should be forced to make up to these people for how we have treated them, and for what we have done. My grandmother left me a substantial amount of money, which I plan on using to help those living with aids in the city in which I now dwell.”

Suddenly it strikes me. What my grandmother had meant when she said in her will do something here. It was a private communication, from her to me, no one else would understand it. It was her final act of contrition, her final admission; her last confession, and a way to buy salvation. Suddenly I am certain this is what she wanted.

“Of the money my grandmother left me, she wished me to take some of it and build a monument in Founder’s Park dedicated to those who have been affected in Advocate by aids. On it will be inscribed the names of our victims of the aids crisis.

“I think my grandmother knew when she asked me to deliver this eulogy what I would say and do. I speak now on her behalf, what I think she wanted to say at the end of her life but could not. Advocate is a small town, and what happened here certainly happened elsewhere. But I am giving you a chance to redeem yourself. She was seeking forgiveness not just for herself but for all of you. Do as she asked. Build the monument. Honour my uncle David. Do for him now what none of you could do for him then. Thus far, and to my knowledge, the only name that would be inscribed on such a monument will be David Owen Angus William McNeil, born August 17, 1944, died October 21 1984. Let us hope there is never another.”

I run out of words. When I sit down beside my mother the church is silent. They wait for Father Harry to continue. He seems moved by my eulogy. He does not immediately rouse himself to the task of finishing the Mass. When he does, he stands, clears his throat, and says the final prayers. The casket is lifted and carried out by the pallbearers.

The rain falls on us as we make our way out of the church. It is a cold benediction.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

as we pass from the church commons into the cemetery, as lovely and peaceful now as I found it all those years ago, even in the rain, Jeanette catches up with me. She is unable to contain herself. “When did you think of a monument?” she whispers.

I shrug. “Right then, as I was speaking. It was what Grandnan wanted, I think. A public way to atone.”

“It’s brilliant,” Jeanette says. Of course my aunt would think so. Ever the radical. Ever believing words emblazoned on signs and etched in stone could make a difference.

I have decided what words will be inscribed on my uncle’s monument. The quote I had come across in War and Peace.

“Lay me down like a stone oh God, and raise me up like a new bread.”

At the last, my uncle would be a better advocate than we were. His words would never be drowned out, or burned in the fire pit behind my grandmother’s house. They would stand long after the rest of us were dead.

Father Harry intones the words for the committal of the dead, as the mourners stand in the rain and watch my grandmother’s casket being lowered into the ground. She will be the last person buried here, and with her goes a certain way of looking at and dealing with the world. When the prayer is finished the mourners, led by Jeanette and my mother, reach for handfuls of dirt to throw on the casket while Harry recites the Lord’s Prayer. Long ago my grandmother had explained the significance of the dirt to me. “It’s a reminder of our own mortality,” she said. “A goodbye to the person we have lost. An act of burying the dead, and a realistic view of our life on earth.” I reach into my pocket and take out the St. Jude’s medallion my mother had given me that morning. I throw it into my grandmother’s grave. The Lemon Day and Orange Day parades are over. The marches have begun.