gazzamie:

When he was 24, my best friend was diagnosed with AIDS-Related Complex. This was before the era of the current treatments, and ARC isn’t even a diagnosis anymore. His life began unravelling pretty rapidly. He lost his job as a cook, not because of AIDS itself, but the risk from the secondary infections. His relationship with his boyfriend, who also had been diagnosed with AIDS, had already been falling apart (for different reasons), and it simply withered away as they both got sick. His health declined. He got infections like amoebiasis and thrush. He used to be lean and athletic, and now he had trouble standing up.

Eventually, he had to move back to his parents’ place in our hometown, so his family could help take care of him. I visited as often as i could. One time, he asked me to drive him to Burger King, although he was too weak to get out of the car, so i brought the food back to eat in the car. But that little bit of getting out cheered him up.

There was a gap of two weeks when i hadn’t seen him - i’d spent the weekend in-between visiting another friend. When i got to his house, this was early December, many of his family members, most of whom i didn’t know, were in the living room. My friend was upstairs in his bedroom, too weak to come down. I had to wait to see him. His father kept telling me what a good friend of his i was - before his father had barely spoken to me before. It was an awkward and excruciating experience. When i finally got upstairs, i couldn’t believe how much he’d declined in those last few weeks. He could barely move his head. A 6’4” man now weighed less than 95 pounds. My first thought was that he looked like the photos of rescued concentration camp victims, except cleaner. He looked like a corpse. I didn’t know what to say - it was hard to talk about ordinary stuff in that situation. As selfish as it sounds, i really didn’t want to be there. I tried to be cheerful, to be the normal he so desperately wanted.

I left, and started balling as soon as i got to my car. I don’t think i’ve sobbed like that before or since. I wished he was dead, not because i didn’t love him, but i did. I railed against a universe that could make a person suffer so much.

Within a week, he got an emergency spot at Casey House, the AIDS hospice in Toronto, and when i visited him there, it was like a transformation. He was still very sick, but he was so much better, so much more alive. Unfortunately, it was just a temporary spot, so he got moved to our hometown hospital, which just wasn’t equipped for the kind of care he needed, but he was stuck there until a “permanent” spot opened up at Casey House, which sadly meant someone else had to die. I spent New Year’s Eve that year sitting with him in a hospital room, as he cried because the nurses were slow with the morphine.

Luckily, for him, he was soon back at Casey House. It would be the last place he lived, but as places to die go, it was a good place to die. He got along well with the staff. He looked forward to seeing our other best friend, who’d been living in Montreal. He talked about the little psychedelic visions he got from the morphine when he closed his eyes.

One day, he phoned me at work, asked me to pick up a new pair of glasses from his optometrist. He said to me, “Thanks, you’re a pal.” A few days later, on January 19th, i got a call from one of the staff at Casey House, that they couldn’t wake him up. A few hours later i got the second call. ‘Thanks, you’re a pal’ would turn out to be the last thing he’d ever say to me.

I went over to Casey House after work. The staff were very kind (i can’t imagine the steel they must have). They took me to see him. As i looked at him, i got the prosaic thought that when people say the light goes out of someone’s eyes, it’s really just the eyeballs are dry. In some way, i wished i hadn’t seen him, because then i could pretend he wasn’t dead. They gave me a box of his effects to take back to his family that night. I really regret not taking the silver neck chain our other best friend and i had bought him a few years back, and he’d worn until that day. It even dropped to the ground when i got to his family’s place, but i put it back in the box. When i got home, my mother told me the optometrist had phoned to say the glasses were ready. I never did pick up them up.

As sad as i was at his passing, and having to tell all of our friends, and my mother, who’d grown very close to him over the years, i’d done the bulk of grieving earlier, and those last few weeks were a reprieve.