is this need to tell one’s story. I have seen it many times before as one senses the end approaching. I expect it accounts for the plethora of memoirs we see in this self-centered, self-publishing age. It’s as if in the telling, people are trying to understand what it was all about, this life they lived. I realized I was the excuse for Jerald to express his thoughts for himself to hear and ponder.
“My diagnosis and meeting Cal shifted something in me. My life was no longer about just pleasure and getting high. I wanted it to matter before it was over. Maybe I could do something good with my money and my time. So, I became a volunteer, still pretending my motives were wholly altruistic. I raised big bucks. Even served on a care team and saw firsthand what awaited me.
“And you know, what was most surprising was I didn’t miss my former life. It was more like, What a waste of my time! Now it all seems like so much fuss and bother. I’ve come to the conclusion that the best people are those dying. Or maybe it’s that people are at their best when dying, although that’s not altogether true either. I’ve known some real assholes who were determined to remain assholes to the very end.”
Over the third and fourth entrees, he told me of his experiences on the front lines of the epidemic, and how they changed him. Eventually, as the lesions had started to appear a couple of years ago and he began spending time in the hospital, he could no longer pretend. Over dessert, an extremely creamy crème brûlée, he brought us up to the present.
“My volunteering days are almost over.” He paused. “My days are almost over.”
In earlier years, when someone said that, I would demur, “Oh, no, you’ve got plenty of time left,” or “I hear they’re coming out with a new drug. The trials sound very promising,” or whatever I could think to say. I had stopped some time ago after I’d found the person was almost invariably right. My words had been to comfort me rather than him.
He paused. “AIDS made me slow down and think about how I was living. I know it sounds trite, but AIDS has given my life meaning.”
“From my experience, there’s nothing trite about AIDS.”
“I’m now working on humility. That’s a tough one. But Cal inspired me.”
“Cal has inspired many.”
“Yes. Unfortunately, we can’t all be saints. You need to have some of us sinners to balance the human equation. Actually, a lot of us sinners. I would say 100,000 sinners for every saint. Those are the odds.”
He looked fatigued as a waiter cleared the table and I drank my cup of tea.
“I’m ready,” he said. “I think Kübler-Ross needs to add another to her stages of dying. After Acceptance, add Fatigue. One gets to the point of just wanting it all to end. No more goals. No more desires. No more struggles. I have no illusions of a heaven or afterlife. The ‘peace of the inanimate’ sounds pretty good to me these days.”
I put down my cup and folded my napkin.
He was nodding in his thoughts. “Strange where life brings us, isn’t it? Sort of makes you wonder what it’s all been about.”
I have often thought back to that distant lunch. We spend this short time on earth— for some, even shorter— and hardly have time to think about our lives as we’re living them. And then, seemingly suddenly, seventy years, or eighty years, or thirty-seven years, and it’s over before we know it, and we depart like Jerald, wondering what it was all about. He was just more witty and entertaining than most, and perhaps more self-insightful. But then maybe not. I suspect most of us die strangers to ourselves.
• • •
Steve had been impressed that Jerald and I were friends in high school. That was Jerald’s recollection; I would have said we had a few classes together. He was eager to hear how our lunch went after I waddled back to the office, slumping into my desk chair and renouncing food forever.
“He really is one of our largest donors,” said Steve.
“I know. He told me. Several times.”
“And he’s not as much of a jerk as he likes to pretend. He not only makes large donations to the organization, but he’s also personally paid for others’ meds when they couldn’t afford them. Cal knows that if there’s someone in need of help, he can call on Jerald. Are you going to get together again?”
“Probably. But not to eat, I hope.”
And we did get together every few weeks as I checked in on how he was doing. One of the last times was in Providence Hospital a couple of months later. I was with Janet, his sister, at his bedside. Jerald had been largely unconscious for the past two days. It was growing late and, at my urging, she’d finally left to go back to her family. “I’ll call if anything happens,” I promised her. By then I had kept a number of these solo vigils and made a number of calls when something had finally “happened.”
I sat in his room, reading, remembering, reflecting on this old, withered man who was my age as I listened to his raspy breathing, and I could still recognize the handsome boy from high school. It seemed like only yesterday. Then around 4:00 a.m., I was dozing when I heard a stirring and jerked awake, opening my eyes just as Jerald was opening his, both of us groggy. He looked around the dimly lit room, appearing confused. Seeing me, he asked, “Am I in heaven?”
“No. Providence Hospital.”
“Thank God. I would have been seriously disappointed if this were heaven.”
“Would you like some water?”
He nodded. I held the cup as he sucked from a straw, then smacked his lips. “Well, since I’m not in heaven, I might as well eat. I’m hungry for once. See what they have on the menu, will you?”
“Jerald, this is a hospital, not a hotel.”
“At what they’re charging me, I can order whatever I want whenever I want it.”
“I think you have a little more work to do on the humility bit.”
“Oh, fuck humility. What good did it ever do me anyway? By the way, what are you doing here? You’re not family or any of my many fawning beneficiaries.”
“I just happened to be in the neighborhood.”
“You just happened to be in the neighborhood. I find that hard to believe.”
“And I had nothing better to do on a Saturday night.”
“Now that I would believe.”
“Screw you. So maybe I just wanted to see an old friend off.”
He suddenly teared up, his bottom lip quivering, and he whispered, “Now that I would believe, too. Thank you.”
Feeling our combined embarrassment at his emotion, I rose from my chair. “I’ll go see what they can rustle up around here at four in the morning.”
“Yes, do,” he said as he dabbed his eyes with the top of his sheet. “Use my name. Tell them I tip big.”
He died a week later at home, between one caregiver’s leaving
