Awareness

One of Maurice's Letters from San Francisco, 1987

Maurice Oullette died of AIDS in 1987 in San Francisco. He was an ex-lover and friend. He called me weeks before his death. I was living at the far end of the country, in Provincetown. Maurice had run away from Boston the previous Spring when he knew he was dying of Kaposi Sarcoma (KS). Actually, he didn't run. He took the bus all the way to California. I offered to buy him an airline ticket, but he would only accept the bus fare when he showed up with a small suitcase to kiss me good-bye. He had been planning to hitch-hike.

 

Maurice called from an alley in North Beach. It was raining. He had a hacking cough, a product of his smoking, his KS and pneumonia. The alley was behind the diner where he was washing dishes to get by, to pay the rent on his seedy boarding-house room and to pay for an occasional bag of weed to ease his discomfort. "I just wanted to say good-bye and tell you I love you," he rasped. I fought back my tears of helplessness and tried to get him to tell me exactly where he was staying. He wouldn't.

 

It was about a year later when a package arrived in the mail from Manitoba, Canada. It contained a drawing, one of Maurice's stunning sketches, and a caption, "Until the next time, Paul. Love, Maurice." A terse note in his sister's hand said Maurice had died the previous Fall. He had left instructions in his room. One of those instructions was that the drawing be mailed to me in Provincetown. The sister's note explained that Maurice was cremated and his ashes spread partly near his first partner's grave in San Francisco and partly in Canada, where he was born.

 

Last night I had an acute awareness of Maurice here in my room as I was falling asleep. It was a presence. Whether it was generated by my own sleepy neurons or by some other force is irrelevant to me. I have had these palpable manifestations of loved ones before. For some reason, I calculated the years since Maurice's death and speculated about reincarnation. He has been dead more than 25 years. As I drifted off, I remember wondering whimsically if some 20-something around me was in part a reincarnated Maurice.

 

This morning the local National Public Radio (NPR) aired a story of a 21 year old gay male prostitute who is struggling to avoid contracting HIV as part of his work. He was disowned by a homophobic family, as I once was at his age and as Maurice was at an even earlier age. Maurice had run to San Francisco where he too plied the world's oldest profession to survive. I, unlike Maurice and the young man on the radio this morning, was fortunate enough to have an education and professional skills. I went to work in a blood lab.

 

I share this as an example of one of the benefits of practice. Integrating these major life relationships and experiences of loss into some form of understanding of the human condition breeds compassion. Being open to my own mind and feelings places me within the world as it is. This makes me more likely to reach out to others, like a kid on the streets with bad breaks, from a position of equitable understanding, not supercilious piety or pity or exploitation.

 

I am still formulating my practical action in response to this experience. For now It is more important to keep my thoughts and feelings alive about poverty, homophobia and my need to help where I can. This is the sausage-making of humanist practice. It is not about just writing a tax-exempt check or throwing money at the homeless in doorways on the way to a privileged bourgeois life.