There’s Always Hope

 I wrote this in the fall of 2019. Given what is happening with COVID-19 and what I fear and expect to happen next made me ambivalent about sharing it now but on reflection I think publishing it at this time in particular, is the right thing to do.

Back in March of last year, my friend, Kim Powers who is a harm reduction goddess and works in syringe access told me she had lost 17 people to overdose in three months. I don’t know how many more it’s been since then. It’s relentless, the grief that comes, the trauma that never gets  a chance to heal. Her question was direct but one with no perfect answer, “What do I do?”

She didn’t mean how do I stop it, because she’s already doing what she can. She’s been to memorials as a mourner where families have asked her to do impromptu Naloxone trainings. It’s happened more than once. When she told me the story of all those losses, all she kept saying was, “It’s crazy.”

There’s no argument the death and trauma around me is incessant, brutal and exquisitely painful to witness and survive. It is apocalyptic in scale. The grief left behind is enormous, so many people forced to keep living with shattered hearts splintered in their chests as they just keep going. Unless they can’t. Because it really does get to be too much. Much too much.

I wish I did not understand what Kim meant when she kept saying it was crazy. But I lived this before in San Francisco, from a few years after the virus we call HIV was discovered, when for years I went to memorial services on weekends, sometimes more than one on both Saturday and Sunday. Until I just couldn’t anymore.

I remember my friend, Bob who I went to see  the night he died. Bob was the founding project assistant for The Stonewall Project, a harm reduction program for MSM who used methamphetamine, founded by Michael Siever, and where I learned harm reduction. Michael used to say Bob was one of the smartest people he knew and I can say he was one of the kindest men I’ve known my entire life. That evening, he was already so frail. He struggled to breathe, his mouth opening and closing like a desperate fish.

I don’t remember what I said to him. He couldn’t speak. I can remember his partner, Brett standing behind me and sobbing in the dim yellow light cast by the single lamp. It’s not an easy memory but it’s one I’m glad I have. Because writing this reminds me of him. Right behind the image of him dying are the ones of his smile and the compassion he showed me at my lowest when I was destroyed by grief and depression after seeing my husband, Randy, literally drop dead in front of me. In a way, remembering Bob’s death opens a door to who he was to me, opens the door to the love he gave and shared with me. In so many ways, the love and memory that lay right behind the grief of his loss gives me hope. 

But hope reminds me of trying to light charcoal in the cool of a spring evening. What’s wanted is heat and flame so it makes sense to drench the coals in lighter fluid, drop a match to cause the sound of fire catching, what it feels like to change state suddenly. What happens is violent and explosive as that whoosh sound of flame igniting swallows the air around it. So much promise of what I expect to happen. But it is a promise unfulfilled.

There’s the disappointment of the flames exhaustion before coals start to catch, the thought it makes sense to increase the flame’s potential by throwing more fluid on the fire; it’s seeing smoke rise instead of flame; it’s the impatience of dropping another match instead of waiting for fire to catch, and when it does, thinking this time it will work, this time the coals will glow orange and red and turn to shapeless ash. It’s the satisfaction of fire and potential burned until there’s nothing left. That’s what hope is. It’s potential thrown on the floor like a dirty sock, stepped over and forgotten, willed invisible, unseen. One day it might be laundered to be used again to soak sweat from my feet and protect them from blisters. Hope is dirty and smells bad. Hope smells like feet.

There’s always hope when there is nothing left, after a life is destroyed, after a fire rages. It means where I am right now is spent. Something could happen; hope rises from ashes. But the only thing I’ve ever seen ash do is turn into earth. There are those who might say by becoming earth, the ash becomes alive, consumed by plants, transformed by sand and water to something life sustaining. Shouldn’t that be enough for ash to do? Shouldn’t it be enough to support life?

Create more hope by poisoning the earth. It will take time, but the toxins will leach eventually. It just takes patience. It takes hope to make it all ok, right before the final ending, the last page of a book, the final period. Something from the ending is the nature of hope.

It’s the hope something will change, that there’s help ahead that keeps me going sometimes. It’s why people walk hundreds of miles for freedom, everything they own on their backs. It’s what happens when nothing is left, when everything is destroyed or taken. At least there’s hope always has a beginning. It’s just the worst part of the story.

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I remember seeing a man walk down Castro Street pulling his oxygen tank behind him. He wore a rugby shirt and baggy jeans, which were the fashion of the era but he was so thin. He was covered in lesions from Karposi’s Sarcoma. He was so fragile and this must have been one of the last times he felt the sunlight on his skin. He moved slowly, carefully and it was as if he wielded some invisible force that parted the crowd as he walked. 

I wonder if he could feel the fear his presence caused. I wonder if he could sense the unspoken wishes of the men who walked around him, if he could feel how they willed him to invisibility. I wonder if he had the energy to care.  All I know is thirty years later I can see him in my memory and I can feel those things. I can feel how fear makes a person vanish to a place where their humanity does not matter. What matters is the fear others cast upon him. What matters is how mean the fear is that can make someone vanish. What matters is the cruelty. But it was never his humanity that vanished. What became invisible was the humanity of the people who wished him away. Those people were everywhere. They still are. Losing humanity is something that happens in apocalypse. It is lost by being blind to suffering. It is lost by assuming the pain of others is caused by their choices alone, it is their fault, it is their moral failing that has caused God to forsake them. Moral superiority is one way to cope with everyone dying. It is one way to deny reality. It is one way to feel safe.

When I remember the time when people died all around me, there are things unspoken. How losing touch with someone meant they might be dead; how seeing someone after a long while meant a big hug and being grateful we were still alive. Thoughts like these were not in the foreground. Mostly, thoughts like these became low level static because to listen to them too closely meant falling apart.

But there is wisdom in falling apart sometimes too. Irene Smith was a pioneer in delivering massage and compassionate touch to people dying of AIDS. At her training, we talked about gloves and avoiding lesions and sores. We talked about intention and loving touch. We talked about how hard it was to be alive in this time. We talked about self-care. She told us we had to understand we were doing something no one had prepared us to live through. We were surviving and saving ourselves by easing the suffering of others. But what of our own suffering? She said something so important, “Sometimes you feel like just crawling under a table and crying. And if you feel like crawling under a table and crying, do it.” 

Over the years, I have lost more people than names I can remember. I have phone books somewhere from that time filled with the names of the dead. I couldn’t bear to throw them out. I think there are many of us who have phone books like this. 

I can’t tell you what it felt like when the local gay paper, the Bay Area Reporter had the simple headline, “No Obits” because as momentous and hopeful that headline was, it was disorienting too. For years every Thursday I went to Cafe Flore in the heart of the Castro to pick up the latest edition. Every Thursday, everyone would turn to the obituaries first to see who died. It was how I found out the California handsome, softly voiced man I never asked out but who always flirted with me was gone. His name was Ray. He was an artist. I saw him just a couple weeks prior. It was how we found out who was left. It was one of the things survivors did.

To survive I did many things I used to think was just living. I made friends. I made art. I made friends to make art. I brought breakfast, lunch or dinner to people who were sick. I relieved people who were caring for others. I had sex. I avoided sex. I had more sex. It was something survivors did. I went to a club called The Box every week until it closed and danced so hard I could barely breathe. The club became so humid from all of us dancing away sorrow and anger, from all of us dancing to survive. Our sweat, as we acted out what we could not bear to feel, gathered in steam around the beams in the ceiling until drops of water fell upon us like slow, warm rain. Survive.  I tried out different spiritual disciplines. I talked about death because we all talked about death. Survive. I did so many things I still do today like taking naps and walking outside. Survive. I claimed my life and stopped thinking I had a future. Survive. Because to not have a future was one way to cope with the possibility everyone you loved and called family would die. My friend A. lost all his friends in NY and came to SF to start over. He made new friends who were family and they all died too. He said to me one day, “Being the last one isn’t such a good prize.”

We were traumatized together and there is a bond from that survival not often talked about. I imagine survivors of war feel a similar way. Collectively we saw the best any of us could ever be revealed in response to the death and grief surrounding us. Collectively we saw a president who joked about us dying and refused to even say AIDS. Many believe he was a great president, the greatest president. To me, he will always be part monster. To me he will always be someone who lost a desperate battle for his own humanity. Because he did. In this case, he really did. Do not argue this with me.

This is what it is like to live with trauma and grief on an ongoing, relentless basis. This is what happens when the tragedies that aren’t supposed to happen are everyday occurrences. This is what happens when good people, the people I live with in my town, the people I pass on Main Street, think an appropriate response to the overdose crisis is to simply harvest the organs of those who died. Look for the silver lining. Capitalize the loss of life. It is a monstrous, morally absent and thoughtless response. Thoughtless. I say this because to come to such a conclusion, to reduce suffering to a transactional, objectified analysis necessitates being closed to the humanity of those in pain. To be closed to pain is to not think about it. It is to not let it in. It is to deny the story of trauma. It makes good people part monster. But it is one way to live through apocalypse.

Adapt to human suffering by creating profit from it. Make more suffering to make more profit. It’s just business. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Close down the stories of those around the edges. And yet, we live in a time where to create an internet persona is a social norm. Personas can be profitable. Live one reality, project another one. Curate. Create fact by documenting fiction. It’s not a lie. It’s just branding. 

At least there’s hope.

But it is like my friend Kim said, “It’s crazy.” It is crazy to come of age during one apocalypse and approach my sixties in another. I’ve often thought of Viktor Frankl’s Man Search for Meaning. Frankl, was a psychotherapist and imprisoned at Auschwitz. As he struggled to survive he asked himself why some people who looked on the verge of death lived for years while others who came to the camp healthy, died in a month. The difference, he realized was those who lived gave their experience meaning. Sometimes the meaning was for revenge, sometimes it was to make sure this never happened again. Sometimes it was to see who else survived. 

As I wrote and revised this piece over the last week, I realize I’ve been thinking of the dead. The truth is I think of the dead every day. As I sit trying to make sense of the meaning of what happened and what is happening now, I think of the people in the trenches too young to remember the AIDS apocalypse who are devastated by the staggering loss of life caused by overdose. When I worked in treatment at Stonewall, I would tell my folks sometimes things happen and you know exactly why. It is clear how A leads to B. But sometimes things happen and you have no idea why. Sometimes what happens makes no sense. But I also used to say, if you keep doing this work someday you will meet somebody who is going through what you survived. You will have the story of what happened and how you made it through and at that moment you will be the most important person in the world to them. Sometimes a moment of intimacy is all there is to give another being.  It is precious when this happens. It is exquisite. It is what practitioners of Harm Reduction do everyday because this is how to survive. Together.

What I know, and what I fight against is an instinct to turn away, to isolate in sorrow and depression. This instinct has its place but if I really allowed myself to follow this path, I know there is a chance I may never make it back out. What I know is in the face of thoughtless cruelty lives will be lost. Death is what happens when people don’t see wiping out another person’s humanity costs them their own. It is how we make slaves. It is how we always made slaves. It is a way to feel safe in the midst of suffering. What I know is fighting for lives in the midst of apocalypse is really a fight for humanity. Fighting to stay human means finding others to practice compassion and kindness with as the single most important tactic in my survival arsenal. What I know is I think of the people I lost because I loved them. They are some of the people who taught me to be human in the midst of suffering. They taught me survival is easier to do with others. I call them in when I am broken, I call them in whenever I think of them. I call them in because I need them still. I call them in because it is something survivors do.

I wish it was not true that anguish for some means others will light a fuse of cruelty and blame to justify letting people suffer and die. I wish it was not true that justifying letting people die is rationalized via a cloudy, broken and bankrupt moral lens. I wish people were not part monster but we are. I wish my friends were still alive. My husband, Randy Garvin used to say, “Love never dies.” I wish so many things but mostly I wish I never had to learn that without doubt, he was right.