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Edited on Wed Sep-07-11 03:37 PM by TygrBright
Dear friends,
You've been kind to me on the occasions I've ventured to participate in your discussions in the past, and I need a little kindness today.
My godfather, my dear Uncle Joe, is in the hospital again. He is 94. His feeding tube stopped working and various complications developed and so the Little Sisters of the Poor had him hospitalized. Maybe he will stabilize and be with us a while longer, maybe not. A couple of months ago he had a stroke that severely impaired his communications abilities, although he is still cognitively sharp, based on what communications we can manage.
So the end seems to be in sight on a very long, very hard road.
Joe was born just before World War One. He was born to a Catholic family in a Midwestern city, and while he was growing up they were still moderately well-to-do. He was able to get some higher education, but he was drafted and served his country in World War II. He was one of the legions of combat support personnel who kept supplies coming, accounted for the dead and wounded, and saw to the needs of his fellow soldiers. He would have been willing to go in harm's way, but the opportunity never came. Still, he did his part and knowing Joe, I am certain he did it more than competently.
Between education and the war, no one was surprised that he wasn't married by the time he was thirty and demobilized. But it was a surprise that he chose to leave his home town, and take up a teaching post in Chicago, one of the country's biggest cities. All the more so as his father had died and his mother was struggling to raise the last of his five younger sisters on a limited income. Joe sent money home, he came and visited his mother and sisters, but even when they found great job openings with the home town school system, he stayed in Chicago.
I always knew him as my "bachelor uncle." It wasn't discussed around the kids, of course, but there was definite concern that Joe had never married. He'd never brought home any prospective brides, his letters never referred to any girl friends or lady friends. The brothers-in-law never got a rise out him at their guy-to-guy joking about "broads" during family gatherings. But nothing was ever, ever said, overtly, about why Joe continued to be a "bachelor," as the decades ticked by.
After all, you don't want people to know that you have a criminal pervert in the family, do you?
Because back then, people like Joe were criminals. The law said so. They were perverts. Society said so. They led lives of furtive shame, pretending to be something that they were not, in order to stay out of jail, keep their jobs, have any friends, live their lives.
I often wonder what went through Uncle Joe's head when he held me at the baptismal font during the 1950s. He'd long since stopped being an observant Catholic, of course. But he attended Mass with the family when he came home for visits.
Joe loved kids. He especially loved watching their minds develop. Watching their intellect kick in. Watching curiosity take them in new directions. His birthday and Christmas gifts to me were always books and puzzles and things that provoked thought.
He loved poetry and Shakespeare. He taught English, and tried to give his students some sense of just how marvelous and powerful a human tool language really is.
For more than thirty years, he taught Chicago youngsters what words and sentences and paragraphs and stories and poems and books could accomplish, and how to get themselves a piece of that action. He lived in an apartment. He had some friends, and some "friends." The former were featured when he responded to questions about his social life and how things were going for him. The latter came up only obliquely. A snapshot of two men hiking in a national park, perhaps. Never anything that pushed beyond the narrow limits of the kinds of things "regular guys" might do together occasionally, though. Nothing like that.
He was discreet. He could not have held a job, had an apartment in a "respectable" building, lived among "decent people," for so many years if he had not been painfully, conscientiously, minutely discreet in every conceivable way. Just a bachelor, the way some guys are, getting a little crustier and a little crotchetier and more curmudgeonly with each passing year. Wicked, wicked sense of humor, though. Dry as a bone. Ironic. He could (and did, at the drop of a hat-- it was one of his favorite recreations) argue rings around just about anyone on just about any subject.
When my sister was going through a painful coming-out, he had some long phone conversations with her. I never knew about it until later. She did not discuss them. She was of a younger generation, it was a post-Stonewall era. She made her (difficult) choice, but she respected, and understood his.
By the time he had been retired for a few years, it was an open secret in the family. I don't know how, really. I imagine my grandmother's death had something to do with the easing up of secrecy. At some point I just remember hearing something that made it "click" in my mind and thought "So that's it!" It didn't change anything about how I felt about Uncle Joe. It was never a topic of conversation, even after it was acknowledged throughout the family. Joe never really broke the habit of seventy years of silence, although it was finally possible for him to talk about a "friend" now and then, and we (sort of) got it.
When his health began to fail, Joe moved back from Chicago to his home town. None of the "friends" he'd had relationships with over the years lived in Chicago anymore. He had no support system, no family, no 'significant other.' He brought his pension and his Social Security back to a "Senior Living Community" that rented bedsitter apartments and had some care services available. He built a new life, a new routine, among the coffee shops and movie theaters and libraries. But not the bars. He wasn't "plugged in" to the gay community or social scene. A few quiet friendships, perhaps.
Gradually his health deteriorated, his movements were further restricted, he lost more and more of his hearing, his vision got worse. The "Senior Living Community" couldn't give him the care he needed; he moved to a high-rise assisted living facility, but a teacher's pension and social security didn't buy much in that respect. It wasn't a very good place for him. One time my mother was appalled to find out that he'd gone for more than two weeks without a bath, because that wasn't one of the things the facility "assisted" with, and he was afraid to use the tub. He'd been taking sponge baths.
His sisters looked for other options. There weren't many, on his mingy pension/social security. But the Little Sisters of the Poor had a facility in the old neighborhood where the family had lived when they were kids. It had few "amenities," but it was scrupulously clean, there were large tubs and exercise areas designed for frail elders, and it was surrounded by lovely grounds and gardens. Yes, the "decoration" leaned heavily into "tatty religious art," and there was plenty of "churchiness" to the atmosphere. But the staff and volunteers showed a very high level of empathy and compassion, and when told that Joe was gay, they declined to judge or comment. He was a suffering old man, a soul worthy of God's regard, and they would do all they could for him.
I have my own problems with the Church, but not with the Sisters. They have been more than good to him. One in particular has constituted herself his intellectual "sparring partner," and maintains a running fire of comments, arguments, and jokes with him, allowing him to be as cranky as he needs to be. Their official opinion of Teh Gay has nothing to do with their relationship with Joe.
The irony probably amuses Joe in some respects. He's spent his life being an outcast from the Church, and as an intellectual agnostic labeled deviant and worse by ecclesiastical authority, I'm sure he never expected to receive any kindness at all, much less the loving care he's getting from the Sisters. He's still not religious. It doesn't seem to bother them. When he was more mobile he'd attend a service now and then "just to keep them guessing" but mostly out of boredom.
And now he's winding down. He's too tough an old bird to go gently into the good night, although I have no doubts at all that if he could just close his eyes and GO, he would. He's going by inches, dragged back from the brink again and again by a lifetime of endurance and fortitude and the sturdy constitution of his family.
Joe's life is almost complete. It is what it is. He has had joys and satisfactions in his life, he's touched generations of students and had many friends, a few lovers, and experienced much.
But I can't help wondering...
What would Joe's life have been like if he had been allowed to be ALL of who he is? Openly, joyfully, proudly? If his family had thought it was no big deal, and loved him and whoever he chose to share his life with and embraced their love as part of our family? If he hadn't had to hide some of the most important things about himself from a society that abhorred them, criminalized them, and vilified people like him? If he'd been able to build up a network of friends and lovers and people who shared everything about him, and enjoyed all of him?
What might have been?
Sometimes I hate my culture. I know we are changing. I'm trying to help it happen. But sometimes it's not enough, just not changing fast enough.
Not enough for Joe, anyway.
Peace, Godfather.
sadly,
Bright
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