Not long before Kris' memorial service, my cousin, Pamela Jane Pitt Arth, was diagnosed with AIDS. This was devastating to our family more so because we've never been all that great at dealing with pain and grief, or with being there for each other. There's a stiff upper lip thing that kicks in whenever something bad happens. How were we going to deal with this: not just the grave illness of a young, beautiful woman, but the fact that it was AIDS, that "disease gay people get."
Being gay is NOT okay in my family. My uncle used to call my best friend from high school (who died of AIDS in 1984) "just a fag." So Pam having AIDS (she got it from a guy she worked with who was bi-sexual and didn't tell her that he had had homosexual encounters) caused a huge increase in the homophobia and anger toward gay people in my family. Because it was all "their" fault, you know.
Pam died in 1994. This is her square of the AIDS quilt. Her part is the one with the butterfly.
If you know someone who has died of AIDS you can search to see if they have been added to the AIDS quilt.
Pam's death brought me, once again, face-to-face with religion. Pam was the only religious person left in our family. But her approach to religion was very much the "I have a personal relationship with Jesus as my Saviour" kind of thing, which was something I (and I guess the rest of my family) did not share. During her illness, her faith was a solace to her, I suppose, but I just couldn't relate.
I remember sitting at her memorial service and feeling completely disengaged. The preacher had that televangelist personality, the Hair of Steel and a great voice, and he and some woman sang "How Great Thou Art" as a duet. Pam's husband read that dreadfully bleak poem by W.H. Auden "Stop all the clocks". I doubt that he knew Auden was gay. I doubt that he knew who Auden was. He read it because someone remembered it from the movie "Four Weddings and a Funeral." My uncle Bert requested "When the Saints Go Marching In" as the recessional, but it did not have the intended effect. These were, after all, Texan Baptists and they really didn't have the New Orleans second-line spirit to carry it off.
But this was one of the times when I thought that religion would have done my family a lot of good. Not the "I felt the flames-uh hail a'burnin' up mah back" kind of religion that my mom grew up with, and not the Jesus-as-personal-savior thing either because if you DON'T believe Jesus is your personal saviour whatever that means, you just can't go there, it's like having a door slammed in your face...
But a more loving, sustaining, inspiring sort of belief that's not dependent on Creed A or Creed B. The kind of belief that helps give meaning to the tragedies that come along in life, like Pam's death. Faith in something more, in something greater than ourselves, our experiences, our petty little lives. Faith that inspires people to reach out beyond what they personally want or need, to ask what other people need. Faith that moves people to strive for justice in the face of evil, disregard and apathy. Faith that allows you to say "there is a reason I was put on this earth beyond enduring all this shit being thrown at me until I die, and it's not just a reward in the afterlife (which has got to be the most masochistic existence I can imagine)."
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