The Death of a Young Man…

The Silent Suicides… The Secret Suicides…

I am really grateful to The AIDS Memorial, because it shows that it is not too late to write. I mean now, often after many years, people write about the death of their loved ones; partners, children, parents, friends – it is like the NAMES Project, not with Panels, but with photos and words.

I recently realized that I have written about the sudden death of my mother many times on Facebook – as if my relatives and friends have never heard about it before. It was quite embarrassing, but I know I did it because her death affected me so much.

But I don´t think I have written about a friend´s suicide, quite as often, although it was something that also affected me strongly. It happened in 1984.

Here is Per-Erik.

When someone very happy and positive suddenly commits suicide, it is very upsetting, because there is no warning. If people are depressed a lot, at least one can understand, but…

At the time of my friend´s death I connected his suicide with grief. He had suddenly lost his mother a few years before he died.

She went upstairs to have a rest after Christmas dinner, while the other family members took a walk with the dog, and they found her dead when they returned home. I don´t think my friend ever recovered from that shock. He was very close to his mother.

He was a young man from the countryside, and in 1984 he had just graduated from a Theater school in Stockholm, he had been hired at a Theater, and had landed a role on Swedish television. Everything was wonderful, and when I met him the last time he was almost glowing. We hugged and said goodbye.

I think one can postpone disaster.

If I understand it right, he kept him self very busy after the death of his mother. He rented a room in the home of an older actress, he studied, he kept him self very busy in the evenings, and was never really alone.

He went home that summer, and came out as gay to his father. According to one of his sisters it was met with silence. Coming out as gay during the first years of HIV/AIDS, can not have been easy.

The family eventually helped him move to the new city, and for a short while he shared the apartment with another actor, until that actor found his own place – and then my friend was alone for the first time in several years – and that is when he died.

He had hung him self in a closet. His former flatmate found him, after he had failed to come to rehearsals.

He had left some small messages on a table, but no suicide letter.

 

After my friend´s funeral, I happened to meet a man that was working in the church, in the parking lot, and we started talking.

He told me that my friend was the fourth or fifth young man, from that area, that had committed suicide around the same time.

And that was really … Was it a suicide pact? One can assume that they knew each other as they were from this little city, so did they trigger each other for some reason?

At that time I did not connect any of this to HIV/AIDS.

 

Many years went by, and after my retirement I moved to a city not far away from where my friend was raised.

I had hoped to finally meet my friend´s father, we had been in contact, but he was very sick, and passed away not long after I had tried to get in touch with him.

And I started to think about the other young men, it left me no peace.

I started to ask around. Did people know about these young men? Was my friend the last one, or did others follow him?

I eventually found out that several of the young men were homosexual, maybe all of them. And it made me wonder if they killed them self to spare their families, protect them against the shame in that little city – if they were all homosexual, maybe they were also affected by this new disease that struck homosexuals? Or the suspicion about it. Maybe it had nothing at all to do with that. But nevertheless several young men had died in that city.

I was thinking about their parents, their siblings. Had they known about the other suicides, or was it kept a secret.

I interviewed a nurse that I have mentioned before, Leif Larsson, who worked with HIV/AIDS-patients for many years, and he talked about ”the Silent Suicides”, where people just killed them selves, they didn´t say anything, they did not leave a letter, they just removed them self from this earth. I think one can add my friends suicide to that group.

I went to the church in that city and suggested that it should be addressed. Maybe it would help the surviving family members, if there was a church service about suicide – then it could come up naturally.

There was a service, but it did not take place in the big church as I had hoped, but in a very small church, outside the city. And not much was advertised about it.

I was supposed to speak, but just before the service began the priest asked me to speak after the service when coffee was served, but I refused – my friend´s family members had arrived, and I wanted to acknowledge him, and the other young men, in the service, in the church.

I talked about them, while the priest stood very very near me – she seemed to be worried that I would say something inappropriate.

At the coffee there was a woman who talked on behalf of Suicide Zero about the death of her son – and all that was well – but it had little to do with what had happened in and around 1984, in that area.

I am quite sure I know the reasons why it all became so strange – it had to do with protecting the man that had once spoken to me in the parking lot. He had not mentioned any names, but he had talked about the young men, and I think it is called that he broke protocol.

But it must also have had to do with guarding the memory of the young men.  And their families. So it was impossible, it really couldn´t be addressed. But they were at least mentioned in that service, to a handful of people.

I know there were many suicides in connection with HIV/AIDS in the US, I have read articles about that, and I have become aware of several suicides that can never be talked about. Silent, secret suicides.

However, I did write about a suicide last year, or actually a suicide-to-be, in a piece in this blog about Robert Locke, called: ”What can I say, I´m BOB. ” Please scroll down.

The death of my friend… He died before there was a real HIV- tests. I have found out that he was worried, because he had had a few relationships, but who knows… I just think it was too hard for him. He had said to a former partner that he thought it was hard to find love. Sex yes, but not love.

I want to finish this piece with a story that the former partner told me about him. The way he was.

He had decided to kill him self by jumping down from a very high place in Stockholm, and he started climbing over, but a man that was passing by caught him and saved him from falling. But that man was so upset about what had just happened, that my friend comforted him, instead of dying.

He is now resting with his parents in a little graveyard, surrounded by fields.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You either lose it completely…

In 1941 a book called ”Escape from Paris” was published in Sweden.

It was written by Lo Håkansson, a Swedish journalist.

For some time I have wanted to quote a piece in her book, about something she experienced during World War II, it was the bombing of a train station in Tours, France, with many casualties.

”When it was all over, I sat down at the same place where I had been standing all the time.

I was terrified over my self. How could one become so apathetic so one could calmly look at the shambles, calmly look at how the dead and wounded were carried away.

I did not understand my self any longer. I thought I knew my self rather well, and although I was sort of prepared for experiences, such as the ones I had just lived through, I had expected that some kind of reaction would appear.

That there didn´t seem to be any reaction at all, I assumed depended on a lack of feelings and compassion.

It wasn´t until much later that it dawned on me, that this was the way I reacted. You either lose it completely in sight of all these insane war experiences, or you become like a stone.”

I had a similar reaction, when it came to HIV/AIDS.

So many people died. It was funeral after funeral. And after a while I didn´t feel anything. It was time for me to go.

And still the experiences I had were limited in comparison to what the hospital staff and volunteers experienced in San Francisco, with so many people dying.

I was allowed to be an observer at a Care for Caregivers workshop in San Francisco in 1987, and saw people there that were stuck in grief, overwhelmed by all the death, unable to cry.

In the end, after my son was born in 1990 – having interviewed and followed sick and dying people all through my pregnancy – I decided to not get to know any new people with HIV/AIDS, just keep on following the people I already knew.

Eventually I started to feel again, remembering certain things that moved me, like…

Ron making a final grand gesture, because ”It can´t be over!”, booking tickets to New York on the cruise ship Queen Elizabeth.

Torgny having decided to make it home by him self, hardly being able to lift his foot on to the pavement.

Carl asking me to read a poem at his partners funeral… ”If you have time”.

And Lars, whose self portrait covers my Swedish book, I can picture him sitting down, trying to dry him self after a shower, a little area at the time, having no strength.

Lars trying to strike up a conversation with an old neighbor over the fence, but the woman continues to walk…

Lars talking in the night, not understanding he is dying, not understanding his lungs are filling up, talking and talking, worried about someone else… until his partner realizes that he has died.

Memories, lines, reaching my heart.

I took these photos of Lars in Greece, 1980, about a year before his journey to New York, where he thought he got infected with the virus.

I have lived on signs… and impulses…

Many years ago, in 1998/1999 I wrote a book about a group of artists, living in a block of old buildings in Stockholm, Sweden.

They were mostly painters and musicians, born between 1907 – 1930, and they lived there because they wanted to be with like-minded people that they could share company with, and they all wanted to continue working.

They practiced on their pianos, they went to their ateliers if they had one, or stayed at home and painted and painted. They had one thing in common as they grew older, and that was that they had very little understanding for their bodies, when it let them down.

I am there now, as I have turned 70. I have a very strong desire to write, but everything goes slower and slower. The Pandemic, and not being able to travel and meet like-minded people, has not helped at all.

One can say that I have lived on and been inspired by signs and impulses, sometimes from posts in the AIDS Memorial, and from sudden messages.

Some of you, who have read things I have written here before, may remember a piece called  ”Ashes”.

One of the people I wrote about in ”Ashes” was Charles, a public spokesperson that I met at The AIDS Project of the East Bay in Oakland in 1987.

After his death, in 1989, I got in touch with his mother, and when I asked where he is buried, she told me he wasn´t buried, that she saved his ashes, so they could be buried together.

I recently found out that she has passed away, so I tried to contact the family through the Funeral Home to send my condolences, and ask if they are now buried together, after all these years. But I received no answer, and thought that I may never know what happened.

But, suddenly, I received an e-mail from a brother of Charles.

As he was going through his mother´s papers, he found one of my letters. We had lost contact, but I kept on writing, and was in the process of sending her a new letter, when I found out that she had passed away.  It seems like the family had not seen the condolences I had sent through the Funeral Home.

He told me that she passed away in 2020, at 93 years of age, from Covid-19.

I sent him the piece I had written about ”Ashes”, where this photo of Charles is shown. He wrote back and told me that it was taken in 1987 when Charles was visiting, and that their mother always kept that photo displayed in her dining room until she passed away.

And, he could tell me that Charles is now buried beside his mother and father. It feels peaceful, and I am most grateful for the message.

Let me add something!

When the brother of Charles, contacted me, I was very excited and I contacted a friend in San Francisco, Alison. We had been communicating about Charles and the ashes, and the fact that I may never know.

But now I knew, so I was very pleased and wrote to her. But she wrote back that she couldn´t answer, because she was sitting with a friend of hers that had died.

  • I´m sitting here with Irene…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The little girl on the cover of Newsweek

I remember this cover from September 1987 so well, and I have always wondered what happened to the little girl.

Now, through The AIDS Memorial page, I have  found out.

The girls name was Boobie, and she passed away a few months after the cover was published.

She became a representative for all the children that were affected, either by being infected them selves and/or becoming orphans. 

Boobie´s mother gave birth to six children, while using drugs.  They lived with their grandmother. Bobbie had a younger brother, Lil Eddie, who also passed away.

The woman who tells the story is one of their cousins, who also lived with the family. She said that Boobie and Lil Eddie were treated like Angels because they were so sick.

They both died at home, and the extended family stayed with other family members or friends during that ordeal.

The children are buried together, but not with their parents.

I eventually made contact with the family, and was told that the parents did not have money for the burial, so it was given to them by Social services or something similar – and here is what drugs do to people  – the parents used the money to drugs.

In the end, a woman who had lost her son in an accident, offered the family space for the children in that grave.

 

There was a man called John…

I met a man called John LoCoco during a course called Care for Caregivers, in 1987. He was a volunteer at a hospital, but he was also a man with HIV.

As we were doing a little exercise looking at our shoes, and saying something about them, he made a comment that made us understand that he probably would not walk in them so much longer, nor live.

I asked if I could interview him, and he said yes.

John LoCoco  was a devout Catholic, active in Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in the Castro. He was one of the people with AIDS that was chosen to meet Pope John Paul II, in 1987. I will write more about him later.

Here is the Commemorative Wall & Fountain at the MHR Church, that was opened April 29, 2013.

I belong to the Anglican Episcopal Church in Stockholm, and last Sunday the priest said the words There was a man called John… It made me want to write this piece, as I am just about to start writing more actively about the people I met in San Francisco. 

In 2014 I had a plate made for John LoCoco, and everyone I had met that had died of AIDS in San Francisco.

 

 

 

 

Who have we lost? Some of the men we lost in Sweden.

I am reading a detective story set in the 1940s, during World War II. It is a case about a young man that has gone missing, and the female detective is talking to the man´s mother.

The detective remembers what she had seen on a street: a messenger going from house to house to deliver telegrams, and mothers running out of their houses calling out in desperation: ”Who have we lost? Who have we lost?!

The young men had grown up on that street, everyone knew each other. And now they were soldiers. Who had they lost?!

That scene touched me so, and it reminds me of all the people we have lost, to HIV/AIDS.

Let me tell you about a few of the men in Sweden that we lost.

Here is Lars Rading, an artist. He devoted his life to painting. He passed away in Spain, with his partner by his side.

Here is his partner, Börje. He found it very hard to live without Lars, to motivate himself to go on.  He hoped he would get a stroke or something similar, and that is what happened to him.  He died with his mother and sister beside him.

 

Here is Ron, from South Africa, who lived with a Swedish man, Alf, here in Sweden. He died in the hospital, with his partner and close friends beside him. His parents called him, and Alf placed the phone next to his ear.

And here is Alf, his partner, who had survived a serious suicide attempt – he was found after 7 days – and lived to take care of Ron, and become seriously ill after his death. I think there were times when he wished he had not been saved.

But, Alf had another close friend, Egil, who had promised to be with him to the end, and he came from Norway and stayed with him, as he had said, to the end.

 

And here is Torgny, who had such a hard struggle with anxiety and fear of dying. He kept it mostly to him self, but in the end the family in the countryside knew.

I will never forget his room at the hospital.

I came rather late in the evening and the family let me in. It was a big room and there were many relatives, some watched ice hockey, others tended to Torgny, and some ate of the food and bread that friends had brought to them, as they were holding watch with Torgny.  It must have been almost like being at home for him.  He passed away the following morning.

 

And here is Mats.

The last time I saw him, he didn´t realize I was in the room, trying to talk to him.

When he had died, his upset father decided that no homosexuals were allowed to come to the funeral that would be held in a secret place, and no flowers were allowed that could indicate what he had died from, as from organisations dealing with HIV/AIDS.  Strict orders.

His father died not long after Mats, and his mother some 7 years after that. They are now buried together.

And here is Per-Göran, a long time survivor.

Per-Göran had another diagnosis, some mental problems, so the family never knew he had HIV. Being at the hospital was normal.

He was a good friend and supporter, and seemed so healthy that one could hardly understand that he was sick. Always on the go, many friends, very active, especially during the summers.

His death came suddenly. He may not even have known he was dying.  He was reading a paper…

And here is Leif, the nurse who took care of so many patients with HIV, and worked tirelessly to create a hospice for AIDS patients. He did not tell anyone, but his partner and a friend, that he had HIV himself. His death was sudden  – there was no time to bring him to the hospice  – and it was a total surprise to most  of us.

 

And finally, here I stand with Calle, holding my panel To Be a Witness.

 

Calle and his partner Tommy made their own panel with many names called Lovers and friends, Sweden.

I have written about them before.

 

Calle survived Tommy. In one of my last conversations with him, he almost broke my heart by asking me to read a poem at Tommy´s funeral, ”if you have time”… Ofcourse, ofcourse! …and during the last conversation he answered a hesitant ”…yes…” to everything. I found out later, that he had had expressive aphasia.

Calle wanted to lie on black silk sheets, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt in the coffin. He also wanted a bottle of Whisky in the coffin. That did not work, as he was to be cremated, so the undertaker, then totally liberated after all the funerals he had had with creative young gay men, poured whisky all around Calle in the coffin.

Tommy and Calle are now buried together.

 

There you are,  some of the men we lost here in Sweden.

 

 

 

 

 

Matti, and the lesions…

I saw a new post on the AIDS Memorial Page, that inspired me to write about two men I knew in Sweden, Matti and Mikaell.

It was Mark Mitchinson, who wrote about his friend, James Harning, and posted many photos of him, also one photo where you see many Kaposis´s Sarcoma lesions on Mr Harning´s face. I was very grateful for that, because it is possible that people don´t know what it looks like. (It was posted in November 2020.)

I met Matti and Mikael for the first time on December 21, 1986. I was working extra as an orderly at the same Ward that they were in, but I was not working with Matti. However I knocked on the door, and asked if I could come in and say hello, and they said yes, and I told them that I hoped to write about HIV/AIDS.

Matti was very sick, and covered in dark KS lesions, especially on his face. He was the first person I met with KS.

During the following days when I worked on that Ward I would look in, if possible. One day I handed Matti a little book with poems and tales by a French poet Marie Noël.

There were some words that I liked in a poem called Grandmother´s lullaby. It talks about going to sleep, about setting ones soul free… from all the thoughts, and all the noise.

”I see a sunbeam on the threshold of the door, just big enough to take one step…”

New Years Eve came and I wondered if Matti was alive, and he was, but on January 21st 1987, I saw his death notice.

When I interviewed Mikael some time later he told me about their relationship.

They had fallen in love, and moved in together very fast. But not long after that they saw that Matti had a dark spot – I think on one of his hips – that they had not seen before, and he went to the doctor. She could not tell what it was, but when he returned to her she asked him about his personal life, and when she found out he was homosexual, she referred him to a certain hospital in Stockholm. Eventually they found out that he had HIV and that he had already developed AIDS. Mikael was not HIV-positive.

Mikael said that Matti was not as alarmed as he was – for some reason Matti had always thought he would die young.

This happened in the middle of their infatuation, and everything changed of course. They had to adapt to a whole new situation with hospital visits and tests and things like that.

When I met them Matti was, as I have mentioned, covered with lesions. Mikael told me about one situation when the lesions even covered his eyes so he could not see. One would think that the lesions would stop, because there were eyes, but the cancer just continued, onto the eyelids.

It was necessary to give him radiation therapy, but that would not be possible to do without hurting his eyes, so what they had to do was to make incisions to insert a plate – I think of copper – between the eyes and the lesions, and when that happened, Mikael fainted.

Matti passed away in the hospital, with Mikael by his side. His coffin was sent to Finland, where he was buried beside his grandmother, as was his wish. It was in the middle of the winter, and for Mikael it was a good experience. People were very friendly towards him.

He was only sad that Matti had been placed in a black plastic bag in the coffin, he would have wanted to open up the coffin and wrap a white sheet around him, but it wasn´t possible.

Mikael´s life changed through this experience. He started working as a counselor with AIDS-patients and did that for many years – but few knew he had personal experiences. On one occasion he found it hard, it was when he had a client from Finland that looked very much like Matti, and was treated at the same hospital, and at the same Ward. That was when the past and the present collided.

He met a man a year after the death of Matti, and they have lived together ever since.

I don´t have a photo of Matti and Mikael, but when I was in San Francisco in 1987, and visited the NAMESPROJECT, I made a Panel for Matti.

That Panel turned out to be on their first poster.  You can see it on the left hand side.

 

 

Your mother is coming…

I am one of the people that often write something at the AIDS Memorial Page on Facebok, when there is a photo and a story about someone that was lost to HIV/AIDS.

It is just amazing that the photos and stories keep coming.

Yesterday there was a man, David Burress, who published a lovely post where he thanked all mothers and fathers that had shared their children´s stories on the AIDS Memorial Page. He wrote about them as being a blessing, and expressed his love for them, saying ”you will always be a parent to us”.

I have read so many obituaries in the Bay Area Reporter from 1987 when I came to San Francisco for the first time, and until today. Often, very often, the deceased had extended families; there were friends, lovers, (cats and dogs), sometimes siblings, and now and then a mother and/or father that was grieving.

This made me think about a woman I heard speaking in one of the sessions in the Volunteer Training Program I took at The AIDS Project of the East Bay, in 1987. (I think it must have been Ahna Stern (1932 – 2015.)

She was a counselor working with People with AIDS in a hospital. She told us a story about a young man who was very sick.

He was nearing death, and was calling for his mother. The staff at the hospital managed to find her and told her that her son was dying, and could she come? She told them that he could go to hell, and hung up on them.

This was something they obviously could not tell him, so the counselor told him that his mother was on her way.  He didn´t have to worry, she was on her way.

In the end the counselor held him and stroked him as he was dying, saying ”Mommy is here, mommy is here”, and he died in her arms.

I have never forgotten this, and I have always wondered what happened to the mother, once she realized what she had done, and that it could never be undone.

 

 

Ashes

I came to San Francisco in September of 1987, after the death of my mother. I was still grieving and counting hours and days from when I had been told about her death.

One of the first persons I interviewed in San Francisco was Judi Stone, a woman who had lost her son, Michael. He was 19 years old.

We talked a little bit before we started the interview, and hearing about my grief, she wondered if I should not have waited with this work for a while, but I knew it was my way to handle it. Having experienced real grief, became almost a key for me to this work.

Before I went to the US, I had read about new ways of celebrating the memory of loved ones. I read that family and friends went out in boats and sprinkled ashes and rose petals on the water.

It was so unusual for me, that had gone to many ordinary funerals. It encouraged me, and made me strong.

There were problems surrounding my mother´s ashes, as her last husband disregarded her wish to be spread close to the love of her life, that she had lost many years ago. So, I decided to ”steal” my mother´s ashes, and fulfill that wish.

I traveled outside Stockholm and picked up her ashes at a crematorium in a forest – still a troubling memory – ordered a taxi and went to the cemetery she wanted to be in, and spread her ashes on the top of a hill immediately, like a sower, before anyone could stop me. There was only one problem – the wind twisted and turned and some of the ashes came back to me, on me.

The Second March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay rights, in October 1987 was coming up, and I heard there were aids activists who had died, who wanted their ashes to be thrown at the White House on that occasion, as a protest against president Reagan, who did not seem to care at all about all the people that died of HIV/AIDS.

It was this photo of a woman who wanted her friends ashes to be used as a protest, that inspired me to write this text, although it happened some years later.

Her name is Rebecca Hensler, and her friends name was Colin Blakeney. He was a S.F.  AIDS Activist and ACT UP member. The protest against Gov. Wilson, took place at the State Capitol in Sacramento, in October 1993.

One of the men I interviewed, Keith, wanted the White House to stand in a cloud of ashes from dead men, including the ashes of his late partner Jay, who had really wanted that to happen. I thought it was a fantastic idea, the ultimate protest. But I remember warning Keith about the ashes and the winds.

I don´t know if it happened with others– but it did not happen with Jay´s ashes, as his parents wanted to split his ashes between them. Keith kept some of it.

In 1987 I went to Volunteer training in Oakland at The AIDS Project of the East Bay, and there we listened to People with AIDS, parents, friends and people who had lost loved ones.

One of the men that had AIDS, was called Charles. He was a tall man who spoke softly to us, he reminded me of the elves in The Lord of the Rings.

 

I later came to visit him for an interview, but on that day he had such an anxiety and fear of dying that we had to give it up.  We took a walk instead, and then we said goodbye, as I was going back to Sweden.

Eventually I found out that he had died, and I got in touch with his mother. She talked lovingly about her firstborn, and told me that he was not buried. No, she kept his ashes, and would be buried together with him.

We stayed in touch for many years, a letter now and then, but since she does not answer letters anymore, I don´t know if she is still alive, she was near 90 the last time we were in contact. If she has passed away, I hope they are now buried together.

Another couple that I met in San Francisco, Keith and Gery, had decided that when one of them died, the other would commit suicide. However that did not happen, and Gery is still with us, and has quite a remarkable story that I hope to write about later. He still keeps Keith´s ashes with him on the cabinet beside his bed.

There are so many ways to deal with grief. I set my mother´s ashes free… and worked and worked, and still work.

Judi, that I mentioned in the beginning of this post – buried Michael´s ashes in the garden, so he never really left.

Judi and her husband Ralph Stone have created a wonderful garden, and they can always be together with him.

 

About Charles.

After I wrote about this, I decided to contact his mother. I wrote a letter, but wrote something wrong on the envelope. But just as I was going to write on another one, I decided to write his mother´s name and place of living on Google – and there she was, her Obituary. She passed away in the end of May this year, 2020.

I have written to both the family and the Funeral Home, asking about his ashes.  But I never heard from them.

I have his mother´s letters and will write about them in a while.

Please see what I wrote in the piece: I have lived on signs and impulses…

There is more there about Charles and his mother.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just a few words… Tim Greene…

Tim Greene

One of the first people I spoke to at San Francisco General Hospital in 1987, was an Assistant Chaplain at the Episcopal Chaplain´s Office, Tim Greene.

I ran into his name in Bay Area Reporter many years later, and contacted him. It was easy for me to remember him, but I was of course one of many people that had passed through their office.

I wrote to Tim Greene because I had seen an obituary in BAR, that touched me, maybe more than other obituaries.

It was about a man who had decided to drive out in a desert to commit suicide. He had left instructions about where he could be found – but they couldn´t find him.

I read that obituary many years later – I have saved many pages from BAR – and saw that Tim Greene was the contact person.

I wanted to know if the man had finally been found, so I wrote, referring to our meeting many years ago, but there was no answer. This was of course none of my business, but… I just hoped that the man had been found.

 

I have earlier in this blog, written about a Lay Assistant Chaplain that I have lost contact with, Laurie D., so I turned to retired Chaplain Connie Hartquist Jacobs, to ask if she is in touch with Laurie, but she isn´t.

But maybe Tim Greene was in contact, I suggested, and she informed me that unfortunately he had passed away some years ago.

I came to think about Tim Greene today, as I came upon the notes I took after talking to him briefly in the Chaplain´s Office, on September 3rd, 1987. He mentioned AIDS Ward 5 A:

I spoke to an Assistant Chaplain. His friend is dying of AIDS. He had had to stop working at 5 A to get a perspective on everything, on all the people that were dying.

  • Do you have time to mourn in between deaths?
  • That´s the problem. We are living in constant shock, as in constant combat. Everybody is dying. It is terrible.