Life or Death
The Masks We Wear
I’ve told this story often over the decades. I believe it speaks to resilience, imagination, and personal strength. You may decide.
As a semi-suicidal teen (it is hard to look back accurately sixty years and determine what, exactly, suicidal ideation in the 1960’s really looked like) and my memory of that time is clouded by the ensuing years. Yet I do recall vividly feeling strongly that my tortured inner life would be better unlived in the external world. I had combative, emotionally neglectful parents whose hatred of themselves translated into a kind of orchestrated mental abuse of me, their youngest child. Even if unintentional on their part, the damage inflicted was very real.
I also harbored, at that time, a deeply held secret about myself that shaded everything in my world with a hopelessness that, at that time, seemed would completely consume me and that death, a transitory concept at fifteen, felt like the only out. I was gay. “Gay” was not a word in common use then, but I knew in my fiber that was what I was. It’s odd because I was fearful of other boys and loved all my girlfriends with a ferocity that belied my ability to operate in the normal avenues open to a child of that era.
I knew because my mother knew. I knew because my father feared he knew, more on that later. My mother went to my kindergarten teacher in 1957 and asked her if she thought I was a homosexual. I have no idea what that conversation entailed or what answers Miss Graham may have provided but I can guarantee that it was not sympathetic, patient, or instructive in any way that would benefit a five-year-old. In fact, my mother spent the next dozen years trying to emotional beat the gay out of me with a campaign of withering remarks, criticisms of my voice, my walking gait, my hand movements, etc. Her battering reinforcement confirmed my inner surety.
At seventeen I made a conscious decision to not die and, if I was going to live, I would become more like my best girlfriend. Not the prettiest, not the smartest, but someone who everyone, guy and girl alike, wanted to be. And hence
The Mask
A broken mask symbolizes the shattering of illusions, the exposure of true identity, and the vulnerability that follows emotional or psychological armor breaking. It represents a transition from deception to authenticity, marking a moment where hidden feelings, past trauma, or genuine self are finally revealed, overcoming previously held limitations or facades. I chose instead to build my mask to disguise my true identity and cloak it in a flurry of extraverted behavior that I sincerely hoped would hide my secrets and allow me freer access to the teenaged life I so desperately craved. And needed.
I pushed through my crippling insecurities and remade my personality completely. I succeeded in ways I could not then understand. The day after I graduated from college I moved to San Francisco. Without knowing it at that time, it was a golden opportunity to redefine myself in a culture of complete freedom and in a world where gay was the coming norm. Free to be me. I continued constructing my mask though, still suppressing a lot of who I really was in favor of the outgoing, personable, wildly enthusiastic person I was becoming. I collected friends like most people collect tchotchkes. The more I had, the more I wanted and the more it felt like confirmation. To quote Sally Field, “They like me, they really like me!”
A few years into my remake a roommate and I were sitting at The Elephant Walk having a martini, or three. Somewhere in our drunken reverie I made the casual remark that I was really a very shy and introverted person. Th as had I had always experienced it. My friend did an actual spit-take across the bar. In his words, “You? Shy? It’s what I hate about you the most. Your ability to walk into a room full of strangers and leave with a fist full of phone numbers, a date for next Friday and two new best friends.”
Wow
Lesson Learned.
I had become my mask.
I had few personal limits. This would be emblematic of my thirties and forties. I continued collecting wide swaths of new friends and thought, at last, I am me, the me I had envisioned as a teen: charming, outgoing, enthusiastic about life and the potential of love around every corner. It was also the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. The storm clouds had been gathering in silence and when they let loose with the fury of their deluge we would all be changed, forever. For the worse.
GIRD, Gay Cancer, the Gay Disease were the first clumsy nomenclature that the press hurriedly put out to warn the country, our community, and the world of this coming tsunami of destruction. Soon enough, HIV blanketed the discussion of what it was that was beginning to decimate our very special hometown and our community within it. The unavoidability of the moment was all consuming. The obituaries in the local BAR magazine very quickly took over the pages, all the pages. They started posting them on the windows of Star Pharmacy at 18th and Castro. Walking to the bus daily, the faces of the dead gazed out on the passing crowds, those crowds that they had so recently been a part of. Gone. The community was awash with action groups, both political and social/care oriented. There was no testing, yet, but those of us who were still personally unaffected on a physical level knew. We just knew. We were next.
As the last of my personal friends were leaving the earth, the funerals and mourning began to wear down my own psyche. I felt myself beginning to separate. On a whim, I moved to Palm Springs. My thinking was that I did not want to inflict my inevitable death scene on the few friends I had left, they were mostly straight and because of that, at a slight remove from the gay community at large. The thought of subjecting anyone I knew to the horror of what I had been living through was unacceptable. In my mind, I saw an opportunity to slowly desiccate in the desert heat and vanish in a very solemn and thoughtful way that allowed me the dignity of my own death and the earnestness of my belief in honoring my life and the passing of my soul into other realms.
I later discovered that Tribal members had, for millennia, been practicing a form of recognition for their own newly dead. They have a custom called burial trees where they prepare the body, wrapped in their own tribal blankets, and raise them into local trees or, in the absence of trees, construct a platform. The bodies slowly decompose and return to the earth. Lovely thought but not exactly practical yet I think of this tradition often in relation to my own eventual passing.
But die I did not.
Even after my official diagnosis, pre-counseling days, there was just a test result tossed across a doctor’s desk and a warning to get my life in order. And so, I moved on yet again. I had a house, a great job and career, and I hated living in the desert. In two weeks, I orchestrated a transfer to San Diego and began, once again, to actually consider living. But first, I had to begin to reconstruct the mask that had, in large part, shattered as I had considered my immanent death. Who needed more friends? Who had any friends left? My raw, teenage self was once again on display complete with frailties, insecurities, and a need, more desperate now than ever, to populate my life with people, energy, and new beginnings. It begins and ends with Kintsusgi.
Kintsugi
The Japanese art form that centers on the repair of precious objects rather than the complete discarding of what is old and broken. It involves taken the broken object and, while in actual fractured pieces, jig-sawing them back into place and where the broken places are, the fractures, they bond them back together using gold and precious metals. They don’t try and hide the broken places, they highlight them and, in doing so, they make a stronger version of the original that pays homage to the original piece but now in a more brilliant and interesting way.
Kintsugi will be the new me. The Japanese use it to repair pottery; I will use it to remake myself. For my next forty years I have done just that; re-engaged, grew my new friends back from seeds, found a husband, and created lives I had never, really never, imagined would be possible.
Today, I am finding a new conundrum to contend with. The gift of my old age, certainly not something I had envisioned, is upon me, with a vengeance. Throughout the years I have endured a panoply of injuries, accidents, surgeries, replacement parts, you name it, I am a body not untouched in any area by trauma. I have more plastic in me than a Honda and more Titanium than the Space Shuttle. I am the Rube Goldberg of human anatomy. And yet I have, until quite recently, overcome, reinvented, and repaired myself with the help of many doctors and therapists. I appear to others as a whole and highly functional human about whom, without exception, people say “You’re a beast! You really bounce back so quickly! You’ve got this! I’ve seen you overcome worse.
This time Is worse
My heart, fluttery and apparently quite compromised, had been thumping away and aside from some palpitations, was letting me do everything physical I wanted. Until it didn’t, I began to notice a host of odd and concerning symptoms, low blood pressure primary among them. Low blood pressure to the extent that I began passing out and almost passing out every time I stood up. Ever the impatient patient I began continuingly reminding my cardiologist of ten years about it every visit, stressing that something was wrong. He dismissed me and went on to say there was nothing wrong with my heart. Period.
I Fired Him
My new cardiologist immediately did an angiogram (the next day!) and to no one’s surprise yes, I had a serious electrical malfunction and needed a pacemaker. While organizing and waiting for the necessary pre-surgical testing, my heart burped, I passed out…..on the landscape rocks in front of my house…..and wound up with a fractured leg/hip and in the hospital. I was immobile, stiches preventing the use of one arm and the pacemaker they installed a week later removed the use of the other arm for six weeks. It needs underlining that, had my (fired) cardiologist paid attention, even once in the 18 months I had been raising my hand for help, I would have had the pacemaker, not fallen, and not ended up a one-legged corpse-in-waiting in a rehab hospital and a wheelchair for six weeks.
And so, at seventy-four years old, I find that my elderhood is fully upon me. It is a stark and unavoidable conclusion that my body, what’s left of it, along with my mind, my surrounding community, as well as my desire to keep engaging, is greatly lessened and in that rather sudden landscape of loss, lie the lessons of aging that must be learned by us all. Our lives are now a condensed and purified compilation of people and moments that we must shuffle and sort and decide what is to be kept and what we can now, with no small amount of relief, let go of. I was given this quote by an old friend and my former doctor. To me, in my here and now, it says it all.
“Elderhood is an exercise in diminishment….when you hit the finish line of your little allotment, there is less of you than when you started. But whatever it is, is all there…you are deepened by diminishment”
Orphan Wisdom Hall
I See The Finish Line, Clearly