Snippets from the Trenches

1.

Before and After

The snow at Crater Lake was fourteen feet deep, or did the ranger say forty-eight feet, that December in 1982? He said we were standing that high above a dozen picnic tables, buried in a record snowfall for the area. If we hadn’t had snowshoes, we might have walked right over the edge of the crater. The snow had built up to about ten feet beyond the rim, and one misstep would have put us into the canyon far below.

It was the second big vacation we had had together since Gary moved to California. The first one, the year before, had been to Yosemite, where we had Christmas dinner on a gigantic fallen redwood. This year, it was in the middle of a snowplowed road in Oregon. We could set our picnic meal anywhere we wanted; there would be no traffic coming through. During the snowshoe hike, he dropped a mitten at the top of a hill. It tumbled end over end, and he chased it all the way down, until he was running faster than his snowshoes would let him. And there he was, mitten in hand, sitting in the snow at the bottom of the hill, rolling with laughter, as the rest of the snowshoed group above joined in.

That is my last image of Gary before the diagnosis. A few weeks later, he called to inform me of a swollen lymph node on his neck. His barber, having noticed it, suggested a visit to the doctor. Apparently, the barber was more aware of what was soon to become all too common knowledge in the gay community. Five months earlier, Gary had sent me a reprint of an article from a medical journal, describing the sudden appearance of a rare cancer which seemed to be affecting only gay men. What was happening? Who knew what was to come?

“Nothing to worry about,” Gary had written, “just for your information.”

A biopsy was to be scheduled, but because of a previously planned ski trip, it was postponed. The doctor had said there was no urgency. That seemed odd at the time, but in retrospect we learned it was indeed true. Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) was the least of concerns when he could have been diagnosed with other life-threatening infections. Within a few weeks, the “nothing to worry about” became very worrisome. That rare cancer was in the lymph node. And so it began. Staging, they called it then. A series of blood tests, antigen tests, various “-oscopies.” And then wait.

Gary asked his primary care doctor how many patients he had with the new illness. The reply was, “Four.”

“And where are they now?” Gary questioned him.

“One died, one is doing fine, one is sick, and the fourth committed suicide. Don’t do anything rash.”

Friends called him, mostly out of curiosity, but the attention Gary wanted most was for someone to just ask, “How about going out for a pizza?”

The day he called to tell me of his diagnosis, we were both at work. He was a computer specialist working as a technical associate with Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's Particle Data Group at the University of California, Berkeley. One of the major publications in which he participated was Physics Letters B, a journal devoted to the rapid publication of important new results in nuclear and particle physics. Gary and an associate also prepared an annual Pocket Diary for Physicists, which was distributed worldwide. Both of them were acknowledged in the publications along with the scientific team.

I was the office manager of a store-planning firm, which provided floor plans, merchandising, and décor for retail establishments; mostly large department stores. Throughout the day, I called Gary to ask how he was taking the news, how he was feeling, how he could work after getting the diagnosis. His answer was, “If people would stop calling me so much, I would be doing much better.”

So now it was up to me to deal with my own anxiety. I panicked, I cried, I worried. What was a mother to do? I expected the worst, and didn’t know how to convey my concern without Gary feeling that I was nagging or leaning on him. Initially, I couldn’t think logically enough to figure out that a weekly call would be fine. And instead of asking how he was feeling, I would ask, “What are you doing?” The first time I tried that approach and he told me he was hanging track lights in his thirty-foot hallway, I realized it would be exactly the system I should use from then on. If he was well enough to do such strenuous tasks, then he must be feeling all right. He didn’t want anyone persisting in asking about his health. He worked at his regular job at the lab, and he forged ahead with his home remodeling, deliberately insisting that his diagnosis was not going to take control of his life. He was determined to deal with it as it came, and not put it before the stuff of life that gave him joy and fulfillment.