The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: A Hard Silence: One daughter remaps family, grief, and faith when HIV/AIDS changes it all by Melanie Brooks

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                                 How It Could Have
                                     Been Different

   “You  know what  I keep coming back to?”  Dr. B  said,  uncrossing his
legs  and  repositioning himself in his chair. His forehead  creased  with
the  intensity of  his  thought. “I  keep  coming  back to that pastor.  The
one your dad tried to talk to.”
   “Yeah,”  I said, hugging my arms close and folding a little at the  waist
into  my protective  posture. Lately, we’d been venturing into  the  vola-
tile territory of faith. The most difficult territory to navigate because  of
my general disillusionment. But even  when I determined to, I  couldn’t
fully  abandon  it. Despite  my  dismissal, I  felt  a  pull to  try to  resolve
things. The figuring out part was perilous therapy ground.
   Dr. B kept going. “I’d sort of like to punch that guy in the face.”
   He   feigned  shame  and  took  an exaggerated look around the  small
office  as  though  someone  else  might   have  overheard  him.  Talk  of
punching pastors was  not typically  understood as the “good  Christian
behavior”   we  had  both  been   taught  in  our  strikingly  similar  faith
backgrounds, but  he was not apologetic. His  late father  was a  Baptist
minister.  He  grew  up in  the  evangelical world—a  place you  have  to
have  lived  to  know.  In  our  second   session,  when  I’d  recognized  a
familiar  logo on  the coffee mug  he was drinking from, I’d  discovered
that we’d both graduated (eighteen years apart) from  Gordon  College,
a  non-denominational, Christian liberal arts school on  Massachusetts’
North Shore.
   I  also knew from small anecdotes he’d shared that faith had not been
an  effortless  path  for him  either. He’d  encountered  his own  periods

of  disillusionment,  so an ease had  emerged in our work together  over
the  past  three years that made  it  okay  for us  to  say  what we  meant,
shocking  or not, appropriately  “Christian” or not. And  though he  was
using  the  bluntness of  this  statement  about  punching  the  pastor  to
allow  space for my anger,  an authentic part of him meant exactly what
he said.
   I smiled even though I felt like crying. Gratitude draped over me, and
I loosened my arms. “I know the feeling,” I said.
   We’d  been   moving   cautiously   into  conversations  about  how   the
Christian,  particularly   evangelical,  response   to  AIDS  early  on—the
intolerance, the  bigotry,  the  turning  of  backs,  the  hateful  messages
from  powerful evangelical  leaders—was  such  a  critical factor in  how
isolated  I felt when my  dad  was sick. A factor that  tied  to my  doubts
about whether there was a place for God in my life now.
   The  story of  this pastor was  one  I’d told Dr. B a long time  ago,  and
I  was moved, not simply because  he would contemplate punching this
guy on  my behalf, but because he’d earmarked this event as significant
enough to hold in his memory. It was a  story that I only learned  about
long  after the  fact  when  I’d sat  alone  reading the  manuscript of  my
parents’  book in my basement  room in Halifax.  A story that  I  wished
I  had  the power to rewrite  because  its outcome solidified a  trajectory
that, twenty-five years later, landed me on this couch.
   Here are the facts as I know them from three stark paragraphs in The
Book:  On a Sunday  afternoon in  1987,  two  years after his  diagnosis,
Dad  was  home alone and  struggling  with  vivid thoughts  of  suicide.
He  called the   pastor of the large, downtown church we attended  and
asked  for an urgent  meeting. The  pastor   agreed, came to our  home,
and  my father disclosed to him the  secret of his HIV infection and  his
anguish. The  pastor offered a  short  prayer and then  made an  abrupt
exit,  leaving my father alone  without  counsel or  support.  The  pastor
later  called  my  mother and told  her if  she and  my father needed  his
help, he would  like them  to come to his office so he would not have  to
visit them in their home.
   They never heard from the man again.

                                                          — 
   My  father was a proud man. He was used to being the guy in  charge.
The  one  always  in control. Nothing  would  have  been riskier for  him
than  being in that  position  of  vulnerability that day  with  the  pastor.
So  exposed. When I try to imagine  the courage it took for him  to  pick
up  the telephone that  Sunday  afternoon, I feel a  clenching fist in  the
pit  of my stomach. And  when I think about that  moment of  rejection,
picture  that pastor turning away  from Dad’s obvious torment, a disap-
pointment bigger than any other threatens to strangle me.
   Because  that  was  the  one  shot. The  one  shot  to  prove that  Dad’s
fears of being ostracized by those around us—ostracized by those in the
Christian   community—were wrong.  The  one  shot   to  break  through
the loneliness of this terrible secret and get the support that he needed.
That we all needed.

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   The  good-girl  me wanted to give the pastor the benefit of the  doubt.
To  extend him some grace. Was  it  unfair for me to stack the  outcome
of  our story squarely on  one man’s shoulders? 1987 was  a  scary  time
when  it came  to  AIDS. I’d  lived  the history. No  one seemed to  know
the  right  way  to   respond. There  was  so  much  ignorance.  So  much
mystery  connected to this illness that took the lives of so many. Maybe
I could forgive him. I had been scared then too.
   A  few  years  earlier, after  recounting this story for  the  first  time  to
Dr. B, I’d gone home, sat down at my laptop, and typed the man’s name
into  the  Google  search  bar.  His  bio on  the  New  York  City  church’s
website  was  the  first thing  to pop  up. When I clicked  on the link, his 
face appeared at the top of my screen.It took me a moment to recognize
him: he was bald and sported a trendy goatee and dark rimmed glasses.
But  I knew his face and my stomach seized. I scrolled  through the  site
and  read about his work and  the impact he’d had on his  congregation.

I  read about his family. Those kids I used to babysit were married  now
with children of their own. He was somebody’s grandfather.
   So,  I wanted to excuse him. I wanted to believe that he simply  hadn’t
been  equipped with the proper tools for the unique nature of my  dad’s
situation. I wanted to chalk it up as one bad blip on the broader  screen
of  his  successful  ministry.  He  was  the  good  guy  in  so  many  other
people’s  stories.  I wanted  to stop thinking that  everything  he’d  done
since 1987 was negated because of one mishandled incident.
   But I couldn’t.
   I couldn’t because in the thirty years since he’d turned his back on my
dad,  on  my whole family,  he’d  never looked  back. Never  apologized.
Never  questioned  his  behavior  enough  to  clarify or  remedy  it.  Dad
died,  but the rest of  us didn’t. We were there  the  whole  time,  coping
with the grief, railing against the loss. And some of us still felt the  pain
and  confusion and  loneliness  of that  experience  as deeply as we  did
then. Maybe more so.

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