It's
been a year since I stared in disbelief at Tom's brief post on Facebook,
announcing Talon ps' death.
I was still at work,
waiting out the last half hour before the next person came in, to relieve me at
the post, so I could crawl onto the bus, catch a nap, and be ready to get all
the stuff done that gets put off when I'm on shift. Let's face it, 16
hour days just don't leave much time for anything else.
I'd been satisfied
that morning. I'd typed "The End" to a manuscript that was for
me an emotional train wreck only a few hours before, oblivious to the fact that
literally as I have typed those final words, Talon was leaving this
world. Also as Talon passed, a litter of kittens were born to a close
friend of mine, that by all logic should also have died earlier that
night. I only learned these things later.
My mind was only filled with satisfaction and relief that a difficult,
painful story had been told, and that they had gotten a happy ending that they
had worked hard for. And a small (okay
huge,) amount of glee that I had finished it in time to meet the submission deadline.
My friend was driving
home in her car, an extremely low to the ground sports car, when she hit the
fresh remains of a deer in middle of the interstate. She had nowhere to
go but right into the carcass, yet instead of it being flipped up and into the
windshield, which would most likely have killed her and her passenger, by some
miracle, the car actually went over the
carcass. Maybe some mathematical genius can give you the odds against that outcome, but my friend made
it home, shaky but okay. Then she had the happier drama just a couple hours
later of three newborn kittens joining the family.
I cried all the way
home, somehow not lashing out at the people around me who appeared to think it
ridiculous for me to be upset over the death of a man I'd never met in
person. Maybe I'm the weird one, but it seemed incredibly callous to
me. I get that they didn't know Talon in any way shape or form, but they
knew ME, and could have at least had
enough respect and compassion to accept MY
grief as valid.
Then later that day,
my boss called, asking me to work a special detail the following two
days. He asked if I was okay; I guess I sounded off. A slightly rambling
explanation followed along with my concerns for Tom, as Talon's partner, and
Prin, as his twin, as well as his niece. My boss, the idiot
extraordinaire of the day, made a very prejudiced comment, assuming Talon had
died of AIDS. Because of course, what else might a gay man die of,
right? By then, someone had posted some information about the disease
that ultimately took Talon, and I admit I took a certain amount of pleasure in
correcting my boss' bigoted assumption. There was an embarrassed
"Oh," and a hurried change of subject, but it was a reaction that
still makes me angry.
I'm a little older
than the AIDS epidemic. I've spent years listening to how it started, how
it's transmitted and to whom. By far the best thing I was taught was how
to protect myself, which was so simple: use condoms. Be careful who you
sleep with and use condoms. Of course, this was back when real sex
education was taught in school, and a week before, you were sent home with a
little permission slip your parent had to sign, allowing you to go, or stating
specifically that the parent did not want you to attend it. My mother,
pregnant with me at 16, made sure I went every year from 4th grade until graduation.
But why is it, 30 years later, with everything that has been learned, was my
boss' immediate assumption that Talon had died of AIDS? How was
that at all logical?
It comes down to
prejudice, I believe. The long and the short of it is prejudice.
A person who happens to be gay couldn't possibly die of anything else,
right? Cancer, heart disease, stroke, environmental poisoning, couldn't
possibly be a factor in the death of any gay person. Not even old age
claims those who are gay… These things,
these ailments, are a curse only the straights bear. AIDS is the gay
disease...according to ignorance and prejudice.
Ignorance and prejudice that after 30 years can only be deliberately
willful, not merely existing through a lack of education.
I can't speak for
what anyone else felt that day beyond shock and grief. For me, there was
also anger, understanding, and resentment. There may be those who might
think I don't have the right to those emotions, because I only knew Talon
through Facebook, and only for a short few months. Those people can take a long
walk off a short pier. Nobody gets to tell me what I'm allowed to
feel.
Grief is obvious. Talon had been unfailing kind to me,
accepting of my tendency to just jump into conversations. I was still new
to Facebook myself, at least as an author, and Talon had been welcoming and
encouraging.
Shock again is
obvious, but tied up with it was anger. Anger that I had no idea that
Talon had been dying. I'd known from some of his posts that he endured a
lot of pain, but never felt it was a good time to ask what was wrong.
Understanding, because of course Talon
would not want to tell everybody that
he's been severely injured, and losing the fight with his illness. No one
wants to be the dying guy. Talon just wanted to focus on as much of the
positive as he could and even with a few months friendship, I could understand
it.
Anger
that so many people could be so uncaring in the face of anyone’s grief, and just plain angry that Talon was gone.
Resentment might be a
little harder to explain. At first, it was because of little things, like
the odd looks I got. "What's wrong with you?" My friend died.
"Oh, well how long had you known him?" Only a few months. "Well,
why are you crying then?" Not important, I know, in the grand scheme of
things.
But as the first days
and weeks went by I became very angry and resentful of the behavior of many in
Facebookland and their behavior towards Talon and his loved ones and
friends. Many were attacked as fake. Some were stalked. I've never witnessed such appalling behavior
in the wake of death for any but some scandalous celebrity. Talon was
well known, but certainly no Marilyn Monroe or even Anna Nicole Smith, who at
least made her living by inviting scandal.
Grief is an odd
emotion, and in some ways an oddly unique one. There's no rules to it,
really. People react so individually to it. Some retreat within
themselves to try to hide from the pain, and others attack the world, gnawing
their own limbs off in frustrated fury. Some perceived as weak, stand tall and
unbowed, carrying on, taking care of others, and some, perceived as strong,
crumple in heaps, lost and bewildered. Some
people need things to stay exactly as the person who died left it. Others need to bring things up, talk about
it, show other things that loved one would have wanted to show everyone. There is no right or wrong to grief. There’s no way to know how any of us will
react until we’re in that moment. Perhaps some of the...misbehavior...is a
result of that, but the rest was purely the need of some to enjoy the pain of
others, and therefore simply unacceptable.
In the year since,
I've watched some people grow apart, when they should have grown closer.
I've seen friendships destroyed because of acrimonious jealousy. The
nastiness even reached a point wherein a piece of work that Talon had tried so
hard to finish before his death had to be removed from availability because one
individual threw lawyers into the mix, and those who worked their butts off to
finish Feral Dreams withdrew it rather than let that person further defame
somebody they love and themselves.
People whom I used to
speak with regularly, never speak to me at all anymore. Some have even
unfriended me, either because they thought I chose a side, or because I didn't,
I don't know. To this day, I don’t understand if there was a fight, or
even if there was a right or wrong “side” to choose. To me there was only those grieving Talon and
those attacking people in pain, and if that was the fight, then my lot was
amoung Talon’s friends. Hell, for all I
know, these unfriendings were simply because a person didn’t like my hair
color, or a book I wrote. Without having been talked to about the matter,
I can’t say. In some cases, it was a
case of *shrug* "whatever.” In other cases, it's been rather
hurtful. Either way, there's little to do about it. But it all adds to the resentment, resentment
that I invested anything in people who invested nothing in me, even if it was “just”
online friendship. What, because it’s
online, it’s less important? Less valid?
So
tonight at work, sitting here, looking pretty, waving to people as they drive
by, and left with entirely too much time to think, I thought about this past
year. It’s dangerous to give me time to
think, I start ranting. There have been
a few friendships that have grown in the aftermath. A few misunderstandings that have been
resolved, and a few that I fear never will be.
Some things Talon would have laughed his little furry black cat ass off
about, such as a recent food fight Prin started. Some of it he would have hated, such as the accusations
leveled against those he cared about, of fakery and whatever other
nonsense. Some of it he would have been
so proud of that nobody would hear the end of it for at least six months…okay
we would never hear the end of it he’d’ve
been so proud.
Maybe
I’m not the only thinking of any of this.
For me, it still hurts, not so much for me, but because I still see the
hole Talon left in so many lives, and some of those lives belong to friends I’ve
gotten to know even better. Because I
see people who are struggling to carry on, and thinking that they are failing,
or doing it wrong, when nothing could be further from the truth. They are still here, celebrating, teasing,
grieving and PeaCOCKING about. Sounds like
a good time for friends to remember the man who showed us all a thing or two
about it.
Warm Winds my friend.
