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"Postcard from Grief" (1995)
My lover died this year on January 5th. We were together for eleven years. He was forty. His
name was Timothy Scott Melester. He was a surgeon and an AIDS educator.
I find my way by sticking to simple declarative sentences: hand-holds over the
swampy, rocky terrain of my terror and grief. After the initial crush of letters and flowers,
phone calls and devotional meals, I went into a mania of work
-- writing plays and screenplays, attending rehearsals, traveling, seeing friends, tackling projects. I went through
all of Tim's belongings and gave many of them away. I took off my wedding ring.
Now, seven months after the fact, the layers of shock are beginning to fall away and I
am left with a feeling for which nothing in my life has prepared me: not religion, not politics,
not philosophy. I have stopped running, and the waves are breaking over me in no regular
pattern, each one bringing new sensations and stripping me further of my illusions: I know
nothing about who I am, where I am going, what I believe, what I want. Tim was
my anchor: his battle to live was my battle.
My closets and bookshelves are filled with his notes and textbooks from medical
school. What happened to all that learning and effort? Where did it go? The four languages he
taught himself to speak, and the two dead ones he learned to read
-- all the facts, the growing up, the struggle and ultimate joy of coming out to his friends and family, all the
music he listened to, all the novels he devoured: Where are they now? So much wisdom and
beauty and pain -- vanished. Friends put me in touch with a medium and she convinced me
that his spirit was present. Every word she spoke on his behalf was plausible. She knew
countless things she couldn't have known. So perhaps our spirits do go on. Stilll can't touch
him, I can't kiss him, I can't suck, fuck, and hold him. He can't reach up and stop me from
picking my nose.
Nothing makes any sense to me. I have stopped reading the New York Times: it's all
gossip, fashion, and obscene cruelty I have no power to change. In the months since Tim died,
the world is still obsessed with O.J. Simpson. I turn on the TV less than once a week, and I
want to vomit.
I talk to Tim. Out loud. I attend my support group, and continue to write, and to see
friends. Others who are grieving share their experiences with me
-- online, in person, even by snail mail. The depth of their despair is the air I breathe. Here are other things I enjoy: Sad
music. Sex of almost any kind -- cyber, phone, video voyeurism, even real and true
in-the-flesh sex. Nature -- watching the sunset, walking in a garden, on the beach, playing
with my dogs. They understand my grief perfectly, it would seem, and when I cry, they grow
still and pensive, put their faces on my knee, and wait for me to come out of it. Which is
more than most people can do. A very few friends and colleagues are able to listen when I
howl, to be present and hold my hand, or make me laugh. But the most common response to
my litany of boundless sorrow is, "So what does your shrink say?" Anyone who says that to me
can expect to be deleted from my address book. Grief is not a pathology. It is the body's
natural response to devastation. Anyone who can formulate a stiff upper lip is, to me, already
dead. I mourn for them. Go away if you can't stand my grief. It's nowhere near over.
My rage is boundless, too. I want Bill Clinton to lose in the next election and I am
going to actively campaign against him. I will consider voting for anyone who steps forward
and says that Bill Clinton has failed miserably; he is a cowardly fuck who can't even be
bothered to file a brief in the Supreme Court opposing Colorado's Amendment Two and should
be dragged through the streets of every city and town, like Mussolini, weeping while we pelt
him with rotten fruit to remind him of who elected him.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Don't tell me I'm lucky to be alive, to be
HIV-negative. Don't tell me that life is beautiful. Don't tell me that I have a lot to offer. To
whom? A nation that wants to lower taxes on the rich as it abandons the poor and
disenfranchised to further deprivation? A culture that accepts a filthy, reactionary piece of
crap like Pulp Fiction and calls it Art?
Here's what I understand: people who tear at their flesh and throw themselves in the
grave. People who join monasteries and spend the rest of their days praying for peace.
Terrorists.
Maybe I'll come out of this and be utterly ashamed to have confessed to the depths of
what I am experiencing. Maybe, someday, I will marry another wonderful man and we'll adopt
a child and name him Tim. Or maybe I will decide that the countless deaths I have witnessed
are too much for me, that the consolations of sex and music and art and love and community
are not enough in the face of this idiot culture, this drug-besotted land of ours, filled with
death and indifference. And I will join my loved ones "before my time. " Don't ask me what
my shrink says.
People who are not grieving say, "Don't get depressed,
organize!" Of course they're
right. I hope to be back in the ranks of the mentally balanced. But I do not believe I can get
there without being here first. So here I am. This is my postcard from Grief. Don't write. Wish
I weren't here.
--Craig Lucas
Whoever finds love
beneath hurt and grief
disappears into emptiness
with a thousand new disguises.
--Rumi (translation by Coleman Barks)
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