Rembering Brad:
On the Loss of a Son to Aids

by

H. Wayne Schow
with Journal Entries by Brad Schow

Signature Books; Salt Lake City, Utah
© 1995 by Signature Books.

Table of Contents:

Prologue 1. On Tragedy and the Death of a Son 2. Entries from Brad's Journals 3. Letters to Brad 4. World Out of Joint 5. Grieving Epilogue photographs cover

Prologue

It's a long way from New York or Los Angeles to Pocatello, Idaho. The distance is not measured simply in miles. Here in this provincial place, in the mountains on the edge of the Snake River Plain, life seems less pressured, less complicated.

The distance--and difference--is partly a matter of pace. We don't really have a fast lane in Pocatello. What doesn't happen today can wait for tomorrow. And the distance is partly a matter of elbow room. There aren't so many of us compressed together here. Perhaps that is why our crime rates are low, racial tensions are barely discernible, and you can walk clean streets in any part of town safely, day or night. When you do feel the urge to get out of town, scenic Idaho is immediately all around you, open and accessible. The sun shines brightly, the air is clear, and you can see the Lost River Range rising above the desert seventy miles away.

Our distance from the cosmopolitan places is partly too a matter of style. We don't set trends here, we don't dictate fashion. You don't see evidence of great wealth. We're probably not on the cutting edge of anything. Our style and values are more those of middle America. Most of us know and like our neighbors; most of us live conventionally, predictably; most of us avoid tension-producing extremes.

For these reasons, Pocatello is a comfortable place. Here you feel largely sheltered from the ills that beset contemporary urban life. Here you generally expect life to be kind.

In this sunny environment, where he had grown to manhood, my oldest son Brad died of AIDS. That was not kind. Somehow it still seems to me, eight years later, not the sort of thing that should have happened in southern Idaho. The cultural geography is altogether wrong.

That sounds terribly naive, I know. For, of course, taboo sexual orientation and taboo illness and untimely death occur everywhere, including sheltered uncosmopolitan places. But they aren't always acknowledged. Somehow we pretend they aren't there. My story of the brief life of a gay son and the response of his Pocatello family is different in some respects from what it would have been had it occurred in New York or San Francisco, for it takes place in a conservatively backlit context of denial.

And that is precisely why I think this story should be told. Though it seems anomalous--the wrong events in the wrong place--I know now what I did not know eight years ago, that this is a common story, lived by other homosexuals and their families in middle American places like Pocatello, a story unfortunately suppressed because of culturally induced shame and fear. As a result, those who dare not express their pain in the face of society's intolerance suffer in closeted silence, and the world goes on thinking that such things occur only in the far off environments of New York and San Francisco.

This book is about Brad, whose temperamental complexity stretched the scenarios normally planned for young Mormons. In writing about him, and by that means attempting to understand his complexity, I have come to realize that this book is also about me, and about the process of sorting things out. The years continue to pass, yet I cannot be done with thinking of him and the impact of his life on mine. In a manner I would never have predicted, he became and continues to be my teacher. That is a paradox worth exploring.

The miscellany that is collected here evolved piecemeal, without initially any intent of its being made into a book. I lost a son in 1986, and I had to try to make sense out of that absurdity. I wrote for therapeutic reasons. Over a period of several years I took up new facets of this involved narrative as the necessary perspectives dawned on me, without giving much thought as I went along to what I had written earlier.

My first response was a long letter to a Mormon apostle in early 1987, subsequently revised and published as an essay in Sunstone magazine in February 1990 and reprinted in Peculiar People: Mormons and Same-sex Orientation the next year. Written shortly after Brad's death, it grew out of my conviction at the time that matters need not have turned out for him as they did. If external conditions had been otherwise, if the theological, institutional, and social causes of his impasse could have been identified and "fixed," then he would not have needed to suffer. That first piece of writing was a reflex action on my part, in retrospect noteworthy for its good intentions and naivete.

A year or so later, as my hope for external fixes waned, a lamentation (the first essay in this collection) emerged from a more fully acknowledged existential mood. The essay on grief followed, and about that time I realized that if my intent was to present Brad's story to others, he could tell parts of it far more insightfully than I. Hence, the decision to incorporate selections from his journals. Having by this time come at these events from several perspectives, I recognized that Brad's life could be seen as a search for a spiritual standing place--and that, in a less dramatic way, was true of my life as well. The personal ambivalence I felt pursuing that search within a spiritual community, and that I am sure Brad felt even more intensely, found allegorical expression in "The Great Western Cooperative," included here as an epilogue.

There is some degree of repetition in these selections. I hope the reader will understand it to result from my compelling need to sift and resift these experiences in order to puzzle out their nuances. And corollary thereto, such repetitions reveal that the book as a whole has not an entirely consistent point of view, since my attitudes changed as time passed. The man who wrote the letter in 1987 is not the same one who a year later wrote the essay on tragedy. And so on. The same is true of Brad's journal entries, which are shot through with contradictions. I have not attempted to remove these inconsistencies, for they illustrate the complex and problematic reality of my life, and of Brad's, during this period, indeed of human lives generally.

Experiences of the kind treated here are not permanently fixed as they occur. The meanings will not hold still because we cannot (or will not) hold still in response to them. Not only do new, subsequent experiences change us from what we were, the past itself changes as well because, ourselves altered, we see it differently. Its truth cannot be detached from our perception. In our continuing assessment of it, we attach additional significance to some features and de-emphasize the significance of others. In this way I have come to realize that we create our fictions, which is an important outcome for me in the sorting-out process this book describes.