Early morning memories of Mark

"I don't want to go," he said. They were sudden, unexpected words. Mark had been submerged by depression and drugs for weeks and verbalized very little, aside from responding to questions with a curt yes or no. He sat in a wheelchair across from me in the hospital garden. It was early June, the sun burning hot, and we were enveloped by azaleas and roses in full bright bloom. He still shivered; nothing could keep him warm. He would be dead in three weeks, destroyed by AIDS at 32.

The day before, Dr. Scott confirmed one of Mark's worst fears -- that he probably had Kaposi's Sarcoma and nothing could be done except chemotherapy -- which ultimately killed him. I had followed up later that day with my own cruel blow of truth. Our younger brother Tim had been diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor. He would follow Mark in three years. Mark howled a primal, psychic scream and hadn't spoken since.

For the six months of his illness, I longed for Mark to tell me what it all meant to him -- the plague that was decimating his friends, and the advancing loss of his own health and life. Now that he uttered that sentence, "I don't want to go," I was speechless, with no comfort to give him, no light to offer. His words hung in the air as they needed to. It was his only expression of lament and sorrow and it needed to be unanswered.

Lying in my bed in the dark of an early morning, 23 years later, I hear his words and can see him, small, frail and ill, in that garden. I treasure this hard memory and preserve those few words as his gift to me and the other people in his life. Inside all of that pain, anger, outrage and grief, he didn't want to go -- he still loved.
Martha