Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  The main thing was, you try and comfort them and help them—especially if it’s a woman. A lot of times the man did everything and the woman didn’t know what to do, so you would help. If the man had been a veteran, I’d take them to the veteran’s office, over on Belmont, when it was there. Billy Duffy—I buried him when he died—would fill out all the papers for them so they’d get their benefits. Then I would take them to the Social Security office, sign them up for their benefits. Then I would take them—if they had insurance—I would take them to the insurance office. People would talk about how nice I was and everything. Of course I had the time. I didn’t have that big a business.

  At first, many funeral directors were afraid to handle people with AIDS. We were the first. I think my first case was in 1985. The man was a very good friend of mine. I said, “You don’t look good.” He said, “I can’t go to the doctor—I don’t have any money.” I talked to a friend of mine and he says, “Take him to the hospital and just leave him there and they’ll have to take care of him.” I took him to the University of Illinois. I went to see him the following day and his door was closed. The nurse says, “You can’t go in there.” I said, “What do you mean?” She says, “You gotta put on a gown and mask, we think he’s got tuberculosis.” I put on the mask and the gown. The next day I came, there’s a sign: YOU MUST SEE THE NURSE AT THE STATION BEFORE YOU CAN GO IN TO VISIT. I went there and they said, “You’ve got to put on full gown and mask.” And I says, “Yeah, I know from when I was here yesterday.” “No, he’s got AIDS,” she says. “Be very careful.” That was how I first started.

  I was on the board of directors for Chicago Funeral Directors. I was put on the infectious disease committee. I talked to the different doctors. They told me what to do. I had a funeral director from Libertyville call me and he says, “I got an AIDS case. I don’t want it. Do you want it? I’ll send it down to you.” I says, “Yeah, no problem.” So the people come in and they said, “We’ve been to three funeral homes. None of them would take him. I want to tell you right now, my brother’s got AIDS.” I said, “No problem.” They couldn’t get over it, that they finally found somebody that would take care of him. The others were afraid of catching it. The word got around that I was very sympathetic to people with AIDS, so I started getting calls from all over the city and the suburbs. They’d all come down here. I went to the Howard Brown Clinic and talked to them,* and they said the main thing you have to watch out for is the blood—that’s where the AIDS virus would be. You can’t catch it from just kissing somebody on the cheek.

  I just thought we’d had every walk of life and just because some of them were gay . . . what’s the difference? They’re human. I felt that somebody had to do it. When they’d come in, you could just see the relief on their faces. My son, he had no problem with it either.

  I’ve seen so many things. I prayed when I went for prostate cancer, and I had everybody in church praying for me, and I come out with flying colors so far. I pray every night. I think that’s maybe why God saved me, because I helped other people like that.

  My wife gave communion to the AIDS people at Illinois Masonic for fifteen years. Nobody from the church wanted to do it. They were afraid they would catch it, giving them communion. It never bothered her.

  I was the only one for three years, till ’88. Then it was mandatory under the American Disabilities Act. They had to start taking them. One case sticks in my mind. This man came in and he said, “My partner died.” He had durable power of attorney. He wanted to go back home after his partner died. His partner’s mother says: “We don’t need you. We don’t welcome you no more.” He went home and the following week he hung himself. So we had the two within a week’s time. I’ll never forget that.

  I’ve had actors, florists, caterers, the organist from church here died of AIDS. Like I say, I’ve had every walk of life. The one case I had, a boy was in Vietnam and his father was, I believe, a colonel. The boy stepped in front of a train and the train hit him. My son and I worked about eight hours on him, putting him back together. The father insisted he wanted to see him. One arm was tore off. We sewed it back on. The father took a look at him and he says, “It don’t look like . . .” I said, “It wouldn’t.” There was nothing missing; it was just that from the impact his face was twice the size as normal. We fixed him up the best we could. He says, “I want to thank you,” he says, “that’s him. But it don’t look like him . . .” We worked from a picture.

  The hereafter? Yes. I feel that when I get up there I’m gonna see all my friends and relatives and everything, and we’re gonna have a helluva time. I really do. Before I go to sleep at night I pray and thank the Lord for giving me another year. And I’ve done good. From a little place down there where we never broke a hundred cases a year, and we moved in here. The first year we did two hundred and six. It’s fallen down a little bit because a lot of people are going through the Cremation Society. And the AIDS cases have dropped quite a few too because they’re living longer.

  Most of your cemeteries are all full now. Take St. Boniface on Lawrence and Clark, that’s full. St. Henry’s on Ridge, it’s full. The only burials they have are the ones that own the lots. St. Joseph is full. That’s where my grandparents and parents are. I’ve got my name on the stone already. When my mom died, my dad remarried and his second wife wouldn’t bury him there—she wanted him next to her family at St. Boniface. So I asked if I could have that grave. It’ll be a double internment. Whoever dies first, my wife or I, they go down eight foot, and then the other one will be put on top. There was another grave on the other side of my mom and my brother died very suddenly. I’d asked him if he would like that grave, and he’d said he would.

  I don’t fear death. No. In this business, a couple of times I’ve shaken hands with a man coming out of church and I get home and I get a call, “Mr. So-and-so died.” “I just saw him a little while ago—I shook hands with him at the church.” “Yeah, he’s gone. He come home, into the house, and down he went.” It’s all over with. My wife and I both have the living will. We don’t want to be hooked up. I’ve seen so many people come in where the body is rotting already, but they keep ’em going with the machines. I think that’s so wrong. They’re rotting before the heart stops, put it that way.

  I took over in 1957 in March, and my mom died in ’58. We were all laughing and joking—she’d baby-sat for my children the night before, and the next day she was gone. I had taken out a baby to be buried, and I got home and my dad called and he says, “Come over quick—something happened to your mother.” She had diabetes bad and she went into a diabetic coma. We got her an ambulance, got her over to Masonic, and in an hour and twenty minutes, she was gone. She was only fifty-one. And then I lost a sister in ’53—she had cancer of the throat, esophagus. I lost a sister in ’57, she also had diabetes. My dad was seventy when he died in 1975. I lost my brother, the baby of the family. We just buried him two years ago—he was sixty-five. I’ll be seventy in December, and I was glad to get out of my fifties. My grandmother, I think, was fifty-two when she died.

  My mom, I had my friend do, because I just couldn’t handle it. My sister that died of cancer, I used to go every week to talk to her. She was at home. She was resigned that she was gonna die and she said, “Bill, I want you to promise me that you’ll embalm me. I know your work is beautiful.” She too had lost a lot of weight. I says, “Oh, Cheryle, that’s a big promise.” She says, “Bill, please do it.” And I did. I embalmed her. In fact, all the rest of my family I took care of. My mother I couldn’t handle. All my aunts and uncles . . . they didn’t bother me as much as my own siblings. That’s where it gets a little sticky, when you have to do your own family. It’s kind of hard.

  I want my son to do it for me. Like with my sister, he said, “You’re asking a lot of me, Dad.” I said, “I know but I respect your work.” Everybody that comes in there that he’s taken care of, the family says, “Oh, your son, he did a beautiful job. My mom looks so nice.” A l
ot of these boys that died of AIDS, sometimes they wither away to just about nothing. I go and rebuild them from a picture. I use silicone. People come in, especially their partner, and they say, “Oh, that’s how he looked before he got sick. Thank you, thank you.” That’s what makes you feel good. Joe is the same way. He goes out of his way to try and get that likeness again. I’ve been to some funeral homes, they don’t take the trouble. Where the coat was like this, careless, I went up and straightened it out. Or if he wore his hair straight back and they’ve got it parted to the side, I say, “No, he wore it back, give me a comb.” And the family goes, “Thank you, thank you. We didn’t want to say nothin’.” They were afraid to say anything.

  I buried two of the boys that were found under Gacy’s house.* One, the funeral directors all got together. I had six funeral directors for pallbearers. There were no outsiders. I was so proud of the Funeral Director’s Association that time. I think there was thirteen or fourteen unclaimed bodies. The cemeteries donated the plot and the monument dealers donated a stone. The one I had went to Irving Park Cemetery and the stone read, “Only known by God alone.”

  They all went out of here fully dressed, and most of them in tuxedos. When the tuxedos went out of style, a friend brought me in a whole carload of them. So when they had nothing, indigent—veterans that we got out of the TB sanitarium or the VA hospital—they would send them over to me and I would bury them for Veteran’s and Social Security. Whatever I got, that’s all I got. I put them all in tuxedos. People would say: “I thought he was penniless, I didn’t think he had any money.” I said, “I took care of it.” I gave him suit, shirt, tie, underwear, everything. They went out first class.

  *The Howard Brown Health Center for Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals.

  *John Wayne Gacy murdered scores of young men, whom he buried in and around his house.

  Rory Moina

  He has been an AIDS-certified registered nurse for fourteen years at the Illinois Masonic Hospital, Chicago. “My parents were divorced when I was seven or eight. I have a sister who lives in South Carolina. My father remarried when I was about thirteen years old. He moved to California, and I have two half brothers and two half sisters out there. I lived with my mother here. Working-class family. I had a loving relationship with my father, but he wasn’t a good role model. That was the reason my parents were divorced. My father was a compulsive gambler.”

  IN 1986, ONE of my first patients was a young man, his name was Bobby. I had just finished my six-week orientation. As I walked by a patient’s room there was a young man laying across the bed and he was crying. I didn’t know him, I wasn’t taking care of him at the time, but something pulled me into the room. I sat down and we started a conversation. He told me about his life growing up outside of Detroit, being sexually abused when he was a child and running away to California and just kind of doing drugs and leading a wild kind of lifestyle. He’d come to Chicago, settled there, and started to get his life together when he realized he had AIDS. He had had PCP pneumonia, which was very prevalent back then. He had had it about five times, which is amazing. I knew him for about a year before he died. It took him a while to build some trust in me, having been abused by men when he was younger. He was a gay kid. He lived in a third-floor walkup and because of these pneumonias and the condition of his lungs, he wasn’t able to walk up all three of those stairs. So right before he died, he came to live with me and my partner, Stephen, so I could give him IV medicine. Back then there were really no other places. There weren’t hospices for people with AIDS. You’ve heard of Bonaventure House, Chicago House—there was nothing like that back then. Not only myself, but a lot of the other staff who worked there took people home with them.

  What I realized—maybe it took about a year, two years, after he died—was that he was my teacher. I was a novice nurse, out of school. With him coming to live with us, I learned what it’s like to have AIDS on a day-to-day basis: the pain, the neuropathy, the pain in his feet, the lung pain that he had. Not being able to sleep because he could hardly breathe. And also the personal stigma of what it was like to have AIDS back then. He had developed some Kaposi’s cancer lesions. He was only twenty-five years old, and people would stop and stare. Sometimes people just don’t think.

  After Bobby died, people would say to me, “Bobby was so lucky to have you in his life before he died . . .” I felt very uncomfortable hearing that, even though I realized that in a lot of ways it was true. It was about two years later, I was going to Unity Church in Chicago. The minister was giving a lesson, it was the first time I ever heard the phrase, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” I burst into tears because of what I realized, what made our relationship reciprocal: Bobby was my teacher back when I needed a teacher because I’d embarked on something that I knew nothing about. I knew nothing about taking care of somebody with AIDS. With Bobby as my teacher, I was learning firsthand, without actually experiencing it, what it was like to live with AIDS. It was a big event in my life. There were so many things after that that just came intuitively to me, but it was based on what I had come actually to know. So I was able to care for other people better with this little bit of inside information.

  Was I scared of contracting? No—actually, I remember two instances. One time I got a splash of blood in my eye, and another time I got stuck with a needle. I had to go through a series of testing. I remember initially being shocked. When something like that happens to you, it just throws you off for a minute and everything rushes before you. I just don’t remember ever being concerned about it after that initial incident happened. I remember getting tested and maybe for an hour before I had my results I would be a little nervous. But, other than that, I have to honestly say I never really thought, Oh, I’m going to catch AIDS. There was something inside of me that just told me I had a purpose. I have a book at home about the quilt. It explains what the quilt was and shows some of the quilt panels. Over the years, I’ve slipped little things into the book to jog my memory of certain patients. A card that I might have got or just something. There’s all sorts of little mementos, little things that patients wrote to me or their families wrote to me. When I think of the fourteen years, about the devastation of lives and the stories there and the families that I met, the supportive families, the not so supportive families—the not so supportive families who came around to end up embracing their child . . .

  I came to know Laurie Cannon through Danny Sotomayor, the political activist, and his partner, Scott McPherson, the playwright who wrote Marvin’s Room. I remember Danny’s mother, whom we loved dearly, but who was just so unaccepting of her son being gay and being this political activist and out in the mainstream.

  Unlike Danny Sotomayor, I’m not somebody who would go out and chain myself to fences. When he was first hospitalized, I was aware of a little bit of like anger inside of me because I thought, This isn’t the way I do things. After a while—again, he was my teacher—I realized that I don’t have AIDS. How the hell do I know if I wouldn’t be chaining myself to fences if I was in his position? So I ended up dropping all of that crap because I realized that was just my stuff, and I learned to love this young man. He was this adorable little Irish–Spanish cherub of a person. I remember once after he had had surgery, he was sitting on the sofa in one of our lounges and he just looked up at me with so much love in his face. Just because of my caring and my being there for him as a nurse. I remember he got up from the sofa, which was just so hard to do because he had stitches in his stomach, and he just put his arms around me and gave me the biggest hug. I was like, Wow! That’s the kind of stuff that kept me going. I get goose bumps when I think about experiences like that.

  When I look back, I had no particular role models in my life. I had people who loved me dearly, my family, but who didn’t have a clue as to how to raise a young man, a young boy. Anything I did was fine with my father. My father loved me unconditionally. That’s something that I learned without a doubt before my father died.
We never had any arguments, but we ended up not seeing each other for fourteen or fifteen years, and only had one or two phone conversations. When I found out he was close to death out in California, I dropped what I was doing just to make sure that if he did die, he knew that I loved him. I became reacquainted with my half brothers and half sisters who live out there. I know before he died he was very happy because he saw the five of us together again, which circumstances prohibited over the years. I’m becoming aware of how much my father did play a role in what I feel, even though he really didn’t play a role in how my day-to-day growing up went. My mother did the hands-on. When I was younger, I remember my father, who was this very macho Sicilian guy. He grew up in Little Italy here on the South Side. You could pick a character out of one of those gangster movies and that was my father—the black curly hair and all that. Yet I remember when I was little he was holding me and all that macho stuff was lost. I remember taking baths with my father. He just adored me and loved me unconditionally. I grew up with that. I missed not having my father around, but I was always content to know that my father loved me dearly.

  My mother—when I told her that you were going to interview me for this book, she didn’t say anything. But I talked to my sister in South Carolina a few days later and she told me our mother was uncomfortable with the idea. There’s been a lot of discomfort. My mother loves me dearly. She accepted my being gay; she didn’t have a problem with that. When I did tell her this, about ten years ago now, even though I had been in two nine-year relationships with men, it never was spoken. After the breakup of that last relationship, with Stephen, I remember we were out shopping one day and she looked at me and said, “When are you going to start dating women?” And I’m like, “Oh my God . . .” So we found a bench, we sat down and I was ready.