Sunday, November 25, 2012

Mémoires du temps perdu

I watched a French film from the 90's. L'homme que j'aime. Really. No francophile is ExC, so this is rare. One scene had a guy with AIDS take his mother and his sorta future boyfriend to a couple of cemeteries to pick out a gravesite. Love and death.

Reminded me of the day my AIDS buddy, the fella I volunteered to be a support to back in the 80's, took me with him to go shopping for his coffin. He was thirty-five. He died that summer. August 15th, to be exact. I performed his funeral Mass. I had to preach to the two different sides of the church at the same moment: his family, from whom his disease had to be hidden, and his friends, who needed to hear the truth. I don't remember what I said.

I only knew him for maybe a year, but his death made a crack in my world that has never healed.

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