In the beginning, what struck me most was how many young fathers were dying. First in ones and twos, then in swelling numbers, a succession of men in their thirties came into the hospital, struggled briefly, and died.
They succumbed to pneumonia or other infections, or else simply wasted away while their wives and small children, who came and went along the glaring white hospital corridors, watched in disbelief. With no apparent logic or warning, families were being cruelly and abruptly destroyed. It was 1981, the summer of my medical internship at Montefiore Medical Center, and though we did not know it yet, AIDS had come to the Bronx.
Gabriel, my first patient with AIDS, was a thirty-five-year-old Puerto Rican intravenous-drug user. By the time I saw him, in August 1981, he had already made several trips to the emergency room for a persistent cough and shortness of breath. He’d been diagnosed first with bronchitis, then pneumonia, given a prescription for antibiotics, and sent home. He returned a week later by ambulance, in respiratory failure, so short of breath he couldn’t complete a sentence. Wheeled by stretcher into the emergency room, he implored us with frightened eyes to save him. His wife and five-year-old daughter hovered anxiously nearby. We admitted him to the intensive-care unit and, thinking he had severe bacterial pneumonia, treated him with strong intravenous antibiotics, but to no effect. As his condition became more critical, he underwent a bronchoscopy, which revealed that he had Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, or PCP.
Despite therapy for PCP, Gabriel’s condition worsened, and his blood-oxygen level dropped so low he had to be put on a ventilator. He improved slightly, but then suffered complications from abnormal blood clotting, as well as kidney failure related to the toxic effects of pentamidine (a drug now routinely used to treat PCP, but then available only by special request from the Centers for Disease Control [CDC] in Atlanta). As his systems failed one by one, Gabriel remained lucid and begged us to keep him alive, but we were powerless to save him. After ten days in intensive care, his heart stopped beating. A resuscitation team swiftly converged on his room, but by the time the staff had assembled and donned all the protective gowns, gloves, and masks (the degree of isolation seems to escalate as the patient’s condition worsens), Gabriel’s pupils were fixed and dilated.
Shaken, I went out to see his wife. She was leaning against the wall for support, moaning and sobbing. Next to her stood her daughter, quiet and wide-eyed, twirling her braids distractedly. I was struck by their youth: Gabriel’s wife was too young to be a widow, his daughter too young to be fatherless. After we spoke, I watched them walk slowly off the floor and out into the balmy Bronx night, side by side, alone with their pain.
Like his biblical namesake, Gabriel was a herald of things to come.
When I’d enrolled at Harvard Medical School in 1977, it had seemed only a matter of time before all human diseases would be brought under the dominion of medical science. Four years later, when the first AIDS cases began to appear, the worldview of medicine did not seem very much affected by it. A couple of reports appeared in medical journals, documenting clusters of PCP and Kaposi’s sarcoma among young homosexual men in New York and California, but these seemed merely further peculiarities of what had been derisively referred to as “gay bowel syndrome” or “gay-related immunodeficiency syndrome.”
Gabriel’s case of PCP was a distinct exception to the kinds of illnesses I’d gotten accustomed to treating during my medical-school training: congestive heart failure, coronary-artery disease, urinary-tract infections, strokes, diabetes. The mostly Jewish, Italian, and Irish patients I saw that summer seemed like so many surrogate great-aunts and -uncles. A few metal carts with disposable protective gear stood outside the rooms of younger patients who’d been put in isolation for infectious diseases, but this hardly diverted my attention as I scurried about at the frantic pace of a harried intern.
When I returned to that ward after a year of rotations, I was surprised to find the patient charts, whose spines had previously been marked with names like Goldberg, Mazzacco, and O’Brien, now largely bore such names as Diaz, Rivera, and Williams. The metal carts in the hallways had multiplied; it seemed as if almost every other room had a patient in isolation.
At first the unusual cases of PCP and other rare infections didn’t appear in any way connected. Rather, we viewed them as isolated outcroppings of disease on an otherwise normal landscape. Only several years later did it begin to dawn on us that there was some fundamental cause, that a mysterious disease had been spreading through our patient population with grim efficiency, insidious and unnoticed, for four or five years.
I remember, early in the epidemic, visiting a patient with AIDS who was dying. José had been a strong, muscular man, an amateur boxer who worked two jobs to support his family. He had also been a heroin addict, but had gotten into a methadone program and had been clean for several years before he became ill. Now he was reduced to a stick-thin ninety pounds, and lay bed-bound at home.
The rented hospital bed was too big for the small bedroom, and left little space for anything else. The shelves and windowsills were covered with candles and pictures of saints, and the slightly sweet, acrid smell of death permeated the air. José’s parents, two sisters, wife, and toddler-age son were huddled in the living room of their cramped one-bedroom apartment. We all knew he would soon die, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. After saying my goodbyes, I walked slowly down the four flights of stairs, passing the doors of the other apartments, with their chipped paint and multiple locks, and I wondered how many of these doors had similar dramas unfolding behind them.
A shadowy predator was at large in the Bronx, unseen, but leaving behind clear, distinctive tracks.
In July 1984 I finished my residency and took a position as medical director of Montefiore’s large methadone program, with three clinics in the Bronx. My new job made me the primary-care doctor for nearly a thousand patients, all of them current or former heroin addicts. My first night on call as medical director, I was awakened at 2 A.M. by a phone call from a Harlem police detective, who told me that a man’s body had just been fished out of the East River with a couple of methadone bottles with my name on them in his pocket; the detective wanted to know if I knew anything about it. I said I didn’t, and fell back to sleep wondering what other surprises awaited me.
Three weeks later, my wife, Nancy, and I had our first daughter, Kyra. I sometimes exchanged stories with my pregnant patients in the methadone program, many of whom later became ill and died from AIDS. It seemed a cruel perversion of the normal life cycle, parents dying before they had a chance to raise their children. A long succession of grandmothers came forward, like a line of weary angels, to care for the children who were left behind. My own father had died suddenly when I was a baby, in a fall from a building in lower Manhattan, and, like these women, my grandfather had come forward unhesitatingly, long after his own parenting days had ended, to help care for me. Sometimes, when the grandmothers would bring their grandchildren in to see us at the clinic, I would remember my grandfather walking me home from nursery school, and me holding on to his warm, rough, wrinkled hand.
The largest of our three methadone clinics was located beneath the el tracks on Jerome Avenue in the South Bronx. The neighborhood was home to a busy shopping strip, with many auto-parts stores and “chop shops,” and an equally busy street trade in drugs and sex. There were several vacant lots and abandoned buildings — which would later be used by crack smokers — directly across the street from the clinic. Our building resembled a cavernous warehouse. The partitions set up inside to create office areas afforded no privacy from the large waiting room.
This is where we initiated our on-site prenatal-care program and primary-care service. One of the first purchases I convinced the program administrator to make was an ultrasonic fetal stethoscope through which we could hear the fetus’s heartbeat at twenty weeks. More than once, I had to lean out of the cramped medical area and ask the crowd of patients in the waiting room to keep quiet long enough for the pregnant woman to hear her baby’s heartbeat for the first time.
In 1985 we began offering HIV testing in the methadone program as part of a larger, CDC-funded research study. (The HIV-antibody test was not yet available for general use.) We would soon document that close to 50 percent of our patient population was HIV-infected.
HIV testing created poignant dilemmas for pregnant patients, as the deadly virus could, in some cases, be transmitted from mother to baby during childbirth. Though we knew that not all pregnant women would transmit the virus to their infants, we had no way of predicting which would.
Nancy and I had our second daughter, Casey, two years after the first. During this time, I felt a special bond with my pregnant patients. The milestones in their progress often coincided closely with Nancy’s: getting through first-trimester discomforts, gaining weight and not being able to fit into regular clothes, feeling the baby move, hearing the heartbeat for the first time, anticipating labor and fearing all the potential disasters that could occur. Yet my family’s path and those of my pregnant patients inevitably diverged, sometimes before, and especially after, the birth.
Those children who didn’t get HIV from their mothers still faced the almost inevitable prospect of losing a parent. In children who were infected, I witnessed a grim reversal of normal development. Most of them were asymptomatic for the first six to nine months; their mothers would proudly bring them in for follow-up visits, reporting how the children had held up their heads for the first time, rolled over, sat up, and in some cases even stood. But then, as if I were watching a video that had suddenly been switched to rewind, the children would begin to lose weight, and then the ability to stand or sit — reverting, in effect, to the earlier stages of infancy. This was the most painful part of my job. While at home I watched my own children thrive and flourish, at work I witnessed these others — most of whom I had first encountered as an insistent, staccato fetal heartbeat — fall behind, dwindle, and die. Some of the infants shared birth dates with my own two children, and when one of these kids started to fail, I experienced a sick, vulnerable feeling and rushed home after work to check on the girls, inhale their sweet baby smells, and reassure myself that they were all right.
As I was drawn deeper into the epidemic, I faced problems for which I felt totally unprepared as a physician. The analytic processes that I’d been taught, the medications whose uses, benefits, and side effects I had memorized — indeed, the entire approach to care that I had learned — all seemed useless against this new and frightening challenge. Paradoxically, by stripping away much of what I was accustomed to doing for my patients, AIDS brought me closer to what was once the traditional role of a doctor. Before the arrival of AZT (which rendered AIDS “treatable,” though not very effectively at first), all I could do for my patients was be there for them, accompany them through their illness, and witness and relieve their suffering. I had never experienced such a clear connection to those I treated. I learned that this role — of an engaged witness, helping patients through their illness — defined my greatest usefulness as a physician.
Suicide, like AIDS, is stigmatizing, something that doesn’t happen in “good” families. . . . Secrecy deepens the hidden wounds of those who remain: it becomes their problem, their fault, their secret.
I remember Nelson vividly. In our program, where patients with the most extreme personality disorders seemed to demand the most attention, Nelson stood out for his sincerity, thoughtfulness, and calm. Unlike many patients, he could talk about his fears and concerns, and resisted taking refuge in further drug use or other escapes. His wife, Marilinda, accompanied him on all of his visits and was a model of grace under pressure. It was clear they’d managed to protect their only child, twelve-year-old Manuel, from the overriding influence of the street. This image of a close-knit family stirred something in me that I did not consciously identify at the time: it was an image of the ideal family that, because of my father’s early death, I’d never had as a child.
Nelson was the first patient for whom I prescribed AZT. I remember writing the prescription carefully, imagining (correctly) that I would write thousands more like it. The arrival of AZT on the market in the spring of 1987 was a momentous event; for the first time, the AIDS virus could be treated. When I handed Nelson the prescription, we both knew it was probably too little too late, yet for the two of us at that moment, AIDS lost a bit of its terror and mystery.
After doing well on AZT for about six months, Nelson started to lose weight, then lost some of his balance and coordination. He became apathetic and withdrawn. One day, he had a seizure in the clinic and was rushed to the emergency room, where a CAT scan revealed a large circular lesion in one of his frontal lobes. He and his wife decided against aggressive treatment (which would likely have been unavailable, anyway, because he had AIDS). His mental status continued to decline, and he began to slip in and out of consciousness.
The last time I saw Nelson, I sat by his bedside and took his hand. He opened his eyes, smiled weakly, and said, “Thank you for being here.” Marilinda, sitting nearby, began to cry softly. I talked with her a little while as she gave him a sponge bath. There was something sacred about the way she washed him, with long, lingering movements, as if she knew this would be the last time she would touch his living body. He died in his sleep that night.
A few months before his decline, Nelson had told me about his one unfulfilled wish: to ride his motorcycle around Puerto Rico again. He had an old Harley-Davidson he’d restored from parts and kept in a friend’s garage on the island. He laughed at the thought of himself, already a little emaciated, racing over hills and around steep mountains near his family’s home in the coffee-growing region of Maricao. We weren’t certain Nelson could tolerate such a trip, but it was so important to him that we arranged for him to go, giving him enough medication for several weeks. He sent me a postcard from Puerto Rico and returned bronzed from the sun and saying matter-of-factly that there was nothing else left for him to do. Soon after, he descended into his final illness.
I went to Nelson's wake, at a small funeral parlor in East Harlem. He was lying in an open coffin wearing a pressed dark brown suit, his hair neatly combed, his hands clasped around a rosary. I wondered, as I always do on such occasions, where his spirit was at that moment. Wherever he was, I wished him well. As I turned to leave, Nelson’s father, whom I had met briefly in the hospital, pressed my hands clumsily between his and said in Spanish, “Thank you. We will never forget what you did for our son.” I still did not realize then how close to home these words hit, how they touched my long-dormant feelings about the loss of my own father.
When I first met her, Milagros looked much too small to be twenty-eight weeks pregnant. She had missed many prenatal appointments and had been told by her counselor that she couldn’t get her methadone until she saw me. She was hostile and suspicious, with dark, angry eyes, black hair, and sharply defined features. Her belly protruded only slightly from her tiny frame, like a little bud not yet fully emerged. Despite her resentment at being forced to see me, and the years of neglect that her body had obviously suffered, her face had a quality that, under different circumstances, would have been elegant.
Milagros had grown up in Puerto Rico and as a teenager had moved to New York with her mother. Her parents’ separation had left her vulnerable to the lure of the streets. By the time I met her, she’d been in our methadone program for a year, but was not doing well. Addicted to cocaine, too, she was supporting her drug habit through sex work, which is how she’d become pregnant. Although she was HIV-positive, Milagros was at a much more immediate risk of dying from drug abuse or violence. Despite her pregnancy, she continued to turn tricks — sometimes twenty a night — to support her drug habit. She told me she needed the money for the coke; the heroin was just to make her too numb to care about the sex.
More than any other patient I’d known, Milagros looked like someone who had already died, but whose body was still going through the motions (although I’ve since learned that people can heal and recover from even the most horrifying abuse and despair). Even more alarming was the fact that she had a baby inside her that was very much alive, as evidenced by a strong heartbeat and active kicking. Clearly Milagros was in desperate need of in-patient drug treatment and close monitoring of her pregnancy, but she firmly refused to enter an in-patient program, saying that she would rather die than be locked up.
The last time I saw Milagros was the week before Christmas 1986, when she came in for a prenatal visit. She’d missed three or four previous appointments, had not gained any weight, and was feeling very weak. When I told her I wanted to hospitalize her, she looked at me with tired eyes and said she would think about it. As she left, she touched my arm, smiled almost imperceptibly, and thanked me for trying to help — a gesture very much out of character for her.
A couple of days later, Milagros and a customer got into an argument that ended with him slitting her throat. She was dead on arrival in the emergency room. A post-mortem Caesarean section was performed, and the baby was born alive, but barely. It died after twenty-four hours in intensive care.
Before I met Milagros, I had never known life and death to coexist so intimately, so interdependently. It was as if she were already halfway to the next world, even as her baby was about to enter this one. Their paths needed to diverge, but they remained fatally harnessed together. Later, this would reverberate deeply with my own history, as I became aware of the effect my father’s death had on my life. My father and I were like an inversion of Milagros and her baby; for me, my father was something dead inside, hidden away, that I needed to bring out into the light if I was to survive.
Javon was homeless, lived on the subway, and wore tattered clothing, but he had the presence of royalty — an African prince, perhaps, who had absent-mindedly wandered away from his kingdom. He was six-foot-four and well-muscled, with chestnut-colored skin, high cheekbones, and a striking profile. His grandmother, he told me, had been a full-blooded Cherokee. Javon was HIV-positive, but his immediate problem was the crack addiction that had cost him his job, his home, and his family.
Although a former IV-drug user, Javon had been clean for five years — until crack hit the streets. Within just a few months of the drug’s arrival in 1986, we became acutely aware of its presence, and of the fact that it was unlike anything we had seen before. Here was a drug that was relatively cheap (five dollars a vial), easy to use, and immediately effective, truly a triumph of marketing. As a testament to the power and pervasiveness of this new product, the sidewalks and gutters around our clinics were soon littered with empty plastic vials and their brightly colored stoppers, like the debris from a turbulent sea.
What finally helped Javon break the cycle of addiction was his acceptance into Bailey House, a renovated rooming house for people with AIDS. Refurbished by the local gay community in Greenwich Village, the building had beautiful interior designs and furnishings, and a bountiful supply of fresh flowers provided by local florists. There was a rooftop terrace where the residents would sit in the evening and watch the boats on the river and the twinkling lights of New Jersey across the Hudson. Javon used to joke that he felt he had already died and gone to heaven: for the first time in recent memory, he had a room of his own, the promise of three meals a day, and protection from the cold without being in prison or a homeless shelter. He also told me that he thought it would be disrespectful of his beautiful new surroundings for him to remain strung out on crack — so, by a tremendous act of will, he ended his drug use and began going to daily Narcotics Anonymous meetings. At the same time, he started to get sick from HIV.
Throughout his subsequent illness, Javon maintained his sobriety. Becoming progressively weaker from AIDS-related wasting, he told me how gratified he was to be able to live in the world as a responsible adult again; he was only sorry that he had to die in order to rediscover this.
Once he’d cleaned up, Javon got back in touch with his sixteen-year-old son, Monroe, who had been living with an aunt in Philadelphia. When I met Monroe in the hospital during one of his father’s illnesses, I was immediately struck by their strong resemblance and by the powerful bond between them. At one point, Javon solemnly asked me how much longer I thought he had to live, because there were many things he needed to teach his son before he died. I told him, as I always do when asked that question, that no one can predict, but that I thought he might have between six months and a year. He breathed a heavy sigh of relief and told me that it just might be enough.
I assume that Javon passed on to his son everything that he had intended, because, when he finally died, he seemed at peace. I admired his conscious effort to leave a legacy for his son, to help initiate him into manhood, and to let him know how much he cared about him. These were precious gifts I’d never had a chance to receive, and I found myself feeling very alone whenever Javon spoke about his son.
Even as I recall the lives and deaths of Nelson, Milagros, and Javon, I am reminded of many other patients whose stories or struggles or special qualities touched me in some lasting way. But these three were the ones who affected me the most and helped me to unlock the big secret in my own life. Like repeated efforts to kindle a fire, each of these lives sparked something in my heart that finally caught flame, starting me on a journey to reclaim my own history, and to understand my feelings concerning my father and his death. For this, I will always be grateful to them.
I looked in the mirror, wondering whether it was the same mirror in which my father had gazed at his reflection for the last time, wondering what he had seen. I quickly scanned the walls, ceiling, floor, as if I might find a message or a sign somewhere, but of course there was none.
One day close to Christmas 1987, I attended a concert at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan. As I was leaving the church, I noticed many candles burning on a small table in front of a plain white scroll that read “In memory of those who have died of AIDS.” Somehow this simple memorial made everything seem real in a way it never had before. I felt something open up inside me, and I began to cry for all the patients I had lost. Later, I remembered what Elisabeth Kübler-Ross once said: “You never cry for anyone else; you only cry for yourself.” And I realized that this work was about me and my life in ways I had not understood.
On October 17, 1955, when I was eighteen months old, my father died suddenly at the age of thirty-five. He fell to his death from a window of an office building in lower Manhattan. He was an accountant. For my entire childhood, this was as much as I knew about him. Because of the unusual circumstances of his death, his memory quickly became a family secret I was not permitted to discuss. Just the mention of his name caused nervous fidgeting and downcast eyes. In effect, I experienced a double loss: first my father, then his memory. I came to believe that maybe he had never even existed. It is a testimony to the strength of my family’s denial — and my own — that my work didn’t raise any conscious thoughts about my father until six years into the AIDS epidemic. How many times had I sat at the bedside of dying young fathers, seeing their pain and that of their soon-to-be-orphaned children, without making the simple association between their family histories and my own?
Now I gradually reconstructed the story of my father’s death, piece by piece. Despite the many gaping holes remaining, I realized that it was most likely not, as I had grown up believing, an accident. The truth was he hadn’t fallen from that window; he’d jumped.
Suicide, like AIDS, is stigmatizing, something that doesn’t happen in “good” families, something that must be kept secret lest the “moral failings” of the deceased also be extended to the survivors. Secrecy deepens the hidden wounds of those who remain: it becomes their problem, their fault, their secret. They must suppress any sign of what has happened, which only furthers their isolation. Maintaining this façade of normality takes its toll. I envied my patients’ reconciliations with their families, the opportunities they had to say what needed to be said, to hold each other one last time, to say goodbye. In this way, they were often able to achieve some closure. For people who commit suicide and their families, however, there are no reconciliations, there is no closure.
Some of my patients have even come to view AIDS as a blessing in disguise. Though it is nothing they would ever wish on anyone, once they have confronted and dealt with the disease, it has enabled them to embrace life as never before. Likewise, though I would trade it in an instant to have grown up with a father, I now see that my father’s suicide has become a source of insight and strength. We are all wounded by the world: the key is to recognize our wounds and heal them, then wear our scars quietly, like discreet badges of honor.
I did not fully appreciate the impact of my father’s death until I became a father myself. Seeing the central role that I played in my children’s lives, I realized how glaring my father’s absence must have been in my own. My mother once told me that, for several months after my father died, I stood by the window daily and called for him with whatever limited speech I had. Finally, one day, I stopped. Picturing that little boy through the lens of my own children, I felt my father’s loss all the more deeply. Seeing my children grow up strong, bright, and healthy, I became aware that the milestones I celebrated with them had gone without a father’s notice in my own life: learning to read, to throw a ball, to ride a bicycle. I suddenly yearned to be able to show him these achievements, to have him be proud of my successes. I felt a great void where all the things a father teaches a boy should have been.
To understand my father’s death, I had to understand his life, so I made an inventory of everything I knew about him: He was born in New York City on January 15, 1920, went to Haaren High School on Manhattan’s West Side, and graduated from City College in 1941. He had a good sense of humor, was articulate, wore thick glasses, and had poor hearing due to childhood infections. He was a good tennis player. He loved English literature, but became an accountant in order to support his family. He was a middle sibling, the darling of the family while growing up. His parents had come to the United States from Russia, part of the wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants at the end of the nineteenth century. His father, Harry, worked in a factory in New York’s garment district. I’ve been told that my father loved me very much and felt I was his greatest accomplishment.
I would still like to know how he looked at me, what he said when he kissed me goodbye on that day in October more than forty years ago. Whenever I leave on a work-related trip, I hold my girls a little longer, a little tighter than usual, making sure to tell them I love them and will always be with them, no matter where I am. What did my father tell me on his last day as he picked me up from my crib? Could he possibly have found the words to tell me he was leaving?
Growing up, I had only a few mementos from which to construct impressions of my father: some faded, worn photographs; two books with his signature on the inside front cover (the collected plays of Shakespeare and essays by Voltaire); an old Gillette razor my mother said had belonged to him. There were no pictures of him on display in the house, no letters anywhere, only the rarest mention of “your father” in conversation.
Now I asked my mother for any other personal effects she might have. She was able to produce a few more old photos and, from a shoe box on the top shelf of the closet, my father’s wallet (containing a driver’s license, a W-2 tax slip, and a Selective Service card from 1943), his wedding ring, and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses in a faded leather case. The ring had a police identification tag attached to it. These must have been the items found on his body. I immediately tried on the glasses — they fit my face but hopelessly blurred my vision — and the ring, which fit my finger perfectly. I put the wallet in my pocket and walked around the house with it, but didn’t feel anything special. I was thankful to have these items, which I still keep in a wooden box at home, but mostly I felt cheated, as if I deserved to have more.
It would be too easy to blame my mother for not keeping my father’s memory alive. She did what she had to do: she stayed; she survived. To her credit, my mother did not allow the rage she must have felt to tarnish her feelings for me. She did not let her abandonment stop her from being the best parent she could be. If anything, I wish she could have let me share in her pain somehow, rather than shielding me from it. Perhaps then each of us might have felt less alone as we groped our way through the years that followed.
From the moment I began to reclaim the history of my father’s death, I knew that I would need to go to the place where he had died. I asked my mother several times about the specifics — what building he had fallen from, and at what time of day — but she had forgotten. I searched old New York newspapers at the library, looking for some mention of his death. I threaded the thick spools of microfilm into the machine, carefully scanning page after page of the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and the World Telegram and Sun from the week of October 17, 1955.
This is what was on the front pages the day after he died: “Wilson Sees Cost of Arms Leveling; Meets Eisenhower”; “Nixon Optimistic on Big 4 Parley”; “Johnson Seeking Coalition to Give South Key to ’56”; “Floods Receding, President Speeds Help for 3 States.” I read every page of that day’s newspapers, searching in vain for the story of my father’s death. I repeated this process with the next day’s newspapers, and the next. All I could find was a small notice in the obituary section of the Times from October 19:
SELWYN — Aaron, suddenly Oct. 17, 1955, beloved husband of Amy, dear father of Peter, devoted son and brother. Services private, Wednesday, 11:30 A.M., Riverside Memorial Chapel, 1 Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn.
Still, the specifics eluded me.
Finally, my mother produced a yellowed onionskin document — a memo, several pages long, dictated by the attorney who had handled my father’s estate and the investigation of his death. The memo described, in unemotional detail, the events of his last day:
He went to work as if nothing were out of the ordinary and spent the morning at his job as an accountant for an auto dealership in Queens. He left the office at 1 P.M., having mentioned to one of his co-workers that he was going to buy a snowsuit for his son, Peter. Then, with no explanation of his whereabouts in the interim, he was last seen alive by a cleaning woman between 6:30 and 7:00 P.M. on the twenty-third floor of 30 Broad Street in the financial district of lower Manhattan. He reportedly had once had some business dealings in the building, but he had no apparent reason to be there on that day. The cleaning woman reported that he had asked her twice for the key to the men’s room, which had no window. The report then states that sometime after 7:00 P.M., but before 7:20, his body was found on the roof of the adjacent, lower building at 40 Broad Street. His wire-rimmed glasses were found on the windowsill of an open office window on the twenty-third floor of 30 Broad. (Reading this, I remembered something my mother had once told me: that he had uncharacteristically left his gold watch — which was specifically designated for me in his will — at home on the day he died.) A business card was reportedly found in his pocket; on it was written, “Cremation, no mourners.”
After so many years of elusiveness and mystery, the chilling matter-of-factness of the document made me shudder.
Not knowing what I would find, but knowing that I needed to finish what I’d begun, I decided to visit this site in Manhattan on the fortieth anniversary of his death. So, on the afternoon of October 17, 1995, I reluctantly took a Metro North commuter train to Grand Central Station, caught the subway downtown, and soon found myself facing 30 Broad Street. It was one of the older buildings on the block, with yellow bricks, decorative cornices, and terraced upper floors. I counted up to the twenty-third floor and — probably looking like some wide-eyed tourist — took several photos. The building next door at 40 Broad Street had more contemporary architectural lines and looked recently built. Its roof was only a couple of stories below the twenty-third floor of 30 Broad. Upon careful inspection, I could detect, about twelve stories up on the side of the older building, the faded roofline of its previous neighbor.
I had a visceral realization then about the finality of his death: his life had ended there, on that day, at that time, in that place. . . . But my life continued. I took my pulse — strong, steady, persistent — and was comforted by the rattling and shifting of the train.
Gathering my composure, I walked into the lobby of 30 Broad, where I was immediately stopped by a security guard. Realizing as I opened my mouth how silly it sounded, I told him I needed to “check something” on the twenty-third floor. The guard raised an eyebrow and said, “What do you mean you need to check something?” “I need to visit a certain office,” I said. Clearly assessing me for signs of lunacy, he gruffly directed me to the street-level office of a brokerage firm, which he said was also the sole occupant of the twenty-third floor.
The downstairs office was filled with busy young stock traders, their suit jackets off, white shirts a little rumpled by that late-afternoon hour. A clerk came over and asked if he could help me. “I hope so,” I said. “You see, I have a very strange request.” I proceeded to tell him my story.
He smiled nervously, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Wait here,” he blurted out as soon as I’d finished, and he went to confer with his boss, who quickly emerged, eyed me suspiciously, and directed me to speak with the building manager. Not wanting to be passed off once more, I explained the situation to him and showed him the attorney’s letter. Still, he hesitated. Finally I asked whether it would be such an intrusion for me to go up and have a look for five minutes. He sized me up and, after a long pause, his face softened, and he grabbed his jacket. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you up myself.”
We walked back through the lobby of 30 Broad, under the watchful eye of the security guard, and rode up in the elevator. I felt my heart pounding as we neared the twenty-third floor. Walking off the elevator, I was startled to see that the whole floor was one large, well-lit, bustling office suite, circa 1995 — not the dark brown 1950s corridor with frosted-glass doors, tiled floors, and globe light fixtures that I had envisioned. My companion quickly led me to a corner office that had two windows overlooking 40 Broad. Two young brokers were working there at a large table. “Go on, you guys,” my guide said. “Make yourselves scarce. I need this office for five minutes.” He ushered me into the room as the men gathered up their papers and left.
I went over to the windowsill, ran my fingers along the edge, and peered down at the top of the new adjacent building, picturing where the old building had stopped, a good distance down. I tried to imagine my father’s last moments here, to visualize his trajectory as he fell. I found myself posing some basic questions that could never be answered: Did he lose consciousness before he hit, or did he feel the impact? Did he bounce, or just collapse in a lifeless heap? Were his bones crushed by the fall? Was there blood? What was he thinking as he fell? Years of mystery and uncertainty telescoped into those five minutes that I stood there. It all seemed so ordinary, so mundane, not the stage for high ancestral drama. After mentally cataloging every inch of landscape that I could see from the window, I turned back to my guide. He said that he remembered the earlier building at 40 Broad, and its roof had indeed been ten or twelve stories below.
On the way back to the elevators, we stopped by the bathroom, which had not been renovated with the rest of the floor. It was still furnished with old porcelain toilets and marble stall dividers — probably the same ones that had been there forty years before. This is where the cleaning woman had last seen my father. I looked in the mirror, wondering whether it was the same mirror in which my father had gazed at his reflection for the last time, wondering what he had seen. I quickly scanned the walls, ceiling, floor, as if I might find a message or a sign somewhere, but of course there was none.
On the way down in the elevator, I thanked my companion for his kindness. He asked me offhandedly whether I had any money in the stock market, and I told him I had a small amount in a few mutual funds. Then he asked, “What kind of a doctor are you, anyway?” I told him I took care of people with AIDS, and he said, “Oh,” nodding seriously. After a pause, he gave me his business card and said, “Listen, if you ever want to talk about some investments, just give me a call.” We shook hands, and I walked out onto Broad Street, feeling suddenly like I could go anywhere, and also like I had no destination.
Back at Grand Central Station, I found my train and settled into a window seat, moving mechanically but satisfied by the knowledge that each step was bringing me closer to home. I need to go home, I told myself decisively, just as he could not, had not, on that day. I had a visceral realization then about the finality of his death: his life had ended there, on that day, at that time, in that place. For whatever reason, he had made his decision, and now there were no more decisions for him, no more struggles. But my life continued. I took my pulse — strong, steady, persistent — and was comforted by the rattling and shifting of the train.
How many years of my life had I spent unconsciously feeling guilty for having survived? Being able to leave him there, symbolically, on the roof of that building meant being able to go on with my life, no explanation or justification necessary. I smiled at my reflection in the darkened train window, content in the company of the many commuters on their way home.
A couple of days later, I was flying back to New York after a morning trip to Washington for an AIDS meeting. As the plane banked over LaGuardia Airport, I looked down at the vast expanses of several Queens cemeteries, the headstones arrayed in long, neat rows. The columbarium that housed my father’s ashes was on the edge of one of these cemeteries, although I could not identify it from the air. After the plane landed, I felt the urge to stop by there on my way home.
Several years before, I had decided to go see this place for the first time. A cheerful woman had led me through several soothing chambers filled from floor to ceiling with glass cases, each holding an ornate porcelain urn, along with photographs, plastic flowers, and mementos. The rooms had names like the Hall of Remembrance and the Room of Serenity. Finally we found, tucked away at the end of a corridor, the Room of Peace, a small, dimly lit space whose walls were covered with row upon row of dull, tarnished metal plates, like post-office boxes, each inscribed with a name and two dates. I looked for several minutes but couldn’t locate his. Then my guide checked her large loose-leaf binder and directed me to a spot in the uppermost corner of one wall. Peering hard into the shadows, I saw the discolored metal plate inscribed with my father’s name.
Seeing his name there made him seem real in a way he never had before. I did have a father, after all; he was more than just a memory my family seemed intent on suppressing.
It seemed appropriate, symbolic even, that my father’s ashes were hidden away in this forgotten room. At the same time, looking at the neglected pigeonhole where his remains had gone unnoticed all these years — I was perhaps the first person to visit him in nearly four decades — I felt an urge to bring him back into the light.
Several weeks later, I returned with my mother, who still held the deed to my father’s site, and we selected a vacant glass case in an upper tier of the Hall of Tranquillity, an open, well-lit room with many fresh flowers on display. At my mother’s suggestion, we transferred the deed from her to me, and a month later I received the document in the mail, with the new location specified. Reading it gave me a feeling of quiet satisfaction; now I would always know his location, his coordinates, like some archaeological site uncovered after years of digging, its artifacts finally cleaned, catalogued, and put on display.
I thought of this earlier visit as I drove from LaGuardia to the columbarium, where I parked outside, walked up to the wrought-iron door, and pushed the buzzer to be let into the Hall of Tranquillity. The hundreds of little glass cases no longer seemed so strange to me. I found his right where I had left it, in one of the upper rows. Inside was a bronze-colored box with a shiny new plate that read “Aaron Selwyn, 1920-1955.” His case was out of reach — I could touch the glass only by jumping up and tapping it for a split second — but I thought it fitting that he was still somewhat inaccessible.
Looking up at my father’s nameplate, seeing his birth and death dates, I was reminded that I had already outlived him by six years. For a moment, I imagined that I was not his son but a dutiful older brother, stopping by to see him and let him know how I was doing. I then envisioned myself even older — at forty-five, sixty, even eighty — coming down those same marble steps into that same quiet room, where he would always be frozen in time at age thirty-five. Finally, I saw myself as a frail man of ninety (optimistic, I suppose, but it was my grandfather’s last decade), making one last visit to see the ashes of the father who, by then, would be young enough to be my grandson, saying goodbye to all the memories, the joys and sorrows. That was a satisfying image, and I decided to hold on to it.
Then my mind turned in another direction: I pictured myself first as an infant, then a toddler, a kindergartner, a grade-schooler, a bar mitzvah boy, an adolescent; then in high school, college, medical school; then as a bridegroom, a husband, a father, a physician, an AIDS specialist. All these stages of my life overlapped each other like a stack of snapshots. I saw them coexisting across time and space, and felt simultaneously connected with my father and complete in myself. I had come this far, safe and whole, and could now go on without feeling as though a big piece of me were still missing. I could see where and how my father’s path and mine had diverged, and could finally understand and describe both our separateness and our connection: He was my father. He died. I was his son. I lived.
I took one more look up at the box of ashes with the burnished nameplate, smiled, and walked upstairs and out into the bright, afternoon sunlight.
This essay is adapted from Peter A. Selwyn’s Surviving the Fall: The Personal Journey of an AIDS Doctor. © 1998 by Peter A. Selwyn. It appears here by permission of Yale University Press.
— Ed.
