After spending time in the desert, I had forgotten how beautiful the morning light in New York City could be. My mind felt clear.
I went for a run — not too fast and not too far, but at least I was running again — and thought about the rest of year and the next. As usual, there were good things to anticipate and problems to dread.
My mother’s mind is still giving way to the tightening vices of dementia, and my oldest brother has also been exhibiting serious signs of mental failure. By his own admission, his memory has always been terrible, a product of an emotionally malnourished childhood and a harrowing, self-abnegating marriage, but lately he can’t recall important events that occurred as recently as last summer. It’s hard for me not to imagine that he, too, will soon be wheeled into Memory Care, which I now believe, after watching the decline of my mother and father, is a kind of living hell in which the mind is haunted by psychic demons borne of unresolved conflict from the past. When our minds are young and strong, we can build walls around trauma that we have suffered and — in my brother’s case — inflicted on others, but with the passage of time, the walls erode and the rational mind gives way.
Of course, as I contemplate the final stages of life, my theory about the psychological underpinnings and lineage of dementia sometimes leads me to fear for my own wellbeing. What does it mean if a word or a name seems just out of reach? Is it normal aging or something worse? Will I one day be wheeled into Memory Care?
At such moments, I remind myself of the importance of being gay, not because of the great sex 🙂 but because it long ago forced me to confront issues related to my own past and wellbeing that, had I not done so, probably would have festered and eventually metastasized into an incurably sick mind, as I have seen happen with my parents and my brother.
There is a perception or stereotype in our society that gay people (and gay men especially) are weak because of our sexual preferences, which is unfortunate because the reality is that being gay makes us stronger. It encourages us to think about why we have these preferences and what it means to act on them, notwithstanding the hatred we must endure for doing so. Those who are not gay must seek out another opportunity to differentiate themselves from the norm and to reflect upon who they are and why they exist; those who do not find this purpose are often doomed to spend their lives in a miasma of fear and weakness.
But once we have reckoned with these issues, life becomes a garden that will flourish and gracefully die, following the natural order of the seasons.
