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Jeff, 1995. |
Jeff
July 7, 1995
HIV has certainly had had an effect on my relationships with other people, with my father, for example. He was uninformed, about HIV, so he and I really never talked about it. About three years ago his business was losing money, it wasn't going anywhere and he was having all this stress about money. He couldn't put his kids through school. He could barely pay for the house. Everyone always expected him to be perfect and finally he did this thing he really wanted to do. He quit his job and decided to become a teacher, at 44. I'm so proud and amazed and flabbergasted. My father was always very conservative and a control freak. He became unconditionally loving and honest and reliable. I circled him and watched him for about a year, just to see how long it was gonna last. He's come up here to visit me in San Francisco. That blows my mind. I never thought that my father and I would be close, that we would have an honest relationship, that I could talk to him about living with HIV, that he would be truly concerned and interested and unafraid of my lifestyle in drag. Sometimes I think of HIV as a cosmic message that is here to tell us something, something that is here to change the world.
MW: What was it like losing your partner?
Jeff: I had known Denîs for 4 or 5 years, and we'd been living together and working together for a year and a half maybe two years. He'd always been fairly healthy. Then he started getting blotches on the inside of his heels. Pretty soon it was from the knee down, on the calf, the underside of his foot, in between his toes. They were hard like little balls and eventually he couldn't even put socks or shoes on. He would either, cut them off himself with a nail clipper, or go down to the clinic and have them burned off. He had to wear sandals. Months go by and he's still running his own business plus doing his work for the church. He was eccentric before he started getting ill, but when the dementia came, not without warning, but very quickly and completely, he was in a wheelchair and half the time he was just incoherent.
He was French so he'd start speaking French or mixing French and English, thinking that I was his father or thinking that my mother was his girlfriend. He would get so into it that I couldn't be around him. One time he decided he had been nominated for this award. At the last minute he drove himself to LAX, parked the car, and flew to Las Vegas. When he came back, he didn't know who he was or where he was or where he had parked the car. After that incident, we moved him to his mother's in Santa Barbara, and she hid his car keys.
He didn't want to be a baby, he didn't want to be told what to do, to lie on the couch and eat soft food all day. He wanted to be in his own home and working on his business. I was on my way back to LA and planned to have a closure visit with him because I was pretty sure- he wouldn't be here for much longer. Sunday night there was a message at my hotel room. He had died the night before with a great big smile on his face, it was very smooth and easy and he was ready.
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