For Lon, Who Loved Life

Lon was already a regular at the St. Paul AIDS clinic when I began volunteering there. Whenever he came for an appointment, we’d chat in an exam room while he waited to see the doctor. We talked about books and movies and often about perennials.

Lon gardened with a passion for beauty and design. To help me beautify my rather shaggy garden, he dug up a clump of Siberian iris and presented it to me at the clinic one Tuesday. 

Those purple flowers became the focal point of my garden. Following his advice and example, I began to take seriously the creating of an oasis of loveliness in my yard for myself and the neighborhood.

Another day, in the dimly lit back hall, he and I had a conversation I’ve never forgotten. It began when I asked Lon how he’d managed to live for over two years with his diagnosis: first of being HIV-positive and then of having AIDS. At that time most people lived less than eighteen months.

“Dee, the thing is I don’t let it define me. This disease. I don’t let it define me. I'm not AIDS. That's not what I concentrate on. What I talk about.”

“How do you define yourself?” I asked.

“Not by AIDS or being gay. I like to garden. To read. Movies. I’m a human being. That’s what defines me. I’m a human being who loves life. I just love living.”

We spoke then of other things and he asked me how I was coming along with my grieving for Dulcy. I admitted that the loss of the year before was still fresh.

“You’ve got to let go,” he said. “You’re missing today. Don't let yourself be stuck in the past.”

Lon died in August 1990 in a Minneapolis nursing home. It was a converted Richardsonian Romanesque mansion that may have been—I can’t remember—a hospice established for people dying of AIDS.  When I visited him in a dimly lit, cavernous, first-floor room, he lay on a cot, among many other men also on cots.

Months had passed since our conversation about definition, and AIDS was finally claiming Lon. His mouth showed the effects of candidiasis. Kaposi’s sarcoma had spread over his body. Dementia had set in and he did not know me. He lay on the bed—ravaged by the disease and yet still Lon with his shy smile.

During our final visit, I knelt on the floor by his cot and fed him broth. He raised his head for each spoonful, opening his mouth like a baby bird, trusting that food would be there. And so it was.

A few days later he died. Many of his friends attended his memorial service. Even though my voice has never truly been in tune, I sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” because Lon loved that song, as many gay men did. For all of us there, he was a gift to and from the Universe.

Three years after Lon’s death, Tony Kushner received the Pulitzer Prize for his play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. The following words from his play speak poignantly to me of Lon: “But still. Still bless me anyway. I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do.”


Photo of birds from FreeDigitalPhotos.net.