COMING OUT VI...IN AN AVUNCULAR VEIN...

My eighty-plus-year-old uncle asked me over to take a walk with him yesterday afternoon. We had been together briefly at the reception after the funeral my mother came over for, and I had told him that M and I had separated, but left the reasons for the copy of my letter to my siblings I was about to send him; then, during a phone call a few days later, my mother told me in passing that she had told him.

Sometimes other people's good intentions can be as troublesome as their bad ones... Why, for instance, does everyone suddenly want to introduce me to their one gay friend? Why, we must have so much in common...

In any case, I spent almost two hours with my uncle, who was really struggling to come to terms with events, and seemed to be losing the battle. (My aunt having conspicuously absented herself...) He started out offering generously to be available any time I needed an ear; I did appreciate the offer, though my uncle is better known for filling others' ears than for offering his own.

But he then proceeded to let me know that he knew of my depression, that he had suffered from it himself -- and all of this in the lengthy, painful, incremental way that has always marked him. I began to wonder where this was all going. It should have been clear enough, but by the time it became so, it was too late to forestall him. Not once but several times he returned to the question: was I sure that the decision was not one taken because of my depression?

I have become somewhat allergic to many things now, having been presented with them at moments of stress or weakness, and the idea that I would cut off my arms and legs on a whim, or in a moment of blindness brought on by depression, is certainly one of them. In this case my allergy is probably based on the experience of parrying with M on this issue for months now. Over and over again.

I have, thank God, the opinion of a perfectly sane psychiatrist [a rare bird, I know] and a completely competent if under-age therapist, that I am NOT acting out of depression, but dealing with some major, potentially devastating as well as depressing, issues in a relatively mature way. As I said to Dr. Feelgood at our last meeting, I am certainly depressed, but then, I am watching my life, in John Patrick Shanley's immortal words, "going down the toilet", which makes a pretty good case for melancholy -- especially when the "liberation" I am marching toward is bound to be as oppressive as what I leave behind supposedly has been. And has not been. I am split down the middle: my life has been given meaning by the events of the last twenty-seven years; on the other hand, I can no longer keep silent about the half of me that I have tried so very unsuccessfully to suppress for over thirty years...

I did manage to state something resembling this calmly, and more concisely. His rejoinder to that was to launch into two speeches, one to marvel at my having accomplished anything in the last six months if I were indeed depressed -- and to count off at some admiring length what he regarded as my accomplishments -- and on the other, to restate his concern that I might wake up tomorrow and find it had all been a bad dream: better not to take any hasty steps now. He seems not to have noticed that the two positions tend to cancel each other out...

And I could only respond first, that none of my achievements or skills would suddenly vanish because I admitted my attraction to men, or even found one to live with, and second, that while I certainly harbor the fantasy that I will wake up someday and find out that none of this has happened, has had to happen, I also do recognize it as a fantasy. And while I feel I have the right to this fantasy myself, I feel it is dangerous to others, and have been doing my utmost to root it out.

I have been told only too clearly that I have screwed up and burned my bridges and said things that could never be unsaid, done things that could never be undone. I have sinned, in short, in thought, word, and deed, in what I have done and in what I have left undone. Fortunately, I now attend a church where we say this every week, so I can accept it pretty easily. And I have the assurance that in reality I had no choice. An assurance that occasionally wobbles on its feet of clay, but generally manages to be a credible monolith...

So here was the long and short of it: please don't do this; you might be wrong, this might be the persuasion of a moment. How I wish this were true. How I wish none of this had happened. But the last eight months have a reality to them that is impossible to shake. And M's reading this blog has put the last nail in the coffin I have unwittingly been fashioning for the shards of her poor heart. Who could blame her? Not I.

How I wish I were a better person, and had found a way to manage all of this without breaking any other hearts, or even just without breaking mine. But I am not that person; I was not born to take secrets to the grave -- or I would not have started this blog, for instance -- and I had carried what I carried within myself like a grotesque pregnancy as long as I could. It is over.

I am willing to admit that my suffering is less than others' because it comes to me by my own choice. I am willing to admit that my suffering is less for any of the manifold reasons set out before me. But I can only repeat that my suffering is all that I can bear and more, all the more so because I so clearly see the suffering of others in their faces, and have to admit that I set it there. No, there is no point in weighing suffering, even if mine were to trump all...

I can only say again, with apologies to all who tire of it, that there is a reason that Christians proclaim the cross: there is a deep knowledge there, that suffering is at the center of human existence and that God himself not only sees it, but came to take it upon himself, so that we could see that he will always be there with us when we are in suffering and hell. Now it is one thing to proclaim it, which I do, and another to feel it, which I often do not.

But there is nothing like an empty room, an empty bed, an empty heart, to remind us of what we lack: not just another person, though God knows that would help; I have no strength to live alone, and I know it.

But beyond the immediate lack of human love, there is a wider, deeper longing. A longing for a presence beyond the material, what Augustine called the God-shaped hole in our hearts, the knowledge that we can find no peace until our deepest longing is filled -- the longing for meaning in our suffering, the assurance that it has all mattered, all been part perhaps of some vast, unseen plan that will redound in some way to someone's good.

And we can only hope.
"All men, I hope, live so."