Grieving

Hundreds more articles like this can be found

at the Kink Mentoring Archives… Spread the word!

---

I would like to say that grieving goes both ways, when my boy died I thought that being with anyone else would be cheating on him and his memory. It seems to become your job to be the person who must remember him, talk about him (to the distraction of your friends). Then you remember all the promises, be together forever (had an agreement for 40 years with an option for 40 more). How finding him took so long, training, fights, love, crying, kissing, spanking……how can I do all that again?
When I advised people in Death and Dying I told them it was like standing in the ocean, knee deep, and the waves break against you and then every so often a large wave comes and almost knocks you down, but you stay standing and continue.  
Thanks for your articles and blog

Papa Tony:

Thank you for demonstrating that relationships can be deep, meaningful and life-changing.  It speaks for your character that you were so powerfully bold as to make such an industrial-strength commitment.  It must be terribly hard to know that you won’t be able to follow through on those forty years.

When my sweet hubby and I first made our commitments, I told him that he gets fifty years out of me, and not one minute more.  At that point, I planned to dump him for an eighteen-year-old on roller skates with a tambourine. 😄  I’m gonna need a time-machine to go back to 1978 to find one!

Decades after losing everyone that I knew to AIDS, the pain is still there, but it doesn’t rule my life and crush me to the ground like it used to.

Deep grieving was slowly replaced by gratitude for what they added to my life, and the shared lessons that have sustained me as I have grown older without them.  I do my very best to remember as much as I can of their lives, and what they meant to me.

Finding Ways to Honor the Dead

I have hosted over 250 gay leathermen’s dance parties - I did this out of an urgent need to bring my brothers together in a series of Guaranteed Safe Spaces.  After so much death and grieving in my Tribe, I knew that we needed occasions for joy.  Every Friday night, we’d get between 400 and 600 men, and it was a glorious time for a few years.

However… Getting that dance-party STARTED was excruciating.  I struggled to get men to stay.  They’d walk into the dance-hall, see six of my friends and an empty dance-floor, pivot on their heel and walk right back out the door.

So, I arm-twisted them to stay.

I’d run up to each man, and say “The DJ has agreed to play a particular song next, and I ask that you join us.  This song is dedicated to all of the men that we have lost to AIDS.  Since they can’t dance any more, let’s dance for them, and carry them in our hearts.”  Who could say no to that?

That became the theme, week after week, and the men stayed.  They brought their friends. They would hit the dance floor, grinning like apes, sweating like pigs, and dancing like angels, four feet off of the ground.

I never got paid for any of the community work that I have done, at least in money.

MY payoff always happened at around 12:30, every Friday, when the DJ would play “Nobody’s Supposed To Be Here” by Deborah Cox, or Whitney Houston’s “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay” - Some irresistible dance-mix that always peaked in a sustained high note.  At that point, the crowd’s pinnacle of excitement would hit DIVA OVERLOAD, and they would ALL scream with ecstatic joy, together in shared brotherhood.

At that moment, I felt like my Tribe was healing, and so was I.

I cried when I wrote this, so yes, the pain is still there.  It’s not so likely to cripple me these days.  I will always carry many, many souls in my heart when I dance.