Nov 2nd - All Souls Day

A misaddressed envelope bubbled up to the surface of the day's mail the other day. This happens with some frequency since we learned our mail route is considered a "training route" for new USPS employees. As soon as a mail carrier gets good at knowing where all our neighborhood mail goes, she/he gets shuffled off to a better route - and we get the next new guy. As it happens, this envelope was only off by one house, but the addressee name caught me off-guard: Stephen Strigle.

We moved into our home eighteen years ago; a rambling old cottage on a cul-de-sac, sharing a common driveway with the tottering two-story house next door. Because of the common driveway and the friendly warmth of our neighbors, we quickly got on intimate terms, sharing conversations in Spanish, home-cooked meals, and vigilance when one another was gone.

René was a handsome, very religious and elegant fellow who was being cared for by his sweet and long-suffering mother Irma, as he waited through the final long fragile months of health complications from AIDS. René doted on our then-young son, Jacobo: When the 1994 Northridge earthquake hit on a pre-dawn January morning, Irma told me that René's first words when she checked on him were "Está bien el niño?"

When he had been well, René related, he had hosted great rollicking parties (a discreetly walled outdoor jacuzzi, a huge outdoor above-ground swimming pool inside a circus tent), and his house would be overrun with guests. Now that he was ill, sedate, and moving gingerly through life's shadows, no one called, no one visited.

René passed away while we were in Mexico visiting family: I've always regretted I didn't give him a rosary and photo of Jacobo to take with him that last emergency trip to the hospital; it would have meant a lot to him. In any event, René visited me - a floating winged spirit - to say goodbye in the early morning darkness the day he died. "René se fué", I told Mimí in the morning, and it was true, we learned when we returned to L.A....

René's mother, Irma, stayed behind, first to put things in order and then, after all the legalities were dealt with, as ownership of the house passed to her and to her eldest son, Luís, they settled in. Our kitchen window faced their kitchen door, and soon a little community tradition developed: If we glanced out and saw either Irma or Luís step out onto their sunlit porch to light a cigarette, and if we weren't busy, we would rustle up a couple of cups of coffee and join them for a kaffe klatch. It leant a great feeling of connectedness to our daily lives.

It was also how we learned that things were about to change again, and that Irma was going to bear a second cross: her youngest son, Chris, a gorgeously flamboyant elf, had been diagnosed with AIDS and was going to need her care.

René and Chris could not have seemed more different. René was very religious and had a priest visit him for counseling and last rites; Chris viewed it all through the lens of Catholic kitsch and wanted a funeral that would be "muy gay." René, embarassed, refused to even pronounce the name of the disease that ravished him, much less own up to it; Chris was as out as could be. And Chris, at least, had a lover, Stephen, who remained with him to the end.

Chris' illness progressed much more rapidly than did René's: very soon we were visiting him in the hospital, drugged into a pain-free sleep. Our last visit there, Chris lay sprawled and splayed across Irma as she sat on the hospital bed, cradling her frail skeletal, still-beautiful son. Bathed in the afternoon light the scene was a perfect Pietá, and I badly wanted- but could not bring myself to beg permission - to return to the car for my camera to record this Passion image.

Before dying Chris made his mother promise to look after Stephen who, in a further punishing irony, was also diagnosed with AIDS. Stephen moved into a tiny room of Irma's and Luís' home and remained professionally active almost to the end, driving away each day, his leather briefcase in tow, to - where? I seem to think he was in law or medicine: medicine, I think. A Stephen Strigle appears on Google as a cytotechnologist working (and writing) on AIDS research in the mid-1980's to 1990's: maybe this was him.

Whomever he was to the greater world, Stephen was in a sort of holding place in our world. He had been part of Chris' life that had remained removed, perhaps willfully ignored, by Irma; he did not share the cultural characteristics of his caretakers; and he did not speak Spanish (Irma's only tongue).

However, Stephen had been disowned by his parents - or at least by his father - years before for being gay, so now this little world around our common driveway was what there was of home for him.

Home did not last long: Stephen passed away fairly quickly, at the hospital. The next morning Luís brought me a little sheet of paper with a phone number: Stephen's parents, somewhere in Orange County.

We had talked often, throughout Chris' and Stephen's illnesses, of this abdication of paerntal love. How was it conceivable, we wondered (without coming to any resolution), that a parent could disown a child? Irma and Luís felt it was cultural: a Mexican parent, they swore, would never abandon a son or daughter, and certainly never leave them as they died. But, from my experience conducting altar-making workshops with HIV+ recent immigrants in the early 1990's, I knew it did indeed happen, tragic and immoral as it seems.

So: the phone number. I wish I still had it. I tossed around in my head what I might say, whether I should rail against whoever answered for being so inhuman, whether I should ask them why they had acted - or really, not acted - as they did. In the end I just called and verified that I had the right number.

The father answered, and when I told him Stephen had passed away, he said only "Well I guess that's it."

"It?" I wondered. Your son dies and you say, well that's it, as though dinner's over, or a game on tv?

I added that Stephen had left behind a number personal items - a typewriter, some books, papers, and so forth; but the dad didn't want anything that had belonged to his son.

There's a lot I should have said then, or done; at the very least I should have asked to speak to the mother: we'll always have our share of "should have's." Presumably Stephen's parents will suffer through theirs.

Stephen had been blessed to be welcomed into Irma's home and care, but the three illnesses and deaths had taken a great toll on her, and now this house and Los Angeles itself were inalterably entwined in shades of sadness. Irma and Luís moved back to Nogales; a few years later Luís phoned to let us know, briefly, that Irma had passed on as well.

The house across our driveway has sat vacant for several years now. Its grey paint peels everywhere; its windows are all barred or boarded up; the back yard where the tented pool once sat is periodically overrun with vociferous, choking vines; and the persimmons and figs we once all feasted on barely announce themselves: dry, tiny and bitter from lack of water.

At the edge of the house, maybe fifteen feet from my studio, there's a chicken-wire avaiary. From the time we moved in it was filled with parakeets and finches; their singing provided an audio track to my painting and drawing - until René, Chris, and Stephen died, and Luís and Irma moved away.

Metaphorically, all this decay and loss is a bit overripe for an autumn tale.

I haven't crossed our driveway to clean the ex-neighbors' garden or to water Irma's old rose bush and bougainvelia because, after all, it's not my property: it's someone else's responsibility. But it is my life that's being affected by the loss and I should take responsibility for my life.

This envelope bubbled up to the surface of our mail the other day: maybe I should open it. Maybe I should start pruning back the plants I see from my kitchen window and studio, even if they're not mine, but because they remind me of Irma, René, and Luís. I could get a few parakeets, too, and spruce up the aviary. I'll name all the parakeets Stephen.