My brother-in-law died today

By now, he died yesterday—the email I got from my brother said it was a heart attack that took him.  JP found D collapsed but conscious in their kitchen Monday morning, and although the doctors worked over him for an hour, there was nothing that could be done to save him.  He was a week short of his forty-fourth birthday.

This happened, so far as I can tell, more or less without warning.  JP doesn’t know anything about a possible memorial service yet, whether it’ll be held in Pennsylvania (where D’s family lives) or someplace else, or when it might be.

D and JP were a couple for almost seventeen years; a quick check of my genealogy database finds a note from JP saying their “anniversary” date was October 14, 1987.  Though they’d almost broken up once, and were having some big relationship problems when D died, they stayed together.  That’s lots longer than many hetero couples I know have made it (and one in the eye for those who claim same-sex relationships are inherently unstable).

Of course, we all knew D would die relatively young.  He had AIDS for years, and came close to dying several times before his doctors finally found an anti-retroviral cocktail that would work for his strange metabolism.  He’d long since got down to the zero-T4-cell count, and come back from it.  Actually, that was what was behind the recent friction with JP:  JP thought D’s viral load and T4 cell count was good enough that D should go off disability and re-enter the work force, and D didn’t want to.  JP thought that was malingering, and it sat pretty poorly with him.  I suppose that D’s gravestone, if he ever has one, could carry the epitaph “I told you I was sick!”

They lived in Florida, because it was somewhere far enough away from both families that they could ignore the parts they didn’t care to deal with.  For years they lived in Key West, where JP managed various timeshares, but finally moved up to the Palm Beach area when the Key West molds, which are ubiquitous, got to be too much for D’s compromised immune system to handle.  They bought a house together there; I don’t know whether JP will continue to live there or not.  Several years ago, after our father died, he told me that he expected he’d move back to somewhere in Texas once D died.  Time will tell whether he really meant it.

T  was perhaps the most upset to learn about D’s death.  She was quite fond of him, and he of her; she’d wanted both him and J to be at her high-school graduation next May.  He hadn’t seen her since she was about ten, she said.  A few years ago T was doing a school paper on the ramifications of gay marriage, so she called up D and had a long conversation with him about what he thought, as someone who was directly affected by the question.  He was very impressed with her questions and ability to work through the implications of various issues.  At the beginning of the call, D asked T how old she was, and on being told she was fourteen exclaimed, in his drama-queen way, “Ohmygod, I feel so OLD!  Just shoot me now, somebody.”

I don’t think this has a point, really, except it needs to be put down.  I’m not feeling greatly broken up over this, except that I feel for JP who, I expect, is really hurting.  I’ll try to call him in a day or two when the first storm of people has had time to blow past.