The Death of Rob and Bob _ A Story of Sacred Love
First published on salon.com on May 30, 2009
(On the 14th anniversary of Rob’s passing and in response to the debate about Same Sex Marriage)
A phone ringing in the middle of the night often suggests some foreboding news is about to change your life in a dramatic unimaginable way. This particular phone call came hours after I had been jolted out of a deep sleep by the sound of Rob’s voice calling my name in a forceful succinct whisper. He would do this often in Loutro, when we lived on the island of Crete. I would open my eyes and roll onto my side to face him.
“Do you feel the energy of the full moon?” he would ask. “How can you sleep with all that incredible energy pulsating through this room?”
On this particular night I was huddled under the covers in a San Francisco apartment while the cold foggy wind rattled the loosely fitting windows. Gary walked through the room with the cordless phone in his outstretched hand, as if pointing a gun at my head. It was Rob calling from London.
“I’m in the hospital!” “Please get on the next plane and get here as soon as you can!”
I have very little recollection of what transpired between that conversation and the moment I arrived at his hospital room. I was panicked when the nurses huddled together whispering to each other at the mention of Rob’s name. One nurse came over to suggest that I take the seat inside Rob’s room where a doctor would soon come to talk with me. As I sat contemplating the worst, I caught a glimpse of Rob’s wheelchair being pushed toward me by a male nurse. Rob was on oxygen provided through a high pressure mask that made it difficult for him to speak or for me to understand him.
Rob’s nurse explained that they were returning from a visit to the psychiatric nurse. That morning Rob had ripped off his life support and ran through the hospital, down one flight of stairs and out onto the street in his gown until he was stopped by a security guard. When they put him in a wheelchair he found a piece of cord and tried to strangle himself. He just kept saying he couldn’t live in a prison looking out of a window to a world where everyone else is free. The miraculous part of this story is how he managed to do all of this without the help of oxygen!
“Our room in Loutro, the yoga classes, the sunshine and the ocean, drawing wildflowers, those were all real life”, he said. He kept holding my hand and telling me he’d rather die now than end his life like Russell had in San Francisco General Hospital.
Rob told me he had passed out on the bathroom floor at our friend’s apartment on the morning of his therapy appointment. They called an ambulance which took him to a hospital where he was seen by a Dutch doctor who told him he was just nervous and gave him a prescription for Valium. When Rob asked the doctor how he was going to get back to his friend’s apartment the doctor told him they only have ambulance service to the hospital, not from it. Rob explained that he couldn’t walk and the doctor brushed him off and told him to call a cab. Rob called a cab and had the driver stop at a restaurant so he could get food into his weakened body. Again he passed out on the floor of the restaurant. A concerned waitress fed him as he sat on the floor leaning against the wall. Then he made his way back to our friends apartment only to find they had gone to the country for the weekend and he was locked out in the rain. A neighbor found him unconscious on the street and called the ambulance that brought him to St. George’s. When he arrived his breathing capacity was only 40%.
Rob handed me a small spiral notebook and asked me to read it. He had written his will. He wanted to be cremated, his ashes to be spread in the castle above Loutro and on Sweetwater Beach on the way to Sfakia. He also wrote that all his belongings should go to me and I would know what to do with them. He wrote that I should keep him on oxygen until I can get him out of the hospital, that he would let the doctors treat him for PCP for one week, but he noted that he didn’t think he would survive.
This was the unimaginable worst case scenario that no one truly in love would ever contemplate, because even to imagine it is too painful. For fifteen years were were inseparable. We had become a third entity called Rob and Bob. The concept of one of us without the other was impossible for anyone to imagine, including ourselves.
Reading the spiral notebook was the moment that send me into that parallel dimension where I was protected from the pain of reality. I became an observer of my own life. I couldn’t bear the torture of being in my body where I would run the risk of emotionally breaking down. I had to be strong, I thought! I wanted to drink every single ounce of denial I could swallow. But there no longer seemed to be enough to get me drunk. Reality just kept punching me in the face, over and over again until I could no longer fight back.
The first time I left through the back entrance of the hospital I had a vision. I saw them pushing Rob’s body down the hallway and into the morgue. As I walked into the street behind the hospital I had to pass by two cemeteries and many funeral parlors and a gravestone engraver. How insensitive and opportunistic they seemed, perched like vultures ready to feed on the still warm carcass. I hated them all for reminding me that we all have to die; that we can’t go on forever.
For three weeks I pretended to eat, pretended to sleep, pretended to laugh and pretended to be strong. But those who face death have an uncanny ability to see through everything. I couldn’t fool Rob. When I was out of the room he told Stefan to “take care of me.”
When the moment finally came I was more unprepared than ever. I sat beside Rob’s bed just holding on to his hand. When he began to take long deep breaths his face became distorted and I knew that each breath could be the last. I began to cry, screaming no not yet, not now. A nurse heard my crying and came into the room to check Rob’s pulse then left us alone. Rob finally stopped breathing a moment later. Adriano was half smiling and half crying and talking about how beautiful Rob looked. I could not see the beauty in that moment. All I could feel was a pain stronger than any pain I had ever felt before. I stood up and looked into Rob’s eyes. Those beautiful intense blue eyes were lifeless now. I remember thinking how strange it is that the energy we call life can be so powerful, but invisible without the body to represent it in a dense form. I reached over to close Rob’s eyes but they kept coming open again. I held them down for a few moments until they remained closed. I walked over to the doorway to the bathroom and leaned against the door frame. My legs turned to rubber and my body slid down the frame until I was seated on the floor. Every tear, every emotion I had held back for three weeks came heaving out. I just kept screaming, “He was my whole life, what am I going to do now?”
As I sat in the doorway to the bathroom and looked up at Rob’s body it was the first time he even looked like a sick person. It was as though his entire body had been deflated when the breath left his lungs. His face was now sunken to the outline of his scull bone. I remembered that day in 1959 when I walked up to the casket of my friend Sandy when I was 10 years old. I looked at her body and thought to myself, “That is not Sandy. I do not recognize the person in the casket.” Now I had the same feeling about the body lying on this bed in front of me. It was not Rob! Rob was still alive somewhere, somehow. He had escaped the confines of the temporal prison and was free from all the anguish and pain it had sometimes caused him. Now I was confident that he would come to me. But I sat on the floor still confined in my own body and very much in pain and anguish.
Stefan and I went to the first floor where I called Rob’s family from the pay phone in the entrance lobby. At first all the phones were being used and I was impatient. I just wanted to get it over before I passed out on the floor or had a total nervous breakdown. When I finally dialed the number, Rob’s sister Lisa answered the phone. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but when she repeated it I could hear Rob’s mother crying hysterically in the background. It was very difficult for me to keep my composure. I just kept thinking if there was anybody in the world who could understand me in that moment it was probably Rob’s mother. When I hung up I called my mother. That was my chance to cry again. The third call was to Gary in San Francisco who would call all of our friends.
Stefan and I went back to the room where Adriano and I washed Rob’s body. We dressed him, then sat with his body for 5 hours. That evening I went to Adriano’s. Adriano found Rob’s diary and read the last entry:
Rob’s Journal June 1, 1995
“Thank you for a most marvelous life. I am overwhelmed by the love I’ve received around the world. I am just so tired, I can’t go on. Forgive, forgive, forgive. Adriano my Angel, Bob my Angel, Thank you everyone. -R.”
As I went through Rob’s bags, I knew there were certain things I had to do immediately. I took all of Rob’s contact lens solutions and his contact lenses and gave them to Adriano to throw into the garbage. They were too personal for me to deal with, but on another level it was a way of admitting that he was really gone. I looked at all of his art and drawing supplies and wondered where all of that talent and creativity was now. I thought of his education at Georgetown University and the different languages he spoke and I thought, “why, for what purpose?” because it all seemed useless that night. Richard from the Hillingdon AIDS Response Trust came to give me a massage before I went to bed. It really made me relaxed and I was able to rest for the first time in quite a while.
I wasn’t able to go right to sleep, but I was exhausted both emotionally and physically. I laid in the bed with a million thoughts swirling through my head. Suddenly Rob was standing beside my bed. I had the same experience in 1969 in the room where my first partner’s mother had died. When she came to me, I screamed and moved my bed to another room the next day. This time I was comfortable with the experience. In a way it was the most normal thing that had happened that day. Rob stood beside my bed demanding that I give him his contact lenses. Perhaps that was his way of using humor to prepare me for what came next.
A faint iridescent glowing cloud of multicolored smoke began to swirl above my bed. I had the feeling of being carried into the cosmos or falling into some black hole. I was witnessing something so beautiful it left me consumed in peace. I focused on the colors in this swirling mass of energy and realized it was my life with Rob. Each part was there in its entirety and when I focused on something it became real again. I could taste and feel and smell everything as if it were real in that moment. Then I found a secret to release myself from the confines of the illusion of time and I began to become the swirling mass of color. I began to experience every moment of our life together in one single moment, then I fell into a deep sleep.
The next day Adriano and I met Stefan at the hospital where we had to sign papers to release Rob’s body for cremation. Then we had to go to the office of the Borough of Wandsworth to sign the death certificate. Stefan waited outside in the lobby while Adriano and I met with the Deputy Registrar. I explained to her that I was Rob’s life partner. She refused to list me on the death certificate. She actually told me that my relationship was not valid. I think she was surprised when I leapt from my chair screaming at her. I had to be restrained by Adriano. She listed Adriano on the certificate as present at death, to which he replied, “A fly on the wall could be present at death”. I wasn’t surprised that the insensitive, vindictive heterosexual, religious myth extended its arm even into my time of grief. At this moment I was in no mood to compromise to make things “easy”. My pain was just as great as any man who had just lost his wife, or as any woman who had just lost her husband. I told myself that I would use this anger to demand total equality from this moment on.
When we came out into the street I exploded with rage. I screamed at the top of my lungs at the injustice that Gay people suffer at the hands of religious bigotry. There I was, at the most important crossroads of my life, dealing with the greatest loss of my life, and a simple-minded bigoted civil servant was able to erase the only official recognition that Rob and Bob had ever existed.
