Remembering Brad: On the Loss of a Son to AIDS by Wayne Schow; Brad Schow

Author:Wayne Schow; Brad Schow [Schow, Wayne Schow; Brad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781560850700
Publisher: Signature Books
Published: 1995-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

Letters to Brad

In January 1979, when Brad left home for the University of Utah, we began corresponding. That June he revealed his sexual identity to his mother and me. In the early fall he moved from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, where he lived for a little more than three years. He then spent several months in Hawaii.

The distances that separated us during those four years were in some ways a metaphor for the distance in our relationship. Though there was no definitive break between him and us, his move away from conformity, his search for new values, and his decision to embrace his sexual orientation softened the ground that separated us, made it boggy and difficult to negotiate. He needed space in which to work out his self-definition. We recognized that. He felt stiff with us, not surprisingly since our resistance was unmistakable; we were diffident about intruding when it might be unwelcome, when it might be misunderstood. There was, I am convinced, a desire on both his part and ours to overcome this strain, to get comfortable with one another again, but it was more easily desired than accomplished.

One result of this was that our contacts with him were less frequent than I might have wished. He came home once or twice a year, and we visited him in Los Angeles twice. The telephone was our easiest means of connection, probably once every three or four weeks. He wrote fewer letters than we did, but we did not overburden the postman.

As it turned out, Brad saved the letters we wrote him during those four years. They were left among his few belongings when he died. Most of my letters to him were follow-ups to telephone conversations, my attempts to give a more enduring, and therefore a potentially more influential, form to my arguments about values. That he saved these letters tells me something, though I know his ties to the past were becoming less relevant at the time.

I have recently reread them. They reveal a great deal about family tensions of the period, about issues that concerned us, about ideological jockeying for position on his part and mine as he went about the business of attempting to create an authentic self and as I tried to exert a father’s influence on that process according to my agenda.

I reread them now with considerable ambivalence. They reinvoke for me the sense that Brad was attempting to navigate treacherous waters and that I needed to share my experience with him. At the same time I am chagrined to recognize the limits of what I then knew outside the boundaries of liberal religious orthodoxy. I confess that as a result my advice was sometimes flawed. I acknowledge that my good intentions were not always helpful.

Both Brad and I in some ways assumed I knew more than I did. He wanted to trust his own experience where it contradicted my advice, but he was intimidated by the veneer of sophistication in which my opinions were packaged.

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