2 - The Catalyst
2- The Catalyst
So, how did I get here? What started me on this strange trajectory about a decade ago?
Before the pivot, I led a fairly conventional life. I had a promising career in medicine, a loving partner named Arnold, a supportive faith community, and a wide circle of friends.
I met Arnold in North Carolina in August 1994. I was living in Michigan at the time but had gone down to Chapel Hill to visit a friend from college who was doing graduate work at UNC. I wouldn’t say it was love at first sight, but I definitely knew that Arnold was someone special and that this relationship had the potential to be something completely different for me.
I did two things that were particularly out of character for me at the time. First, I missed work to stay an extra day down in Chapel Hill with him. I was doing a paid internship back up in Michigan. I was so nervous to tell them that I was going to miss a day. My boss said “OK” and was hanging up the phone by the time I finished getting my excuse out. She couldn’t have cared less. Clearly my contributions as an intern weren’t quite as valuable as I had thought they were.
The second was two weeks later. I drove home over Labor Day and came out to my parents. I had already come out to most of the members of my family, and a select group of friends. I was very worried about how my deeply Catholic parents would react. However, I knew that I could not hide the relationship that Arnold and I had. More importantly, I didn’t want to hide it. It was the best thing that had happened to me in my life so far, and I wanted to share it with those I cared about most.
As it turns out, it was one of the best things that ever happened in my life, period. That weekend we started what would blossom into a 17-year relationship. I moved to North Carolina for a year while Arnold finished his PhD in English, and then followed him up to Philadelphia when he got a teaching job at a nearby Penn State branch campus. Along the way, we bought a house and a created a life for ourselves in Philadelphia.
Like any relationship, it was a lot of work. Any true relationship isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. We loved each other, but we had to build and rebuild our relationship over those years. There were times when we each wanted to throw in the towel, but we held on.
All of that changed in January 2008 when he was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. For three and a half excruciating years, he underwent chemo, a bone marrow transplant, and then more chemo. Finally, in June 2011 he passed away comfortably at home, surrounded by those he loved.
As W. H. Auden wrote in his poem “Funeral Blues”: “He was my North, my South, my East, my West…” In other words, he was pretty much everything to me. He was the most important person in my life, and the center around which my world revolved. I was, quite simply, devastated. Since at least April of that year, we knew that he was going to pass, but it hits you differently when it actually happens. I still sometimes tear up when I think about it.
I will write more about grief in later posts, but the fundamental fact remained: I had to reconstruct my life. The whole foundation had been shattered, and the shards thrown out the window. I now had to put it back together, piece by piece.
There is a particularly moving scene towards the end of “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” after the hobbits have returned to the Shire. Frodo is walking through his home, and he says in voiceover: “How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand: There is no going back.” That was how I felt. I didn’t know where to go from there, but I certainly couldn’t go back.
And so began my own process of reconsidering and reconstructing my life. I had to take a long, deep look in the mirror. Over time, every aspect was examined and what didn’t fit was taken out or modified. I’ve tried lots of different things to see if they fit or not. Some were fruitful, some led down blind alleys, but all of them have helped to bring me where I am. I am still in that process of discernment – deciding what to keep in my life and what to let go of. These blog posts will be about that discernment process, and the sometimes radical ways in which I’ve changed.
Up Next: “Peeling Back the Layers”
