Family’s Wounds Left by Son’s Death May Never Heal

Bryan was 17 years old, just starting his junior year at school, invulnerable as only a kid like this can be. He was golden--from money, a star athlete, smart, his family’s firstborn, the only boy. He was considerate and warm.

Bryan never wanted for friends.

One time, Bryan’s friends wanted to give him a present that he’d never forget. His team was on a road trip, playing an exhibition game out of state. Things were really clicking, Bryan recalled.

Everybody was having a great time, palling around after the game, drinking, being boys. The coach was off getting drunk himself. Then, Bryan said, the idea came up to really “initiate me into manhood.”

Bryan’s friends found him a whore.

“You know, it’s like if I had met her on the street, I wouldn’t have looked twice at her,” Bryan said.

This woman was in her late 20s, not too bad to look at, expert at what she does. “She led me through everything,” Bryan said. They spent two hours together.

It was Bryan’s first, and last, experience with sex. Later he felt disgusted, sad, and tortured by guilt.

Bryan did not tell me this story himself, and today, three years later, he cannot. This golden boy is dead. He died late last year, of AIDS.

Dr. Kathleen Zechmeister, a clinical psychologist and licensed therapist in Seal Beach, met Bryan after he called her cold on the phone. She sees a lot of athletes. She has many patients with AIDS.

“I remember he said, ‘I’m straight, but I have AIDS,’ ” she said. “I said, ‘That’s OK. What can I do for you? He said, ‘Well, I have some unfinished business with my family, especially with my father.’ I remember he sounded very young. I asked him how old he was.”

Bryan was not this young man’s real name. I am using it here to protect people who have already been hurt; the wounds left by Bryan’s illness and death may never heal.

Even today, Bryan’s parents have not told their friends, the members of their Orange County church, the real reason that their son died.

They are ashamed. “It’s a gay disease,” Bryan’s father said.

Bryan’s parents are afraid, still, of what people may think. Lymphoma, the opportunistic disease to which Bryan’s weakened body succumbed, is more acceptable than AIDS.

Kathleen Zechmeister told me Bryan’s story, sharing with me her notes with names expunged, because she feels she owes Bryan something. He wanted to warn people not to do as he had done. He wanted to offer up his devastated body as proof that invulnerability belongs only to God.

“Bryan never conquered one issue,” Kathleen said, “and that was to live his own life, like he wanted to. He wanted to tell people, but he said, ‘I need to respect my father’s wishes.’ I think this caused him a lot of stress . . . .

“He was so honest, and I know it was hard for him to die a ‘cancer patient.’ Yeah, it wasn’t a lie technically. But we knew better. He cared a lot about his friends, his sisters. He would tell his sisters, ‘Please learn from me.’ ”

Kathleen saw Bryan, alone and with his family, in the months leading to his death. She visited him in the hospital, talked with him on the phone, shared favorite Bible verses, shreds of songs, and many, many tears.

She asked his family to visit with her four days after Bryan’s death and reluctantly, they came. She attended his funeral where Bryan’s youngest sister, his closest friend, secretly pointed out the few friends that Bryan had confided his condition to.

Kathleen’s file on Bryan is now marked, “Case Closed.”

But, of course, it is not.

The tragedy of Bryan’s death has stayed with Kathleen. It makes her angry and afraid. She counsels teen-agers infected with the HIV virus all the time. All of them had unprotected sex.

“In adolescence, it’s so difficult for them not to worry about what other people say, what other people think,” she said.

And teen-agers are not alone in thinking that AIDS will always be somebody else’s problem, a somebody they would not want to know.

For months, Bryan’s family flat-out refused to believe that AIDS could strike their child. It was Bryan’s sister who took him to be tested for the virus, at a clinic where there was no chance that they would be known. His sister had been educated about AIDS at school.

Only months after that did Bryan build up enough courage to tell his dad. His father questioned his masculinity when he heard the news. Then the horror sunk in; a series of unexplained illnesses might now have a cause. The family prayed.

When Bryan did not get better, his father concluded that they had not prayed hard enough.

Bryan’s parents sent their son to Europe to be examined by doctors there. They told their friends that their son was going to a sports camp, to get an edge up.

In the meantime, as his condition worsened, Bryan was undergoing no AIDS treatment for a year.

Not long before Bryan died, Kathleen arranged to see Bryan and his father alone. She calls it “finishing some business for them.”

Father and son said they understood each other, that they knew why the other one hurt. They told each other how much they were loved. Nearly everything was said through tears.

“Wherever you are, I’ll be there too,” Bryan told his dad. “I’ll always be with you.”

Kathleen has in her notes for that day that Bryan did not look good at all. His face and hands were pasty white, as if a life force were being drained from his skin.

Bryan died in the hospital, unconscious, connected to machines. He had contracted pneumonia. Nothing worked.