The Way We Are

“… if we want our children to love and accept who they are, our job is to love and accept who we are.”

• Brené Brown, social scientist (1965 — )

Some years ago, I accompanied a friend on her appointed rounds. A hospice nurse, she cared for patients with AIDS in their homes.

One of them resembled a slimmer version of actor Rock Hudson. With dark hair and moustache, although yet on the shy side of middle age, he had seen better days.

Looking at him, I think few would have guessed his sexual orientation. So with Rock Hudson. He entered a heterosexual marriage, but it didn’t work (as with so many Hollywood unions, it may not have anyway).

After we were introduced, he pulled up a pantleg to reveal an angry violaceous lesion on his leg — Kaposi’s sarcoma.

I had seen pictures of such lesions. They were more vivid in the flesh.

Purple is a favorite color, but not this time. I averted my eyes.

We talked easily. A writer, he was intelligent and articulate and could still talk easily.

As we sat down, he asked me, as if to answer an unspoken question: “Do you think, given the way society is, I would choose to be gay if I had a choice?”

This was Los Angeles, not San Francisco. But it wouldn’t have mattered.

The question haunted me and has remained locked in the cells of memory.

My nurse friend administered the amphotericin B (patients often nicknamed it ‘amphoterrible,’ such were its side effects) and we left.

I never saw him again.

Before that, when I spent two years overseas, I encountered a young man on the street of some forgotten town or city who looked like this:

Photo: S M Chen

The first thought that came to me was that his mother had taken thalidomide or similar substance when pregnant.

Thalidomide was available in 46 countries in the 1950s. One of them might have been the one in which I lived.

In addition to apparent phocomelia of his right upper extremity, the poor man has a deformed left wrist that resembles a condition called Madelung deformity. I cannot say for sure the two conditions are related but they might be.

What is notable is how cheerful the young man appears to be. He is clutching a sheaf of artwork, perhaps his own.

Now I wish I’d stopped and learned his story.

It may well have been more interesting than my own.

Perhaps bought some artwork from him. Lightened his economic load some.

But ours was a fleeing encounter, barely more than two ships passing in the dark of night.

What I did not have time for then I have all the time in the world for now.

Some years ago (the timeline is not so important), on a street in Budapest, I encountered this woman:

Photo: S M Chen

I do not know her name. She did not speak or even look up.

I cannot say she was not blind.

I do not know her story, which was all her own. Surely she had one.

I did not take the time to try to learn it. In this instance, I had an excuse: I did not speak Hungarian (by all accounts, a difficult language) and most likely she was not fluent in English.

But some things transcend language.

Something brought her to this place.

Of the 1.7 million people in Budapest, she was the only one I saw begging.

But there may well have been others. I did not walk the streets of the city looking for poverty.

Hers may have been the result of poor decisions on her part. But all of us are guilty of that, are we not?

Not all of us end up begging on the streets, however.

Some are saved by the nets of society designed to help the poor. She may not have been. Instead, she may have fallen through the cracks to the bottom.

In 1980 a sister and I visited the land of my parents.

They had emigrated to this country and stayed.

My aunt (father’s sister) and her husband also lived for a time in the U.S. They elected to return before the country became Communist.

Unfortunately, neither my sister nor I were conversant in Mandarin.

My cousins, whom I met for the first time, were not conversant in English.

My aunt, who retained a remarkable command of English from her time in the U.S., acted as translator.

Were it not for her, we would have smiled more and talked less.

Lotus. Westlake. Hangchow. China. Photo: S M Chen

It was a quirk of fate/providence that things turned out as they did, that it was we who visited them in humble circumstances, rather than the other way around, which might have been the case had different decisions been made decades earlier by our respective parents.

Some people in the time of the Master thought that physical misfortune was a consequence of sin. That of themselves or perhaps their parents. But what if it were neither?

The Master pointed this out to His disciples in the 9th book of the Gospel of John of Holy Writ.

A man blind from birth was healed by the Master.

Apparently, his blindness was an affliction that awaited that moment of encounter between the Master and himself, when divinity overcame one of the blights of humanity.

Certain things are what they are: sexual identity, congenital physical deformity, poverty, place of birth, blindness. Surely there are other similar conditions and situations.

We who count ourselves fortunate should be grateful, and gracious to those with less good fortune, who were born into humbler circumstance with perhaps some physical limitation not of their own making.

For surely, there but for grace go we.