Love in a Cold Universe: A Halloween Tale of Two Buried Gays
The clocks have gone back, the days are darker and colder, and it is All Hallows’ Eve. Appropriate, then, that I spent some of this morning in a rain-drenched graveyard.
Allow me to explain. My gran wanted a tour of the haunts of her youth. She’s in her eighties and nostalgia has been hitting her hard lately. Dutiful grandson that I am, I drove her to these old places this morning—and learned some family history along the way. One of our stops was a graveyard where some of her relatives are buried, including her brother (or half-brother; I’m not entirely sure), who, I noticed, shared his grave with another man, described only as his “close friend and companion”. My great uncle died in May 1999; his “companion”, in December 2000. They were 77 and 81, respectively.
Employing my immense powers of deduction, I suspected that the men I’ll here call Tim and John were partners. And so my mum confirmed. She told me that everyone only ever knew the pair as Uncle Tim and Uncle John and it wasn’t until another of my gran’s siblings asked if the pair of them were gay that the truth came out. Great Uncle Tim had been married before and had a daughter. But nobody cared that Tim and John were a couple and, it seems, everyone was happy to bury them together. I found this tolerance and these family bonds very touching.
I never knew Tim and John, though it’s possible they met me as a baby (I was born in 1996). I know nothing of their story beyond what I’ve sketched out here. Was Tim bisexual or gay? How did the pair meet? How did Tim’s marriage end? How was his relationship with the ex-wife and daughter through all this? How long were they together? Was everyone in the family unfazed by the relationship, or were there some who disapproved? Who chose that euphemistic description of their relationship for the headstone—them or the families? Did John’s family know? Did they choose to be buried together or was it John’s wish after Tim died, or neither of their wishes but the thoughtful choice of others?
Some of these questions are answerable; others, probably not. I’ve been meaning for a while now to delve into my family history, to set down memories and stories before they are forever lost. But the story of Tim and John reminds me of how much has already been lost, how much is irrecoverable. And this is just one story among many: how many others have been extinguished with the crumbling of brains and bodies over the long span of human history?
Over 100 billion humans have lived on this planet. Most of their names we will never know. Most of their stories are buried in the earth or floating as ashes or wending their way through the innards of vultures or returned to atoms and elements and dispersed back into the natural cycle, indecipherable to us. We don’t even know what we don’t know, what we’ve lost. The billions and billions of stories, of transcendent joy and debilitating agony and everything in between and besides, all gone, forever. No, not billions and billions: it must be trillions. Because every human contains a set of nigh-infinite stories: the human to story ratio must be the most lopsided ratio in the universe. All those memories vanished, like tears in rain.
What can be done about this? My own small (though as yet uncommenced) effort involves recording family tales. On another plane, fiction is a method of recovering lost stories as well as creating new ones. But it is probably impossible to recover all such extinguished stories or to collect all the ones that come into being every second of every day. No, the immensity of the task is too much. We can only do a little bit for ourselves and keep in mind the epic, quotidian saga that is the human story: keep the flame flickering, just a little longer. No man is an island, but every consciousness is a cosmos of its own. Invoking something of this sacred spirit is a start.
Let me be clear, though, that I don’t mean anything supernatural or woo-ey by all this. No, the light of consciousness and the richness of human experience are natural phenomena in a cold, godless universe. So what? Only the ungrateful would require anything more than that. It’s a lack of imagination on the part of god-botherers and superstitious dolts to cry about our puny cosmological position. No, the universe doesn’t care. But we are conscious, intelligent beings with the capacity for love (and hate) who can understand the universe and our place within it. The fact that such a brilliant and horrible and messy species like ours can come into existence through physics and chemistry and biology over billions of years among billions of galaxies on one planet out of an infinity of them among 200 hundred billion trillion stars: now, that is exciting, that is beautiful, that is wondrous.
But to take leave of this highfalutin metaphysical meditation and return to Earth: what other lessons can be extracted from the story of Tim and John? One is that ‘family values’ doesn’t mean traditionalism: the moralising right has no monopoly here, and in fact evinces a great deal of hypocrisy. Which of these families is more committed to each other: the one that throws its gay son out onto the street in the name of God or the one that embraces him?1
Tim and John’s tale also shows that gays have always existed, that same-sex love has always lived alongside its noisier opposite. Even when it has had to subsist quietly, it has always been there. That pair of ‘uncles’, those decades-long ‘housemates’, those old maid ‘sisters’ living across from us? Poofs and dykes, every one of them.
It saddens me that there are so many family stories that I’ll never know, but at least this is true of everyone. How many secret loves, how many deadly enmities, how many trysts, how many terrible and joyous things there must be hidden and locked away deep down in our family trunks, in attics and basements and dusty old closets! But it’s nice to know that something like infinity exists not just in our own mental cosmos but in the histories of our families and our species.
So here’s to Great Uncle Tim and a man we may as well call his husband, John, for ‘husband’ rings truer than ‘partner’ or ‘boyfriend’ despite being an anachronism. Their story is an example of the countless small acts of love that make life worth living. It is a rebuke to bigotry and an affirmation of dignity. In this cold universe, it was—is—a small piece of warmth, a light against the vast darkness.
Addendum. There’s just one thing that nags, though. The graves we visited are old graves, but they were shiny and well-taken care of, unlike many others in the same cemetery. None of the family know who could be responsible for this. So, an appropriate mystery to end with on Halloween: who is tending the graves?
Update (added 1/12/2021): Turns out that Tim was actually my gran’s half-uncle; so he’s actually my half great x 2 uncle.
It never fails to astonish me, the fact that there are people who would disavow their own children for being gay. Imagine placing love of God above love of family, of your children: such is the perversion, the deformation wrought by faith upon all that is beautiful in the human.