Sunday morning, I picked up a friend for an overnight trip to a neighboring city. “Nancy Reagan died,” she informed me.
“Oh,” I said, after which my thoughts returned to driving along the mountain roads.
We were out of town that night, so I did not see any of the news coverage dedicated to the event. I can’t say I missed anything.
Perhaps my admission of apathy sounds callous. In fact, I feel sympathy for those closest to Nancy Reagan, who knew her in life and thus mourn her death and grieve and will grieve their loss of her.
I did not pay much attention to her. That Ronald Reagan’s love letters to her are being publicized, that their love story is foregrounded at this time — these things do not move me.
Two nights ago, I was at my new friend D’s house. Ostensibly, we were watching the opening round of the Indian Wells tennis tournament. Our talk turned to Lori Ostlund’s novel After the Parade, which I had given D as a recent gift. “I read a couple chapters, and then I put it down,” D said, no comment on the quality of the book. “Is it about AIDS?”
I assured her it was not. In fact, when I had learned of the book’s upcoming publication and title and heard a little of what it was about (gay man in his forties moving to San Francisco), I guessed at and misinterpreted its possible plot. After the Parade does not mean, as I’d imagined, after San Francisco’s Gay Pride parade; it was not a metaphor for a gay man’s move to San Francisco after the AIDS pandemic has wiped out much of the gay male population. That’s exactly what happens in the novel — a gay man moves to San Francisco after the AIDS pandemic and so on — but AIDS does not figure prominently, or much at all, in the novel. I told this to D.
D was glad to hear it. I believe she’ll be able to continue reading the book now. AIDS cuts too close to home for her in too many ways. She lost friends to the pandemic; she has worked directly with other deadly epidemics. She did not want to venture too deeply into the novel if it took on the subject.
“Nancy Reagan just died,” she continued, “and that’s sad, but I don’t feel that way.”
This, too, was part of our conversation about AIDS. D and I both fault Ronald Reagan for his refusal to acknowledge aloud, much less respond to, AIDS when it was in its first years. Our anger runs deep. It is what we think of first when various Republican candidates uphold him for what they consider his estimable qualities. He has blood on his hands, the blood of the millions of people who died of AIDS and of millions more living with HIV. I know he isn’t patient zero or ground zero for the virus, but I hold him almost singlehandedly responsible for the spread of the disease.
So when his beloved wife died and now that she’s being buried and eulogized, I can’t think of anything but the millions upon millions of deaths that didn’t have to be.
R.I.P.
PROFESSOR GAGA 