Death Worker

The first message of the day was from R., a client who lives with HIV, Crohn’s disease, and addiction. “I want to make a will,” he said. I reached out to a friend at Legal Aid’s HIV Unit, who told me they can refer people to a private law firm for wills, so I sent R. to him. I had to get an early start to see my psychiatrist before work. Just as I reached her building, the NYU ICU called and I started to panic, but they were just asking me for permission to share info with his father. The client himself is the same. They decided against trying to extubate him today. My psychiatrist is interesting. She’s fairly young, in her second year of residency, and dresses kind of professional/goth, often in black with chunky black shoes. Today her black dress was printed with some kind of creature, but I couldn’t figure it out. “Sting rays?” I asked. “Butterflies,” she said. “I just gave myself a mini Rorschach,” I said and we both laughed. In grad school we spent two semesters learning to administer and interpret the Rorschach, which is rarely used these days. The basic principle is that you compare your subject’s responses to a guide that uses a huge number of people’s responses to indicate how common certain responses are. The further someone’s response is from common is supposed to indicate abnormalities. It gets into more depth, but the basic premise is flawed because people’s responses are very influenced by cultural factors, and the norms are of course based on white people from Europe and North America. Once when I gave the Rorschach to someone from a Caribbean island nation, who grew up scuba diving and eating freshly caught seafood, most of his responses were related to water and aquatic life. They were nowhere near the common responses, but they made sense given the context. The thing I first noticed about this psychiatrist is that she often wears short sleeves even though her arms are covered in self injury scars, pencil thin parallel lines like a tabby’s striped legs. I think she’s brave to let her scars show because other providers can be very judgmental about self-injury. Despite the widespread concept of the wounded healer, both psychiatry and psychology have a tendency to treat people with mental health issues as though they are “not good enough” to be a part of the profession. As a second year resident she is mostly in the hospital so she no longer has her own office in the clinic, she just grabs a generic empty office that’s available. Sitting in there, I find myself telling her about Mark and how hard it is to accept that someone who was such a ubiquitous part of the activist world is gone. Then she asks me about work, and I tell her about my Very Sick client, and telling those stories back to back I am struck by the commonalities – AIDS, kidney failure, surviving way past multiple predictions. She asks me what else I’ve been doing, so I tell her about the rally for Renee Good after she was murdered by ICE. She takes that in for a moment and then says, “you are surrounded by death.” She’s not wrong, this has been the case for decades. Once, talking to Cait, a professional death doula, she said to me, “you know, you’re a death worker too.” I had never thought of it that way, but when she said it, it fit. We talk for a minute about the political situation, the effect the intense levels of fear and uncertainty are having on our clients. “The mental health establishment has nothing to offer here. What’s going on here is a normal response to living under a fascist regime.” Then she pauses for a moment, looks a little uncertain, and I wonder what’s going on. “You know Libertas, the torture survivors’ clinic in Queens?” I nod. “I’m working there one morning a week.” And suddenly I know before she says it. “We have a client in common.” We’re both amazed at the unlikeliness of this in a city of millions, but also, it’s a small queer world. Almost as an afterthought she asks me about my meds. I just shrug, we both know that the things that weigh me down can’t be medicated away. I head out into another mild day and check my phone. Ben is thinking about death too. He has sent me an old blog of his, from ACT UP’s 29th anniversary in 2016. “Look at how many people from this anniversary action are dead?” he wrote, and I do see them, Andy Velez, and Mark, and many others. “ I think being among the younger people in our activists worlds leaves us in the position of losing folks as they age, plus you add in the AIDS factor and the folks who are actively using….” I write back, walking past the expensive shops on Spring St. It feels odd to be talking about being one of the younger people at 50, but many of our comrades are in their 70s,80s, 90s. It’s a privilege to fight alongside them, to hear their stories and learn from their experience. I think of Joan Pleune, one of my favorite people to get arrested with, who would tell me about being one of the Freedom Riders in 1961. Also David Freeman, who was a teen activist in Dr Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign in 1968. And I remember Bob Kohler, now long gone, and his stories about the early Gay Liberation Front, formed in 1969 after the Stonewall riots. The day ends, I start gathering my stuff to head home and in my head I hear a line of a song, "the teachers of my youth are moving on," and when I pause the rest of the song, Sweet Honey in the Rock's "They are falling all around me" comes flooding in. They are falling all around me by Bernice Johnson Reagon They are falling all around me They are falling all around me The strongest leaves of my tree Every paper brings the news that Every paper brings the news that Every paper brings the news that The teachers of my youth Are moving on Death comes and rest so heavy Death comes and rest so heavy Death comes and rest so heavy Your face I'll never see I'll never see you anymore But you're not really gonna leave me You're not really gonna leave me You're not really gonna leave me It is your song I sing It is your load I take on It is your air I breathe It is the record you set that makes me go on It is your strength that makes me stand You're not really You're not really gonna leave me I have tried to sing my song right I have tried to sing my song right I have tried to sing my song right Be sure to let me hear From you