Hampshire Memories

     I was at Hampshire, in my second year, when my mother found my birth father’s obituary in in the NY Times after looking for it for years.  I don’t know what made her think he would die fairly young – he was 66 – but she read the obituaries year after year with a quiet determination.  It wasn’t easy to buy a copy of the Times – the campus store didn’t have it, and you wouldn’t necessarily find it by taking the bus to Amherst either – so I went to the library and fished it out of a bin of recently arrived newspapers.  The library was silent, not in the hushed way of people trying to be quiet as they did research, but in an empty, echoing kind of way.  I could still bend back then, so I settled onto the carpet to read it.  It covered his time in the Navy in WWII, his years writing for Life and as a professor at Columbia.  But mostly they covered his books and the controversies they caused.  The last line, his final fuck you to my mother, was “no immediate family survives.”

    That was 1994, an absolutely terrible year.  So many friends with AIDS died – Aldyn Mckean and Robert Rygor among them.  Robert especially was a difficult loss – in an effort to keep our parents from knowing how much we were skipping school to protest, John and I filled out the Delaney cards they handed out at the start of every semester with the ACT UP workspace address and Robert’s name as our parent.   When he started getting postcards about our absences and lost textbooks, he decided to really own the role and became a mother hen, clucking at us about our homework and our lack of studying.  I kept leaving Hampshire, jumping on a Peter Pan bus back to NYC for funerals and actions and then reversing the trip a couple of days later.

    1994 was also the year I came home during spring break, and found my mother’s normally eggshell white skin an odd shade of bluish lavender while she hunched over the dining table unable to take a full breath.  It was an odd scene because she wasn’t alone – my Dad was there, and my grandparents were visiting – but everyone was just going about life as usual as if there wasn’t someone desperately ill in front of them. As the disruptive one, I made a fuss, insisted on dragging her to the hospital where she was diagnosed with both the breast cancer and the emphysema that would take her life five years later.

    When spring break ended, I made my way back to Hampshire, barely holding it together on the bus.  I was a TA for a natural science professor who was teaching a lot of classes about human sexuality, so I headed into the science building, and collapsed into a chair in the hallway.  That was where Ken Hoffman, one of the founding Hampshire professors, who taught my calculus and linear algebra classes found me.  He asked me what was going on, and I told him that everyone around me kept dying.  He was an older professor with fluffy white hair and red cheeks from riding his bike to campus and tending his chickens in cold weather, and he pulled up another of the random mismatched chairs that were scattered around the hallway.  I was too zoned out to remember what he said, but what stayed with me was his gentle kindness.  Ken himself is gone now, he died at 83 in 2024.

    My time at Hampshire was not all about loss, but it was an undercurrent that ran through those years and kept going.  It’s still with me to this day.