A Family Wedding

My youngest sister's daughter is getting married today and the boyfriend and I will be attending. In fact, he is doing my niece's and sister's hair for the event since their normal stylist is out of town. The wedding and reception will be held at a large beach house - eight bedrooms and 9 bathrooms - in the Sandbridge area of Virginia Beach (the photo at right is a view from the area where the house is located and the one below is a sunrise scene). Virginia Beach borders North Carolina and Sandbridge is basically the northern most part of the Outer Banks of North Carolina where they attach to the mainland. My youngest daughter will also be going to the affair. Hopefully, the weather will cooperate so we can take full advantage of the beautiful setting.
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This is the first large family event since the psychodrama surrounding my late mother's death and funeral which led me to have a separate memorial service. All of my living siblings and just about all of their children will be there and, thus, it will be interesting to see how the day plays out. I'm not one to typically hold grudges and my issues were never with my youngest sister. I hope my niece has a magical day. Her husband to be is a cutie and seems like a truly sweet guy. I am facing the day with both excitement and apprehension.
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As for being at the beach, it should be wonderful. The one thing I miss living in Hampton as opposed to Norfolk or Virginia Beach is the distance from the beach and surfing. Having to drive an hour - as opposed to 10-15 minutes as when I lived in Virginia Beach - makes one think twice about getting out the surf board and paddling out. One of my resolutions is to get back in the water more regularly and restore my lost endurance. It's great therapy and tones the upper body too!

Losing a Sibling – Sunday Reflections

We had another wonderful day here in New York City. We met my niece who lives here for lunch at a great little restaurant on Greenwich Avenue and I very much enjoyed catching up on what’s going on in her life. She seems to be flourishing after losing her mother, my middle sister and then her father less than two years later. She’s happy here in New York, has left banking which had given her the opportunity to live in London and then move to New York, and is now in the French culinary school here in New York. What was haunting to me throughout our wonderful meal was how much she looks like my late sister – I literally felt myself tearing up at a couple of times thinking of my sister and things lost. Throughout the remainder of the day we managed to avoid the 9-11 protests and instead seemed to encounter people involved in fashion week – certainly a more attractive option.
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The 9-11 remembrances seem to always get me looking back in contemplation. 2001 was a year of huge upheaval in my life: I lost my sister and had to deal with her estate and so much high emotion and intra-family drama; I came out to my former wife after keeping secret to all but myself the epiphany I had had two years earlier as the result of an unintended encounter in Chicago; and, of course the 9-11 attacks took place.
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In many ways I have achieved what I had dreamed of when I came out – I’m in a committed relationship with a wonderful man and overall we have a comfortable life despite living in anti-gay Virginia. My ongoing financial struggles given the collapsed economy and the impact on the real estate practice are the main source of constant worries. Another plus is that I have also reestablished communications with all of my children and I treasure my relationship with my youngest daughter who has worked for me for a year now as a paralegal. Perhaps most importantly, I am at total peace with my sexual orientation and long ago ceased feeling that I had been cursed by God.
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I could never have reached this inner peace remaining in the closet. Living a lie on a daily basis, in my view, makes it impossible to come to terms with who you are. Moreover, it reinforces a sense (even if it’s subconscious) that being gay is wrong. As I have noted before, I have met far more genuine people in the LGBT community than I knew in the outwardly perfect world of suburbia where everything was about appearances and “keeping up with the Jones.” Despite all of the turmoil I have been through since coming out – forced out by my law firm for being gay, divorce case from Hell, two suicide attempts – I truly know that it was the right thing to do. I believe that I truly would be dead by now if I had remained married and in the closet.

Thoughts of My Sister

I’m not sure what triggered it, but I had repeated dreams last night about my sister who died in 2001. Perhaps it was because a dear friend is struggling with the lost of his mother. Maybe it was from talking about my coming out saga with a female reader of this blog that I met through the Second Saturday Salon in January. In any event, I woke up this morning still thinking about my sister. Ironically, she is the only one of my siblings that never got to know who I really was as a gay man - even though her death played a large role consciously and I suspect subconsciously in leading me to make the final decision to come out as opposed to killing myself as I contemplated frequently.

As long time readers know, it was an unplanned, unsought same sex physical encounter in 1999 that forced me to have to face the truth about my sexual orientation. However, it was another two agonizing years before I ultimately came out to my former wife. In some ways, but for my sister’s untimely death in April, 2001 – April 12, 2001 at around 1:00 PM to be exact – that after some months of internal debate and despair broke the dam of hesitation, fear and immobilization that had plagued me since September of 1999, I might have remained in the closet or had a “surfing accident” that would have led to me drowning. My sister was a remarkable person – extremely smart, very pretty, a cheerleader and outstanding athlete in high school, honor graduate from college, one who expected nothing less than perfection from herself, and an amazing dedicated mother to her two children. After earning a Masters Degree in Chemistry, she went on to be chemist for the Navy and did complex analysis of metals and post crash investigative work, based first in this area and later in Florida. Unfortunately, she was in what we later discovered to have been an unhappy marriage that she stayed in until her husband left her. I believe she did it for what she thought was the sake of her children. In addition, having been raised fairly conservative Catholic - I suspect she believed that she had to stay married due to the dictates of the Church. Like me, she was one to do what was expected and lived most all of her life for the needs and/or expectations of others.

Career wise she was definitely coming into her own and making a new start after her divorce when she received a terminal diagnosis of lung cancer even though she had never smoked (I still suspect the chemicals she used in her job or exposure to radiation somewhere was the true source of her affliction). She put up a heroic struggle against the caner, but eventual lost the fight. In addition to trying to mourning her, I found myself having to plan her entire funeral and burial and also as both the executor of her estate and trustee of the trust she had established for her children. It was an emotional nightmare and her hostile ex-husband made for a toxic atmosphere. Perhaps the hardest thing of all was being in her house in Florida alone – her children were staying with their dad since she had died at home and they did not want to be in the house – and having to arrange for its sale, the storage of furniture, etc. Being alone in her house, among all of her things, and trying to grasp that she was really gone was so incredibly hard. Compounding the pain was the knowledge that she had not known happiness so much of the time – or at least such is my belief. Rather, she had “played by the rules” and tried to be what she believed was expected of her. Just as I had done throughout my whole life up to that point in time. And now she was gone and would never have the chance to be truly who she was.

Sadly, due to the “glass wall” I had always placed between myself and others to guard my horrible secret, I never got to know my sister as fully as I might have. Similarly, I had never allowed her – or anyone else – to really know me. As a result, I doubt she ever knew how much I loved her or how wonderful I thought she was. Her death made me look seriously at my own screwed up life and made me realize that my fate would be the same if I did not do something. I believed I could (1) take the suicide route and leave plenty of life insurance proceeds to care for my wife and kids, or (2) I could try to be who I really was. The fact that I am writing this post shows that I chose the latter. Thank you Kitty for helping me be who I really am.