Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 29, 1995 TAG: 9505300111
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It seemed fitting. Gerard Edgar Gardner had a gift for making things live and thrive.
But as Gerry, 42, lay suffocating from pneumonia at the end of four years of living with HIV, he revealed an understanding of something others were less prepared to deal with: his own impending death.
While everyone around him was trying to keep him alive, he was fighting at every chance to move on. He had HIV, but no one expected him to die so soon.
"Gerry was more ready than we were," said his friend of 20 years, Bill Shaffer.
Sunday afternoon, his friends and family gathered at the Alexander-Gish House in Roanoke's Highland Park to share their feelings, to try to learn what Gerry must have already known and to pay tribute to his quietly extraordinary life.
On a table in one room were mementos of his life: pictures of him as a chubby child with a slick little pompadour; him with hair down his back in the early 1970s; play scripts with his notes in them; three pocket knives; a key tag from the Ritz hotel in Madrid; a pamphlet on grief recovery.
The centerpiece of the afternoon was a reading of entries in a journal kept by those who sat with Gerry during his last days. It was organized by Gerry's sister, Claire Gardner English.
It was the kind of soul-baring that Gerry appreciated. Claire and Gerry figured out a long time ago, she said, that it isn't what happens to you that hurts you, "it's the secrets that are toxic."
That's why Gerry would talk about the most intimate details of his life, about his infection, about being gay, about how he wished to be allowed to die in peace.
While rain pounded the mud in the parking lot outside, about 35 people listened as Claire recalled taking Gerry to the hospital at 6 a.m. on April 1. He had called her from his bed, unable to get out of it.
He was admitted to Roanoke Memorial for what turned out to be a short stay. But it was grueling for those on what became an around-the-clock vigil.
Gerry knew the drill well, but not from the patient's perspective. He was a volunteer with Good Samaritan Hospice.
"He was almost like a minister to many people," Claire said. "He had a way of being present for others in their most painful times."
Last spring, he had watched his dearest friend Roger die of AIDS. When Roger had wasted away to the point that he couldn't care for himself, Gerry moved in with him. Someone had to make sure his IV was untangled and functioning.
Perhaps it was from Roger that Gerry learned what he knew of death.
"Once Gerry knew [he was dying], he was an active participant in it," Claire said. From the beginning, he fought the oxygen mask that was keeping him breathing.
Claire didn't know what to do. But doctors said to give Gerry seven days to turn around. After that, a decision would have to be made about how - or whether - to treat him.
For Claire, life became a battle to keep her brother alive for that seven days, despite his wishes.
She enlisted friends and her daughters to sit with him around the clock. Gerry gave them all fits, constantly tugging at this oxygen mask. When a nurse fixed it, he snapped at her.
"Whose mask is this?''
When he wasn't trying to expedite death, he was telling Claire what to do with his possessions. He wanted his nieces to have almost everything.
On the back porch of the Gish House on Sunday sat what was left of Gerry's stuff: books on topics like cooking with marijuana to plays by Woody Allen, an Appalachian Trail guide and stacks of maps, 10 or 15 pairs of blue jeans. Guests were encouraged to take what they wanted.
Claire took his books by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. Plus she got a special gift. "I want you to have the compost heap," Gerry had told her.
When he wasn't driving a cab, Gerry was an avid gardener. Claire said he was also a gifted actor, who borrowed his characters from people who rode in the back of his cab. He was a member of the Acting Company of Roanoke Valley.
He was a seeker of new experiences most of his life. He dropped out of high school in the mid-1960s and hit the road. Claire said he went from commune to commune, until he showed up in Roanoke when he was 21.
Claire didn't even recognize him at first, it had been so long. But she took him in and became his surrogate mother. Their relationship with their parents had long since ended.
Always in love with nature, Gerry fell for the mountains that surrounded him here. He stayed for the rest of his life.
He also tried to make up for having missed out on a formal education. Friends say he was an avid reader and that his mind was encyclopedic on any topic you could name.
And it stayed sharp until the end. He tossed out jokes from behind his oxygen mask, "trying to distract us from his goal of reaching death," Claire said.
On April 7 about noon, the sixth day of the seven days, Gerry was particularly surly. Nurses sedated him.
Claire thought that would give him a chance to rest with the oxygen mask on. But when she turned her head, he ripped it off. Thinking he was so out of it he wouldn't notice, she held it over his mouth without touching him. He turned his head.
When she laid it on the pillow and told him to pick it up if he wanted, he jerked out his IV again.
The phone rang. It was Claire and Gerry's brother Joseph from Baltimore. Claire was relieved. She knew Gerry was dying quickly, so she kept Joseph on the line for the next twenty minutes, listening to Gerry's uneasy breathing.
He finally got his way.
Gerry was cremated last month. Amid his directions for what to do after his death, he demanded his ashes be spread near limestone. He said he didn't want his alkaline ashes near acid- loving plants that would suck them up.
Bill Shaffer said that was just like him. He never refrained from saying what was on his mind.
"He kept his dignity to the end."
by CNB