Suzanne gave me permission to post the following text she wrote one day after Andrew died at Barnes Jewish Hospital,
A text I sent Marcia, Jan 23, 2024.
As I listen to the outpouring of all the things Andrew’s many friends with they had done or said, I’ve been entreating them to lose no more time in the cesspool of regret.
Not that I’m taking my own advice.
More constructive: we try to understand the things he had long labored to tell the world.
He was a visionary. In the end, due to the many obstacles erected in recent years by those who promote the total medicalization of life, he couldn’t say some of what he needed to share. Nor did he have the energy simply—as I was wont to tell him—to “take out the garbage.” His body archived every loss and betrayal of humanity. Something may not have wanted, or been ready, to be free. I think most of us have such areas in our internal terrain.
I believe that now he is free.
In the end, accumulated trauma and the unapproachable Veil of Silence—dubbed “cancel culture”—should be the official cause of death. That, and medical greed. Every lucrative test was perpetrated on his weary body-mind. As far as I can tell, none of them were indicated by presenting symptoms. Invented aetiologies. Compounded assaults. And the existing toxicity left unacknowledged and unaddressed. Labels affixed, effacing the brilliant synthesizing mind, reducing a life and a death to 3 condemnatory letters: H…I…V…
I vow to rage against that good night…and to remember to take out the garbage, to heal the scars left by ignorance, whether willful, or simply practiced out of an accumulation of prior scars in the lives of the perpetrators. An endless cycle of probing and injecting because our culture is at war with life itself.
I’m resolved to speak in his defense, if questions like the following come up—though there’s slim chance they will—Why on Earth did he not just TAKE THE GODDAM SHOTS? And the AZT, and the Prozac? Why did he DO THIS TO US?
I will, in that unlikely case that someone will voice their questions out loud, gently as I can, reply that he had sound reasons. (Then I’ll offer a book about this. And another about that. Really wanna know? Got the time?) I’ll remind them that they cannot have it both ways: Andrew was NOT simultaneously a genius, an uncommon intellect, a prophet—and an idiot. I will leave an open invitation to explore in doable doses the roots of his genius and the content of his education.
We’re either on the brink of the end of everything for humanity, or at the threshold of a radically new foundational understanding: that the all-pervasive Love that engendered all life radiates and redeems us and everything around us.
All we need do is stand agape at the wonder of it all and participate without altering or controlling that perfection: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116…”Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no! It is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken. It is the star to every wand’ring bark…”
