On Wednesday morning Cora Williams neither called nor came by. When I rang her house around noon, a woman with a heavy smoker’s voice answered the phone. After a bit of prodding, she introduced herself as Grace, a cousin from East Texas … probably one of the ones that had beat the tar out of young Reedy.

“I guess you hadn’t heard,” she surmised. “Bayboy passed away last night at the hospital.”

My heart dropped to the floor.

Cora had spent everything she had on his perpetual treatments. There was Didanosine and Stavudine and Lamivudine and Emtricitabine; medications with names that burst through the stratosphere like encrypted profanity from another world, obliterating our medical vocabularies and leaving us with unfulfilled hopes and dreams.
In the end, the long names and high price tags were just not enough. AIDS was too vigilant, too all-consuming to tuck its tail and run from a few experimental cocktails that, at best, offered marginal results. In 1993, gay men in the black community were dropping like flies. But as fast as one died, another would come out of the closet.

I often wondered if it were possible for God to accidentally overload a little boy fetus with too many female chromosomes. Could there have been a biological mistake made in the womb? The small question kept leading to a larger, more profound question the Bible had already answered: Could God do anything, accidentally? Could God make a mistake?

As a young boy, Cora had allowed Bayboy to wear dresses and play with Chatty Kathy dolls because it pleased him so. But why did it please him so? Why didn’t a Power Ranger uniform and a Tonka truck please him instead?
The universe had its quirks and Bayboy had been one of them. But now it was over. All of the rashes and warts and fevers and vomiting and $300 pills were behind her now. Cora could get on with her life, that is, if there really was a life for a parent after losing a child.

I watched one day as the neighbor’s cat climbed a tree and pull a little helpless chick from a blue bird’s nest. The cat ate the chick on my side of the fence. Despite the mother bluebird squawking and flapping; despite her swooping down and pummeling the cat’s head, he still ate the little chick and walked away.

For weeks, the mother sat on the fence, just above the spot where the attack had taken place. She never chirped or flapped or changed the direction in which she faced. She just perched there for hours, watching the ground. Finally, one day she didn’t come back. That was the day she got on with her life.

I knew Cora. One day she would get on with her life. It was going to take some time. But, if for no other reason than for the sake of her teenage daughters, she would eventually go on. I made a promise to myself to be there every step of the way.

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Mike Murphy
Kids Hooked on the Outdoors
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