"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it."
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Simply: One Purple Violet
Prologue
There were no hymns. No eulogies. No flowers. There wasn't even a photo of him set out so that we could honor him that way. He would have hated all that. He'd lived simply, modestly for the last ten years of his too short life.
Why change that in his death?
And now, there were fewer than a dozen of us here today to celebrate his life. Fewer than the number of men he could fuck in a week twenty years ago. But… that was twenty years ago. And he was a different man then. We both were.
Today is January 1, 2021. Our son and I chose this day to celebrate him so that we could bring him into this new year with us. Brian Kinney, my husband of five years, my lover for most of twenty, died of complications from AIDS one week ago today.
Fourteen years after we were both diagnosed with HIV.
Two years after he was first diagnosed with AIDS.
The doctors told us it was pneumonia. But I know he worked himself to death.
So now, I sit here in our small apartment in Bayonne, my eyes unable to see anything but the framed work on the wall above his desk. One of his first photographic projects – a small black vase holding a single purple violet, resting on a stark white background. He titled it 'Simply,' an homage to his philosophy on living. And dying.
Simply: one purple violet.
I wrap his favorite sweater around me as I listen to our good friends and small family sharing shocking memories and quaint anecdotes of the most magnificent being I've ever known. Smiling through my own death.
You can't live without a heart, I've heard, and my heart died one week ago today. Christmas Day, 2020. Hindsight is a cruel bitch.