Love and Loss: An Elegy

I weep for Adonais—he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all the years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: with me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!

Philip Brett died of cancer on October 16, 2002, one day before his sixty-fifth birthday. He and I had been lovers for twenty-eight years: he was thirty-six when we met, and I was twenty-four (our birthdays were on the same day). Since Philip and I had been partners from the 1970s, I had no identity, as an adult, much less as a gay man, that was not realized in and through him. His death left me utterly bereft: losing him was emotionally more overwhelming than anything I had ever experienced. The loss of friends to AIDS, the loss of grandparents, aunts, and uncles, even the loss of my parents: as devastating as these losses were, none was like the loss of the person with whom I had shared a life and who in so many ways had helped me become the person I am. There is no consolation at such a time, no feeling beyond that of woe: the tears with which Shelley begins his pastoral elegy are the only response to a loss so deeply shattering. "Weep . . . O, weep": there is nothing more to do in such a situation, nothing that anyone can offer, no way out. The grief traps me within myself and leaves me desperately alone.

A few years before Philip's illness I wrote an essay called "Desire and Mourning: The Ideology of the Elegy," and I turn to it now to ask what sources of consolation this rich tradition offers.¹ Shelley begins his elegy with the fact of death, with weeping, and with a claim of the value of the life that has been lost:

            say: with me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!²

The threat of time is also a kind of hope: this assertion at the opening of the poem, this hope that the dead friend will be remembered, is perhaps a place to start. Shelley's poet asserts this belief even as he expresses the brutal fact of death. The death itself must be acknowledged, must be spoken, for this hope to be realized. Philip too will be remembered. A kind colleague and generous mentor, he brought many people joy. He was a scholar of English Renaissance and twentieth-century music, an unparalleled editor, the founder of gay studies in music, a performer, a conductor, and to many of those he met in these different professional worlds, he was a friend. Do these memories act as "an echo and a light unto eternity"? In a way, of course, they do. But is that a consolation? No. Such memories and hopes in themselves do not console; they only serve to measure the magnitude of loss. But they could do more. Shelley's lines suggest that a death must be spoken before there can be a source of consolation in its memory.

O, weep for Adonais—he is dead!
Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep!
Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed
Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep
Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep;
For he is gone, where all things wise and fair
Descend;—oh, dream not that the amorous Deep
Will yet restore him to the vital air;
Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.

(19-27)

"For he is gone," the poet says. Gone. Philip's "mute and uncomplaining sleep" torments me still...