If I’d learned anything from the first session with Dee, it was that there was absolutely no telling where our time together might lead us.  Although the jumble of words, sounds, and images received by her open mind later made perfect sense, that was not necessarily the case at the time.  All we could do was move as the spirit led us, gleaning what meaning we could along the way.  From my perspective the experience was surreal, both intimidating and thrilling.  Scott’s death and the force of my desire had indeed opened my heart and my mind, and I had been deeply gratified by the accuracy of Dee’s first reading.  The idea of communion with Scott’s consciousness, contact with the other side, had both answered my deepest prayers and blown my mind.

Nevertheless my rational mind, the part of me trained as an attorney, did not know what to think.  From one perspective, no amount of evidence will ever be sufficient.  But my heart was telling me otherwise.  All my instincts reassured me that Dee was the real thing.  Beyond the accuracy of her insight, I noted her almost complete lack of interest in money and remembered that she had actually dissuaded me from setting up a second session at the conclusion of the first, telling me she’d already given me quite a bit to work on.  On a deep level, I sensed that she was motivated only by love.  I realized that the Paul Crockett existing before Scott’s death would probably not be having these conversations with her, but I also knew that everything had irrevocably changed on March 1 and that man was forever gone.  In pursuing this new path, this path of the spirit, I found myself on a journey with neither map nor compass, being steadily pushed to new limits.

Now, as Dee spoke, those limits were suddenly pushed further.  It looked like we had company.  “Who’s Rob?,” she asked.  I knew the answer to her question, but hesitated for a moment as a wave of mixed emotion crashed over me.  Somewhat shocked, sorting through the implications, I replied simply “I knew a Rob that died of AIDS a few years ago.”  “Yeah, he’s there with him.  And I think they’re visiting one another right now.  Did he know Rob?”

I found the invocation of Rob’s name upsetting.  Even today, it is difficult to capture in words the unique journey Robbie Sommers and I shared together over the years, to sort through the anger and the love.  From the time we met in Tallahassee, Florida in1986 until his death in 1991, we enjoyed a special and tumultuous connection.  An extraordinarily talented man, Rob had risen to a top position in an unlikely place, the state Department of Corrections, despite his obvious gayness.  He had been able to make a positive difference there, seeing to it that televisions were placed in the state’s first prison AIDS ward, helping point some troubled kids in a better direction, and otherwise bringing an enlightened perspective to a bureaucracy much in need of it.

Though we shared many beautiful times together, a tension inevitably arose because in the end I could not give him what he wanted.  Over the course of time he had fallen in love with me, and I was unable to return his feelings.  Rob was a highly creative individual, pushy, effective, and used to getting his way.  Generous with his heart and highly insistent, he could not understand why I could not accept the gift he offered.  During the worst moments of the relationship, I experienced a level of manipulative behavior and anger unlike any I had ever encountered before, shaking me to the core.

Nevertheless, mutually recognizing the special bond between us, we finally reached a shaky truce.  I had moved to Tallahassee, the state’s capital, to clerk for a justice on the Florida Supreme Court.  When that position had run its course and it came time for me to leave the city at the beginning of 1987, I decided to take the opportunity to see as much of the world as possible before I began practicing law and was forced to get “a real job.”

It was Rob who drove me up to the Atlanta airport.  Together we had enjoyed an exhibition of the magnificent paintings of Jacob Lawrence at the High Museum there, leaving me inspired with the boldness of his color and the freedom of his line.  That night I had sketched away madly in color pencil until late in the night, interpreting from our hotel room window the view of the extravagantly Moorish-style Fox Theater just below us, its unlikely towers, arches and minarets reaching upwards, and the city’s downtown beyond.  A few hours later, finally sitting on the plane, rain beating down upon the windows, I knew that I was forever leaving behind a chapter of my life.  Thinking back on some of the sweet times we had shared together, I found myself nevertheless deeply relieved and grateful to be on my way.

I had finally returned from that journey and moved back to Miami, my home town, moving in with my parents while I looked for a job.  Within a short time I was working as a lawyer, busily learning a new profession and living in a world measured by the passage of billable hours.  The next month, in early February of 1988, I received a phone call at home that forever changed my life.  “Robbie asked me to call and tell you,” said the shaky voice of a mutual friend with whom we’d once shared good times, “that he’s in the hospital with full-blown AIDS.  Paul, he’s really really sick.”  Left breathless by the shock, I felt as though the bottom of the world had suddenly dropped out beneath me.  I had no idea what to say.  Never before had the AIDS bomb hit anywhere so close to home.  “I don’t know whether I should mention this or not,” he said in closing, “but you might want to think about getting tested.”  And then there was silence.

Hanging up the phone, I thought, my God, he’s talking about Robbie.  Suddenly the disease had a face.  As if punched in the gut, I cried out in pain and grieved from deep within.  Falling back on the bed I lay screaming, helpless, sobs wracking my body.  Major, our white German Shepherd dog, put his huge front paws up on the bed and began whimpering with me and licking my tears.  He could sense my total distress, and sought to comfort me.  I was otherwise alone, so very alone, and I appreciated his love.  Until his death a few years ago, I never forgot how he had been there for me when I really needed him.

Suddenly dropped into a free fall of pain and shock by the news of my friend’s dire situation, it was days before it occurred to me that the news carried ominous implications for my own health.  In the late 80′s, in the figurative backwaters of Tallahassee, AIDS had seemed something far away, an awful, incomprehensible experience that happened only in distant places to other people.  Though Rob and I had enjoyed a sexual relationship on and off over the years, it had never occurred to us to regularly use condoms.  Now the lesson was all too clear.  We had all been at risk.  After building up to soaring crescendos of anxiety in the weeks that followed, shadows of terminal illness haunting my dreams, I finally worked up the nerve to take the HIV test.  It came back negative.

In an instant, that phone call had changed everything.  In the face of death, my differences with Rob suddenly seemed minor.  What could I do for my friend, now in the hospital and in such pain?  Not much, our mutual friends back in Tallahassee told me, except to come up and see him and show support, to be there for him.  Also, they suggested, why don’t you bring a living will with you?  Since I had frequently helped clients complete the documents, legally making their wishes known as to the withdrawal of life support in the event of a terminal diagnosis, I seized on the suggestion.  There was really nothing I could do, I knew, but at least this was something.  I was doing what I could.  At least it might bring him some peace of mind.

The following weekend, just before Valentine’s Day, I had flown up to Tallahassee and been greeted by a group of friends lost in their grief and barely able to keep one another afloat.  They had held me, told me how glad they were that I had come, and warned me what to expect in the hospital room.  He was doing a little better as a result of the iv’s, they said, that awful rash is gone and the infection in his throat is finally fading.  But he’s still burning up with fevers; he drifts in and out; sometimes he gets angry.  I tried to listen but my mind wouldn’t cooperate.  It had all been too much, and it was only just beginning.

No warnings could have diminished the shock or the horror of that first visit.  In those days visitors were required to put on gloves and surgical masks before entering the door.  Even close friends were suddenly transformed into space aliens, seemingly lost and far-away from home under the harsh fluorescent lights.  And there in the middle of the small white room was Rob, wearing a hospital gown and sitting up in bed.  He looked pretty much the same, I thought, but he’d gotten so skinny, especially his legs.  My God, I thought, all the muscle is just gone.  As I walked forward to greet him he tried his best to smile, but then pointed to himself and said “Look at me.  There’s hardly anything left.  Just skin and bone.”

Suddenly leaning over a cold bedpan to dry heave, nauseated by the brutal antibiotics coursing through his veins, he looked up at me afterwards with tears in his eyes and said “There’s no words for how horrible this fucking disease is.”  As he looked into my eyes, I saw in his a level of pain, disappointment and exhaustion that immediately broke my heart.  A few minutes later he signed the living will I’d brought with me, the hand clutching his pen shaking so badly that his signature was barely legible.  Even that simple effort seemed to leave him breathless and exhausted.  As he spoke in the next few minutes with another friend visiting, a woman he’d worked with, I noticed that she brought out in him a different quality, one I’d never had a chance to see before.  Filled with sadness, I wondered why all the sides of this complex and gifted man were coming to an end, and such a painful one.  How could this be?  And where was the dignity in it?  Later, back among my friends, they held me as I broke down and cried.

Despite the severity of that first illness Rob was a survivor, and had hung in there for more than four years after his diagnosis.  Though we shared some special moments together during that time, he seemed to drift with his illness ever further into isolation and uncharted emotional waters.  Now more than ever, it seemed, I could do no right.  When he visited Miami once after Scott and I were together, Scott almost immediately developed a visceral dislike for this haunting figure from my past.  He had little patience for this idiosyncratic, skinny little man shuffling about, clutching to him his small backpack like a purse.  Rob had been battered by repeated rounds of brutal illness but was still on his feet, stubbornly clinging to life.  Perhaps troubled by the specter Rob’s presence presented for his own future, Scott had said dismissively “He moves around and bitches like a crabby old lady.  I hate that.”

One year, after I had committed the cardinal sin of forgetting Rob’s birthday, he called me up to tell me that he “just couldn’t deal with the stress of me anymore” and was cutting me out of his life.  Though I made a half-hearted effort to argue the point he quickly cut me off, and I never saw or spoke to him again.  When I heard months later that he had died, an awful death, I felt it important to travel to his funeral in order to pay my respects.  Though my feelings about the man could not have been more mixed, nor the lessons of our experience together more unclear, I knew that he had become part of me.  For better or worse, his story had become caught up in mine.  In grieving his loss, I honored my own.

To: A Message Of Peace Planted In tIme

Now, with Rob’s uninvited presence in my session with Dee, I felt not only unalone, but crowded.  “What is he doing here?,” I wondered impatiently.  “Rob wants you to know that he received Scott,” said Dee, “that he was one of the two.  He knew that you cared about Scott, that he was the love of your life.  So he did this for you as a friend.  Today, he’s visiting because Scott doesn’t mind.  He was here during our last conversation, he’s saying, but held back because he wanted to give Scott center stage.  He doesn’t feel that he’s intruding now, if you don’t mind.”  Somewhat uptight and not knowing exactly how to respond, I fudged out an “of course not.”  I was not being completely honest.

Uncomfortable, thinking back to our strained relations in Rob’s last days, remembering his awful anger and feeling guilty that he had died alone, I asked hesitatingly “Is Rob still angry with me?”  Dee answered firmly and quickly.  “No.  I want you to know that right now, he said.  He said he’s lost all that.  See, they both wish you well and they pray for you.  I think they had a good conversation once Scott got over there, and everything was ironed out.  But you must never think that he was angry with you.  He was very sick towards the end.”  I shuddered to think of him facing his death alone, and the agonizing tortures he must have suffered in the months before.  “Very very sick and full of anxiety,” she continued.  “But not anger.  He said he wouldn’t be there if there was anything to be ironed out here.  He wants you to know that.”  The profound idea made sense, and something clicked within me.

“He’s saying, my voice was an insulting one when he was here on Earth.  Does that make any sense to you?”  When I answered yes without hesitation, she continued.  “But he asked that you forgive him for anything too.  Cause any unkindness that went on is left to the Earth, it doesn’t go with them.”  I paused, remembering his hostility in some of our encounters and the shrill attacks he’d launched upon me.  “In other words,” Dee went on, “the bond that was there in the beginning is there now.  He wants you to know that too.  See, they’re separated from you, but not forever.  They want you to know that.  When you pass over, you’ll all be together again and you’ll be very happy, in a new life, but that’s not going to be for a long time.”  She chuckled.  “So take your vitamins!  That’s Scott interjecting.  That’s what he’s saying.”  I smiled to myself, thinking of my Jewish mother of the spirit.

“Scott and Rob are both saying that somebody new will be coming into your life, and they’re both very very pleased.  Their life with you is finished, the way it was.  And they want you to move on.”  As she spoke, the words of the first channeled writing came back to mind:  Oh my love please stay open to me and above all move on with your life… “They want you to move on,” she repeated.  “In other words, they want you to live.  And when they’re showing me that, they’re turning a light on and off.  See, the light is off now because they’re both gone.  And, they’re showing me a light snapping on, which means they want you to live and be happy.”  Bemused by the vivid but simple image, I recalled Scott’s message that I want you to live and keep on living because now especially I feel and see through the we.  Was it my imagination, or was I hearing reverberations from the other realm?

“See, they do work over there,” Dee continued, “they work with people.  See, like attracts like and when people pass over with AIDS, they don’t just immediately go into their new body and transform.  They don’t do that.  They have to be nursed and brought back…to reality, to themselves.  They have to be taught, ‘you’re now over here, and you don’t have sickness anymore.  You’re with us now.’  Rob knows what’s on your mind,” she continued, “and he asks forgiveness and seeks to forgive.  That’s what this is all about.”

“It’s hard to explain,” she said, “but every time you right a wrong you’re elevated in some way, spiritually.  It’s a beautiful concept.  You see, what happens over there, is that there’s somebody every minute, every second, passing over from AIDS.  There has to be somebody over there to receive them and to pull them into the light.  Some of them have a very low self esteem but they’re good people.  Whether they’re believers or not, they find themselves in no state except glory.  In their deaths, they have become almost like martyrs or something, you understand?”

“A lot of times they’ve had such long hard journeys, and they have to be taught, ‘you’re no longer in pain now and you’re happy.’  When Scott was living, he used to see this.  He already had this concept when he passed over, so it was easy for him to grasp.  Unlike Rob.  Rob had to be shown.  Scott leaned toward the light and went right to it.  He believed in God,” she said, “but Rob didn’t.”  Listening to her words, I could not help but contrast the circumstances of their departure.  Scott, surrounded by his life and love, enchanted by the vision before him and gently letting go, and Rob, broken hearted and alone, probably feeling resentful and abandoned, waging a desperate, white-knuckled struggle against the waiting black void.  “If Rob had any resentment or anything towards you, Scott helped heal that.  That’s all been left behind.  See it has no reality; it doesn’t exist any more.  Yes, I think they’ve come to a good understanding.”

At the time, with loss my most pressing reality and dreaming only of Scott, Rob’s unexpected presence troubled me.  I no longer feel that way.  I had not then begun to realize the extent to which we are all connected, living and dead.   Although the realm of spirit remains essentially mysterious, I have grown into a deeper understanding that we are all drawn to the people in our lives for a reason, however troubling, baffling, or otherwise inexplicable that proposition might seem, and that we may or may not be left with unfinished business at the time of their deaths.  I believe that although it is frequently not ours to now understand, we will one day, and at last know peace.  I have just begun to perceive the extent to which we are all interwoven in a vast tapestry of the spirit starting in the very center of each heart and outreaching infinity, with not one of us excluded.  There is room enough in my heart for both Scott and Rob, with doubts and unresolved feelings and all, and for that I am grateful to them both.

“See,” she went on, “Scott brought love into it.  I think this was bothering him.  Yes, it was bothering him because there was something that needed to be forgiven.”  Even at that moment, I realized that the depth of my mixed feelings at the invocation of Rob’s name told me that my feelings for him were far from neatly resolved.  Were these two men in my life, my dead lovers, reaching me today for the purpose of shining light on that dark and neglected corner?  “Scott is telling Rob that you’re more mature now than you were then,” Dee said, “this is what he’s telling him.  So see, everything is all made right.  Through Scott.  It’s all made perfect.”

She paused, then said gently “He must have been…a wonderful person.  He had to have been.”

To  Chapter 23

During that first session with Dee, a multitude of messages came through, many of them unique to my situation and virtually all of them accurate. Some of the insights, however, unbounded by time, only later came to pass. In rapid fire, she reported images laden with meaning to me. Out of the blue, she asked “You drink soda, don’t you? You know, soda or pop?” “I guess so,” I replied, uncertain what she was getting at, “Why?” “Yeah, cause he’s showing me that. He said he was very thirsty at the end. Did you know this?”

Suddenly, I got it. She was referring to the Gatorade that was Scott’s beverage of choice. His last act, prior to dying, had been to pull himself up with great effort to the tray table I had set up by the bed to reach for the glass of Gatorade there. Just as his hand had grasped the glass his entire body had suddenly tremored, spilling the liquid all over himself. He had fallen flat backwards into bed, his head landing on a pillow, mouth open and eyes staring, and stopped breathing. That was when I started panicking.

Dee continued “I see he was thirsty. He wanted to, you know, drench himself. He says he was very warm. He says his thoughts were running rampart.” “Running what?,” I asked, and Dee impatiently spelled the word for me, “r-a-m-p-a-r-t.” “Hmm,” I thought, “maybe the word is his and not hers.” “He knew you were there,” she continued, “but somebody was there holding his hand. The hand I see was never a human hand. It’s an angelic hand. He was not alone. He’s saying that even when you went off that morning you didn’t leave him alone. He was never alone.”

Later, when Dee asked “Who is Anne?,” I answered “my mother.” My parents had been there for me throughout the ordeal of Scott’s illness, and after he died I had left his body to be held in their arms while I cried. A couple of years earlier, Scott and I had been forced to cancel a long-awaited weekend trip to Key West after he began coughing up blood in the early morning hours that Friday. I had called his doctor at home and made arrangements to check him into the hospital, and driven him there through the deserted predawn streets. As we watched the pale sunrise together from his hospital room window, both of us frightened and exhausted, I said quietly “Honey, we’ve got to hang on to life loosely.” Later, in his journal, I saw that he had written down the words.

That Friday morning, before being able to sleep, I had had to drive to yet another hospital, many miles south, to keep an appointment to have a will signed by one of my clients dying of AIDS-related lymphoma. He was in pain and disfigured by the ravages of disease, but had the grace to ask how Scott was doing, to ask if I was all right. Meanwhile, his life partner, who had been in our office only months before for estate planning, causing a sensation with his beauty and his gentle, sure manner, lay in the same hospital two doors down, also dying. No one was sure which would go first.

I finally got back home and called my mother, having no idea what I wanted to say. Words started pouring out of me. “We had to cancel our trip to Key West, and Scott’s in the hospital, and I just had to go do this will and this guy and his lover are both in the hospital dying, a couple doors from each other. This damn disease. I just…” I broke down crying. I had been pushed beyond my limit. It was all too much. My mother, sharing my pain, spoke soft words of comfort, knowing that there were no easy answers.

“I know, darling. I know.” She was just there for me as I cried, feeling as if I would never stop. Finally, she said “Darling, now get some rest and when you wake up why don’t you come by for some ice tea and a sandwich.” And I did, lost in darkness, and we had talked. She had been through it with me.

My Mom, Anne Howe O’Quinn Crockett

A woman whose loving nature had found expression in her Christianity, she had come to terms beautifully with the fact of her gay son, and later my HIV-positivity. Just days before, I had discussed with her my feelings that Scott’s love was still present. To her, the idea was the most natural one in the world. Is not the essential message of Christianity that death is not what it seems to be, and its core commandment an imperative to love beyond reason? She too had felt his presence, she told me. In fact, she had found herself having a conversation with him, “thinking to him” as she put it, before going to sleep just the night before.

Now, Dee was saying, “He said to give her his love.” Laughing at some private message, she asked “Does she believe in the after-life like that [as in communicating with the departed]? Cause I think he visits your mother. He does. He goes to see her.”
Wow, I was thinking, this guy is busy! Little did I know.

Finally, Dee wound up the session by offering a breathtaking new perspective on the relationship Scott and I had shared, and its future promise. “See, I believe that you two have really grown together. That’s why…that feeling of wanting to be with him [as in suicide], it can’t be. That would separate you if you did that. You can’t do that. But when the proper time comes, you’ll be with him, you see, then you start all over again. It’s beautiful.” I thought Dee was talking about reincarnation, but wasn’t sure. As I requested clarification, she responded. “Yeah, I believe in the last life you both lived you were the teacher. In this one, he was. That’s where you’ve grown together. There’s always one ahead of the other.”

“Yeah, he was the teacher in this life,” she said, “but in each lifetime, the two of you have left a legacy. Which is beautiful. There is a bond between you. Each life that you weave together is better than the last, although you forget…you forget, along life’s path. In other words, you two better yourselves. You better each other.”

“But he’s left plenty to keep you busy,” she said. “She’s got that right,” I thought to myself, thinking of the various creative endeavors we had begun together and which now awaited me. “He doesn’t want to see you dragging your feet, pining away to be with him. He says he’s left you the music, his writing, his poetry, the play, everything that’s built up around you, and there’s more than enough there to keep you busy.”

To  Chapter 13