Funeral for a friend.

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie
• Position: AIDS victim - Further Comment - Column

A week before my mom called, Newsweek reported that "doctors are starting to consider H.I.V. a chronic, manageable disease rather than a death sentence."

A month before that, Andrew Sullivan, the former editor of The New Republic, who was diagnosed H.I.V.-positive in 1993, wrote a memoir of the AIDS epidemic for The New York Times Magazine entitled, "When Plagues End." "A diagnosis of H.I.V. infection is not just different in degree today than, say, five years ago," he wrote. "It is different in kind. It no longer signifies death. It merely signifies illness."

My mom left a different message. She had seen the name of a high-school friend in the paper and she remembered him as someone who had come to my house for parties.

His brief obituary listed no cause of death.

I knew he was dying. I'd heard that he had AIDS and was living here in Madison.

I was also aware that I was not supposed to know he was gay or that he was dying. I was a remainder of an earlier, more closed existence. The knowledge I had of Jim required care. It required silence. He would have done the same for me.

For the two days before the funeral, I felt a desperate aggravation. It was December. It kept snowing. The roads home were slick. The snow erased detail, leaving a bland landscape. And, though I kept trying, I could hardly remember him.

Jim lived for years with the knowledge that he was dying. Now, suddenly, at the moment when he was no longer supposed to die, he had succumbed. His death undid pages of fanfare and wishful thinking. I couldn't help feeling that Jim had done it again.

During junior high and even into high school, he had been different, inappropriate, easily mocked. He wasn't good at hiding the things that made him unacceptable to many of his peers, although he tried.

I tried too. I was well aware that there were things about me that were not quite straight.

I didn't fully acknowledge my own sexuality until my mid-twenties. But in my high-school years, having endured the adjectives "weird" and "strange," I became adept at the lies of normalcy. In fact, my distaste for myself sometimes extended to Jim. He was supposed to be my friend, but he never could be "normal" enough. I both cared about him and dreaded the fact that I cared about him. I remember wondering, what did his friendship say about me?

In the magazines and papers, words threatened to cover over his death, to disqualify it as an anomaly, to make him someone who, this time by dying, had again...