Eight Difficult Deaths:

Tyrone Summer 1993

I got a call from an area HIV clinic. The nurse, a friend of a friend, asked if I could come and do a ritual for the staff, who was struggling with multiple losses that month. We met in her home with about seven or eight of the clinic staff, all whom worked closely with their HIV clients. One death in particular bothered them. A young man, just a teenager from a small North Carolina town, had been “on their minds”. Several of the people felt an uncomfortable sense of his presence. 

Mary, his clinic “buddy” described his last visit: “I don’t even think he understood what AIDS was. He kind of jokingly asked the doctor how much time he had left, and the doctor told him ‘two to six months’. A look of terror came over his face and did not leave until his death two days later.”

We set up an altar with candles, special mementoes, and a bowl of water in the center. We lit candles for each direction - East, South, West, North - and each person talked about where he or she was in life’s journey around the medicine wheel. Then we joined hands and I said a prayer for those who had died. I began to perceive a long, thin man who seemed turned into himself. His skin seemed encased in a rough, acrid, darkness. I remarked on this and scrunched in my shoulders and arms to illustrate what I was seeing. One man said “He was always like that.” Others nodded.

We began to sing into the circle. I was directing energy through my hands. Gradually, I felt him shifting. To my surprise, I began to hear a song one of my friends wrote about a new baby being conceived. So I sang it:
“I come, I am, I come, I am into your dark sea...
Your loving arms around me, enfold my tiny body...”

As I finished the song, Tyrone, now looking like a golden, shiny, perfect child of two or three, went scampering across the circle away from the woman on my right and disappeared. The young woman said she had had the sense of holding him, like a baby, against her heart. Tyrone seemed free and full of joy as he went running off. I had the sense he was running towards new life and happiness.