Dark adolescent nights

He was a year younger than me (turns out to be two). I don't know what he knew, but I suspect that we were probably about equally ignorant. I didn't understand why what we were doing was wrong, exactly. I knew it was private, but as a very sheltered fourteen-year-old, I don't think I grasped that it was sexual, or maybe I just didn't have a sense yet of what that would really mean. Still, I was certain to the core that it was wrong; my dad had made absolutely sure I understood that a few years earlier. I don't think I knew that our actions would be considered any more forbidden than that sort of contact with a girl would have been. When his older sister and, the following year, his brother my age, would accuse us of "being queer" with each other, I had no idea what that specifically meant, beyond being an insult implying strangeness. My chief familiarity with that word was from Robert Frost. And we didn't much try to hide what we were doing from the other boys by going off by ourselves somewhere, so we clearly thought of it more as "naughty" than "shameful."  Neither of us understood the cause of the moisture that would dampen us after a while; we accused one another of urinating, as each of us knew that he hadn't. Again, I can't speak for him, but from my perspective we were just playing around in the dark, passing the time, and . . . and what? Indulging our curiosity? There was certainly no sense of attraction there (though, in hindsight, he was much better looking than I ever was), no sort of penetration, just mutual contact with each other and, for my part, no interpretation of our contact as being a form of sex, exactly - the idea of that wouldn't have appealed me, and not just because of the same-sex factor - so much as just something taboo. There was an air of the excitement of the forbidden.

Before the week was over, we kids would spend a sleepless plains night outside under that impossible canopy of stars, imploring the God whom I conceived of as being beyond them to please, somehow let my dad be okay.  Mom had informed us of his mysterious, suddenly critical condition back home, which was taking us back from vacation sooner and faster than we'd planned. As we kids prayed together, I added a silent, desperate, hopeless intention that the wrong I'd been doing wouldn't be an obstacle to our prayers being heard, certain in my heart that it was. Dad had been his normal self when we left, but I knew his condition must be grave: why else would my aunt, uncle, cousins and grandparents be coming with us? (Did they all come the whole way? Or was it just dad's parents who flew home with us?  I can't remember.) I didn't know then that our prayers had already been answered in the way that was probably best for a youngster living in the shadow of his dad's alcoholism. He was already dead, and mom was just waiting until we'd completed the trip back home - the four hour drive to Wichita, the flight(s?) from there to Baltimore; the return train ride she had planned was now out of the picture - to tell us. "Cerebral hemorrhage" was the intimidating medical term she served us to cut off our questions. It would be another couple years before she'd explain to me that his cranial bleeding was caused by the small, high-speed projectile of lead that he'd fired into his brain; it seems to me that she probably shared that some months before she informed me that he wasn't my biological father.

Maybe these two paragraphs, these two major events of my childhood, should never have gotten connected in my mind and in my gut. But I now realize that, because of their proximity in time and significance and location, they've always been linked in my unconscious mind, and probably inextricably so.  I've examined different parts of this time in therapy, and have a far more mature theology, yet haven't managed to fully separate them. I wonder if it would have been better or worse for me if mom had been more open about dad's death when she told us he was critically sick? Would I have still felt as if his death was my fault, that my prayers weren't answered because of the gravity of my sin? If so, would I have perhaps attributed it more to his long-term disappointment over my shortcomings as a son and a (non-)athlete than to my perceived sins in the dark that week?

Oh, those are utterly useless questions.  But the recent death of my dear uncle, his dad, who treated me with such compassion after my dad's death so long ago, has brought all of this to mind in a way I wasn't prepared for. I hope my cousin isn't as haunted by those nights as I am.