Tom

Today, on a whim, I went on-line to see if I could find anything about Tom, one of my closest friends from graduate school. I don’t have current contact information for him and I wanted to find out how he is. On-line I found the usual links: “Find Tom Irwin* on LinkedIn,” “6 Tom Irwin’s on Facebook,” “15 Tom Irwin’s in the white pages.” I scrolled on down and then I saw it. “Obituary for Rev. Dr. Tom Irwin”. My eyes caught the “born in Winnipeg, Manitoba” and my heart sank. I clicked on the site and there was Tom’s smiling picture. Part of me was not surprised. He had not been well the last time I had seen him. Then I looked at the date of his death—nearly five years ago! And I didn’t know.

The first day of classes in our graduate program, after we introduced ourselves, Tom came to me and said that he too grew up Mennonite . . . MB (Mennonite Brethren) . . . in Manitoba. He was now Lutheran, Missouri Synod, because he had joined his wife’s church. Being in graduate school, far from home, was a challenge for me and Tom sensed that. Every day he sought me out, checked in to see how I was doing.

We quickly became friends. It was music as much as Mennonite that drew us together, but Tom was a renaissance man. He knew a lot about many things, and was the go-to person in our class for any odd bit of information needed. He scouted out concerts to attend and restaurants to visit. He found a record shop in a nearby suburb and an Episcopal church with an amazing organist as well as an excellent preacher. Tom was tuned in to the people around him, intuited what was going on internally, and was always gentle. He had a softness, a kindness toward others that came from a painful past. He was a safe person for anyone to talk with.

But Tom was big. I don’t mean simply tall or broad shouldered. He was big as in three hundred pounds or more. I remember once when a group of us went somewhere, we all piled out of the car quickly except for Tom who struggled to extricate himself from the front seat. “You are seeing my shame,” he said to us. Until then I hadn’t realized how bad he felt about his excessive weight. Every day we all saw him take two to three times as much food as anyone else in the cafeteria. He sometimes hesitated before taking another serving, but he almost always took it.

After we graduated I knew I didn’t want to lose track of Tom. For years we kept in touch, not often, but enough to know what the other was doing. Once when we met our son at a music convention in a city near Tom’s home, Tom met us for lunch, showed us around, and came to our son’s recital. Many summers Tom and his wife visited family near our home, and we always tried to see each other then. Sometimes he and his wife stayed with us overnight.

On one visit, he came to meet me near my work and we had coffee at Borders. That was the day he told me what I had long suspected—he was gay. He was gay and stuck. His wife didn’t know. If he told her, it would destroy her he feared. There was no place for him as a gay man in the Missouri Synod, certainly not as an ordained clergy person. He knew that his overeating was the symptom of the internal conflict and pain he lived every day, and I agreed with him. We were both pastoral counselors. We knew about eating to assuage pain, and gaining weight to carry the heaviness of deep secrets. We talked about his need to begin to put himself first. I encouraged him to talk with his wife.

Perhaps two years later I saw him again. This time we met at a bakery for coffee and pastries. I had one roll. He had two or three and bought more to go. As we talked, I noticed his eyes wandering to someone behind me. He apologized. “It is the cute waiter,” he said sighing. “I just can’t help it.”

Again, we talked about his intense conflict, his fear of destroying his family and their place in a close-knit church community, his out-of-control-eating. We talked about trying to make connections with other gay people of faith, but he, who always knew how to find information, didn’t know where or how to make such connections. I offered to get some information for him—I had gay friends—but he declined. He told me that I was one of very few people who knew he was gay.

The last time I saw him was at our house. His family was with him, but he and I stayed up after everyone else had gone to bed so we could talk. He had finally told his wife that he was gay, but he couldn’t really talk with her about it because all she did, if he mentioned it, was cry. I encouraged him again to put himself first. He needed to have compassion for himself as well as his family. He was demoralized—he had serious circulation problems with his feet. It was his weight, of course. He said once again that he knew he couldn’t lose weight unless he dealt with the secret he carried. He knew he was eating himself to death, but he saw no way out. I knew his health was deteriorating, but I didn’t think that would be the last time I’d see him.

He must have died within that year. I don’t know the exact cause of death, but I saw a picture of him with the obituary and he was more profoundly overweight than ever. I have no way of finding out about his last days. I wonder if he was able to break out of his secret prison, even at the end. I suspect not.

I have been in a fog of sadness all day, but I am also angry. I want to blame someone–his wife, who couldn’t face the reality of who he was, but I know she surely has suffered too. Even more I want to blame his church. I want to tell them that they have blood on their hands. They killed him with their rules, their inflexibility, their inability to see the face of God in one of their members. Of course, Tom could have stood up to them all, but at great personal cost. Who knows? Perhaps the cost of doing so would have killed him just as surely. He was too gentle and kind for his own good, literally so. He was caught in a bind for which there were only costly alternatives, and he chose to pay the price rather than asking his family to face public shame and rejection. I can’t fault him. He did what he thought was best for his family, but I grieve for his loss of himself. I regret that he never was able to live out the joyful, gentle, gifted self God created him to be, that he never found the freedom to be fully alive. I do not rejoice with his family who “rejoice that Tom can eat to his heart’s content [in heaven].” Rather, I rejoice that he now doesn’t need to eat to numb the pain of the secret burden he carried for far too many years.

*Not his real name

Rev. Dr. Kathleen W. Kurtz (former staff member of CPC)

Feb. 13, 2019

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