It felt surreal — the beautifully orchestrated memorial service at the Little Theatre last Sunday, August 16, for Guy Willoughby, raconteur, former critic for the Mail & Guardian, teacher, actor, dramatist, essayist, novelist, librettist and speech writer.
Among the congregation of friends and colleagues was a sense of incredulity and the kind of grief normally attendant at the funerals of young men or women who are senselessly cut off in the prime of their life.
Willoughby died aged 52 from Aids-related complications. His death has sent shock waves through many people living with HIV. The day his death was reported in the press, Nathan Geffen, veteran campaigner for the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), phoned me: “What the hell is going on?”
At the memorial a film clip was shown. It showed Guy with his daughter, Beatrice, performing Oscar Wilde’s fairytales with Guy as the Remarkable Rocket: “Now I’m going off, he cried!” Willoughby — the perpetual adolescent, a Peter Pan — certainly burned brightly. Many can’t believe he has been extinguished without even fading.
Guy didn’t tell any of us that he was HIV positive until he was on his deathbed. He came out about his status to the poet and novelist, Finuala Dowling, mother of his daughter, on Saturday. By Tuesday he was gone.
Yet many of us suspected he was HIV positive. He had lost weight and developed a look of rictus.
Questions lingered among the mourners in the foyer of the theatre. Survivor guilt: “Why didn’t we pin him to a chair and force him to tell us?”
We must learn it is possible that a man who usually wore his heart on his sleeve and so often created embarrassing emotional scenes in public, an educated academic in the liberal arts community, felt he would be stigmatised, judged.
Only a week before I received an SMS from one of his many faithful Johannesburg friends: “Guy is dying.” Last month he was cavorting at the National Arts Festival.
I rushed to see him.
He had elected to die at home. “The worst possible thing will be if some do-gooder charges in here and resuscitates me,” he said. I took his hand; it seemed oddly large, it hadn’t shrunk like the rest of him. It was obvious from his appearance that he had full-blown Aids.
He wanted to explain. Five years ago, after a routine test, an employee of the insurance company called him unexpectedly and told him he was HIV positive.
He went on to antiretrovirals (ARVs), but they made him so ill he said he’d “rather be dead”. After two years he stopped. “It seems I am one of the unlucky ones,” he said. “The TAC don’t talk much about the toxicity of these things, you know.” He told Dowling the ARVs made him nauseous and dizzy, left him clinging to the basin in the bathroom before going in to deliver his lectures.
He became heavily depressed; he felt he couldn’t create anything worthwhile.
Perplexed, I asked Geffen. He replied by email: “Antiretroviral treatment works incredibly well. There’s no reason anyone with access to decent healthcare should not be able to find a regimen [there are about 20] that works for them, even in countries with very poor healthcare infrastructures. Data from across the world shows that HIV has become a chronic manageable disease and that ARVs can give people near-normal life expectancy.”
It is too late to argue with Guy. He told me he thought he had a month left. In fact, it was 18 hours.
“I never told anyone because I thought my friends would patronise me. But it was all in my head.” He repeated this several times.
Dowling said, when he finally did tell them, he experienced a euphoric relief.
“I notice people don’t want to kiss me on the mouth anymore,” said Guy. He must have known that he was loved and that I knew I couldn’t catch anything from him. And I gave him one more farewell kiss, on dry, cracked lips. — Brent Meersman