Funeral for a friend.

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 behaved improperly. Someone it was better to ignore.

In Appleton, I accepted Jim as a boy too involved in his books and his languages to be interested in girls. It was easy enough to believe.

"Sex is just not my thing" also became a phrase that I repeated to myself. Later, once I came to understand that desire would not spare me, I continued to describe myself as "not interested."

It was a safer way to think about myself. Thus years of partitioned consciousness led, for several more years, to a divided life.

After I heard Jim had AIDS, I called him. We talked for several hours about his dissertation in seventeenth-century French history, about people we used to know, and about baking bread, which he loved. We didn't talk about his illness. He didn't say anything about being gay. Neither did I tell him about my lover of several years, a woman. I thought I was saving that information for later. He said we should have a meal together, and he promised to call in a week to make plans. He didn't call back.

I thought of myself as respecting his wishes, and didn't call him again. However, I did ask about him many times, whenever I came across someone who might know him. In this manner, I constructed a sketch of the last years of his life.

He worked as the manager and cook for a local bakery to fund his graduate education, traveled to Britain and France for research, returned, began his dissertation, recovered from pneumonia in the H.I.V. wing of a local hospital, went on with his baking and his studies, and in August 1996 discovered the cancer that would kill him.

I asked after Jim for the last time about five weeks before his death. I had happened across one of his former roommates, a friend of a friend. Jim had fallen out of touch, he told me. He didn't know where he was.

I made it to the funeral in time to walk past the casket behind a handful of my high-school peers. "The cancer was so bad-we wanted to remember him the way he was," his father said to me, pointing to the closed casket and the photograph beside it.

I, too, wanted to remember him the way he was.

These are the words I remember from his funeral: "wicked," "wickedness," "sinner," "sin."

The one Bible verse I remember is Psalm 51. The Lutheran minister said that Jim had chosen it.

"It's Jim's message to the rest of us," he said:

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,

and cleanse me from my sin!

For I know my transgressions,

and my sin is ever before me.

Against thee only have I sinned,

and done that which is evil in thy sight,

so that thou art justified in thy

sentence

and blameless in thy judgment.

These are the words no one spoke during that hour and a half: "AIDS," "gay," "homosexual."

Jim is the first friend I have lost to AIDS. So I have no idea how common this sort of damning memorial service is. But it enraged me.

In the version of his death that I was getting from the pulpit, Jim was a sanitized young man-like so many other young men-who had died of cancer, not AIDS. And he seemed to have left no one he cared for deeply, except his parents and brothers.

For those of us who suspected he had lived a different life, there was a battery of code words-"sin," "sinful," "sinner, "wicked," "wickedness"-to warn us against mentioning anything unspeakable.

During the minutes that the preacher recited what passed for a memorial, I lost Jim. I had come there wanting more than anything to remember him. Instead, I found only a blizzard of blame words and my own fury.

I had no idea who had invented this other James, who was making the Jim I'd known inaccessible to me. I began to wonder, whose life was this? Had Jim's life ever been his own?

It may be impossible to represent anyone well. But when we intentionally misrepresent our dead, we lose them. We unmake them. If they disturbed us while they were living, we turn them into what we always wished they were: static, undisruptive things. Dead things.

Here is a stab at the memorial Jim did not get in the town where we grew up together:

He was thirty years old. He was gay. He had AIDS. He was a large man with a loud, sharp laugh and a broad face. After years of being thought ugly, he was handsome. He was devastatingly smart. He rarely lost an argument. He was kind to people at times when they did not expect kindness from anyone. He had no patience for pretense or dishonesty-except his own.