In the past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, loss has been part of the lives of millions. In “How we remember them”, we reflect on how we process loss and the things – both tangible and intangible – that remind us of those we have lost. In our family, there was a curse for 200 years, a genetic illness that seemed to catch everyone, drown everyone, kill everyone – as if we lived in a fairytale castle that filled up every night with the ocean, while we tried to hold our breaths until the morning. Only one of us survived the curse, my uncle Brian, the one our disease didn’t touch, who died, instead, of AIDS, the curse that drowned a generation in his chosen queer family.He kept a record of that loss – a magic object, a book. I saw it first when I was 19, in the apartment where he lived, on a small street in the centre of gay Philadelphia, in a row of narrow 19th-century brownstones, in his world of beautiful objects. The dresser in his bedroom was painted to look as if made of malachite, a gold Dunhill lighter was in his pocket, a silver cigarette case on his coffee table painted faux marble, an antique Chinese jar on the table where he wrote, full of pens, decorated with drawings of twining dragons and fish. Next to the jar, there was an unremarkable black address book.
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