Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [80]
Bob consistently stayed in the background, quietly monitoring Mary’s activities. He felt that what she was doing was right and was good therapy as well, but he was wary that her intensity might set her up to be hurt again. He tried to rein her in from time to time.
Joy was advancing in her job with the successor firm to CalFrame. She, too, had rejected organized religion and was seeking new ways to channel her spirituality. She was not an activist, but sought through meditation and other inner-directed ways to resolve an intense case of survivor guilt. Like her mother, she was unsure where Bobby’s spirit was. He appeared to her in recurring dreams, and at first she greeted him excitedly. But each time, in an unsettling close-up, she would notice deep unhappiness in his eyes. Those dreams haunted her. Were they saying that Bobby held her responsible for not doing more to help him, for not being more sensitive?
Joy eventually visited a hypnotherapist and in a long hypnotic session satisfied herself that Bobby was safely in the spirit realm. She divined that everything was fine between her and her brother, that he knew she loved him dearly, and that he in turn loved her. Everything was okay; the bad dreams disappeared.
Ed was now a sheriff’s deputy and dating wife-to-be Linda, whose five-year-old son, Ernesto, he would take under his wing. Ed had traveled the path with his mother away from fundamentalist thinking, and shared her new conviction that his brother’s gayness was a natural occurrence. His concerns were about her security as she became more and more visible.
That visibility was to jump several notches in 1989 with the convergence of three events: the establishment of the Bobby Griffith Memorial Scholarship; the publication of a three-week series on gays in America in the San Francisco Examiner, with Mary and Bobby Griffith’s story serving as a major anchor; and the U.S. government’s publication and almost immediate suppression of a study that concluded that suicide among gay and lesbian teenagers was nearly epidemic.
Rob Birle had a brainstorm. It happened in spring 1989, while he was reading to his class the annual list of scholarships that would be handed out to students upon graduation. There were at least one hundred different money grants awarded annually at Antioch High, including several to blacks, to Hispanics, to Italian Americans; there were awards from insurance brokers and realtors, from Rotary and Kiwanis. Why not, Rob thought, a gay scholarship?
Yes, a competitive scholarship countywide—maybe area-wide—honoring college-bound seniors whose essays demonstrated sensitivity to gay and lesbian issues and a commitment to gay and lesbian rights. The ace in his game plan involved Mary Griffith.
“This would be the first such scholarship of its kind in the country, as far as I know,” he told her. “With the precedent of all those other special-interest scholarships there is no way the schools could refuse it. Just think: they would have to announce it, administer it, put it in their graduation program. It’s a way to get the subject discussed.
“And Mary,” Rob added with appropriate import, “we’d name it for Bobby. The Bobby Griffith Memorial Scholarship!”
Mary was immediately enthusiastic. Bobby’s name and memory would be immortalized. A competitive scholarship could only get people talking about the issues. And for some gay kid feeling isolated, the existence of a scholarship would reassure him or her that there are adults who care. She could see no downside.
“Okay” said Rob, “but you’ve got to be ready for a change in your life. The family, too. Up to now you’ve been operating in a small arena. I’m convinced that this scholarship is going to get a lot of attention, throughout the state, maybe the country. You’ll be in the media spotlight.”
Mary was not the kind of person who relished attention. She had practiced being unobtrusive since childhood. What