“Why Us?”
Once, the family of the Reverend Jimmy Allen was blessed with an unshakable faith in God. Then came AIDS, banishment, and death—and a need to ask the eternal question.
(Page 3 of 5)
The only member of the family whose tests turned out negative was Scott. Instead of relief, Scott felt guilt. “After a tragedy, people ask themselves, ‘Why me?’ Here my entire family was stricken with this disease and the only question I could think of was, ‘Why not me?’” Scott said. Angry and afraid, Scott turned to his church for love and solace. When Scott’s mother had been ill with depression, his father had found comfort there. But depression isn’t contagious, and this time the church did not honor the Allen family’s secret.
A few days after getting the news, Scott went to see the Reverend Warren Hile, the senior minister of the Colorado Springs church. Hile told Scott how sorry he was for the whole family, but soon, says Scott, Hile asked for his resignation. By that time the secret was out. A friend of Lydia’s had betrayed Lydia’s confidence. Panic set in. Suddenly parents were worried that one of their children might have shared a deadly juice cup with Matthew in the church nursery or had come in contact with one of Bryan’s diapers. A meeting was held to discuss whether any church members could be at risk for getting AIDS. Scott and Lydia weren’t invited, and not a single person telephoned to offer encouragement or reassurance.
The day after Scott met with the senior minister, he went into his office and found a letter on his chair that Hile had typed. It was a memo accepting a resignation that Scott says he never offered. The following Sunday, Hile and two leaders of the church, both of whom happened to be lawyers, called Scott into the senior pastor’s study and granted him a paid leave of absence. Hile denies that Scott was forced out. Nonetheless, Scott still feels that his family was rejected. “That’s when I realized that for all their talk about unconditional love and caring, many Christians are terrified by people who face this kind of suffering,” Scott told me.
They decided to leave town. Through his father’s contacts, Scott got a job in Dallas at the Christian Life Commission. Scott packed up everything they owned and headed home to Texas in Job-like silence. They left in a hurry; there were no good-byes.
By then they had been told that Bryan had only a few weeks to live. He needed constant oxygen. One day the man who provided Bryan with oxygen tanks showed up at the door of their rented home wearing many layers of clothing; he was afraid even to enter the house. Lydia was tired all the time and couldn’t find anyone to help with baby-sitting or housework. She felt obligated to tell anyone who interviewed that she and her children had what Lydia called the Scarlet A.
One of Scott’s jobs at the Christian Life Commission was to find churches for AIDS patients, but he couldn’t find one that would accept his own family. One Baptist minister suggested that Matthew could come to Sunday school if Scott would sit with him in class; another suggested that they videotape Sunday school lessons so Matthew could see them at home. At another church, parents told their minister that if a child with AIDS came to Sunday school, they would pull their children out. Individual Christians did help Scott and his family. Some raised money for Scott’s salary, one group showed up to help paint their home, and others offered to baby-sit. Yet the church as an institution rejected them.
Scott could not reconcile the fate of losing a wife and two small sons with what he had been taught about the Christian faith. “We were innocent. We gave ourselves to God. Where was God’s favor? Where was God’s blessing? Even God’s church rejected us,” Scott said.
In January 1986 Bryan entered Fort Worth Children’s Hospital for what Scott and Lydia knew was the final siege. Lydia stayed with Bryan night and day, trying to stop his endless crying. “Bryan never smiled. All we could do was rock him,” said Scott. “I would rock and sing the Simon and Garfunkel song ‘Old Friends’ to him, and he would claw at my chest. All I could do for him was hold him, rock him, and try to help him catch the rhythm of life.” In retrospect, Scott now views Bryan’s undeserved suffering through the lens of his Eastern philosophy. “My goal was when he died, he would know the kind of love he was going to. He would know it and find it familiar in the next dimension,” Scott said. “Maybe we do life here so we can catch that rhythm. In a way, I guess we’re all running for the next train.”
The night before Bryan died, Lydia went home to rest. The next morning, Bryan’s doctor called and told Lydia to come to the hospital right away. When she and Scott arrived, Bryan’s body was still warm, but he was dead. They dressed him in a sailor’s suit, and Scott placed him in a child’s coffin. The funeral director was reluctant to touch Bryan’s body. “He asked me to straighten Bryan’s head,” recalled Scott. “Bryan was an untouchable even in death.”
After Bryan’s death, Scott and Lydia’s marriage frayed. Scott was angry at both God and man. Lydia couldn’t deal with his outbursts. A month after Bryan died, Scott moved out of the house but continued to care for Matthew four days a week. During the separation, Scott took another HIV test, and this time it came out positive. Later he found out that the paperwork was in error, but for three months Scott Allen believed he too would die of the disease.
One day he decided to give up. “I quit,” he thought. “I’m off this planet.” He got in his 1979 Plymouth and drove to South Padre Island, where he intended to kill himself. His plan was to drive his car into a tree and hope Lydia could collect his life insurance. “I was driving as fast as I could,” said Scott. All the while I was thinking, ‘Nobody cares.’ But then I realized something: I cared.”
Scott and Lydia reconciled. By then Matthew had a few playmates whose parents knew about his disease. Scott and Lydia read books to him every night. In 1991 all three took a trip to the Grand Canyon. By early 1992, Lydia knew she was close to death. Two weeks before she died, Lydia woke Scott up and told him that he had been talking in his sleep. “You said something about a gate,” Lydia told him. They talked about what the dream might mean, then drifted back to sleep.
At 3:46 p.m. on February 28, moments before Lydia died at their home in Dallas, Scott looked at Lydia and repeated the message from his dream. “Meet you at the gate, Lydia,” he said. She smiled, and then she was gone.
Scott sat down on their bed and read a letter Lydia had written to him before she died. Near the end of it, she said, “I love you, Scott, and I’ll see you at the gate.” Scott got to his feet, walked out of the house, got to his feet, drove past the hospital where Bryan had died, and then turned back toward home, for one more day of life with Matthew.
Not long after Lydia and Scott were married, Lydia had a premonition that she later related to a close friend. While praying in a chapel, Lydia was surrounded by a feeling of darkness. In the next few minutes she saw a series of moving pictures in her mind’s eye. The pictures were of everyone and everything she loved slowly being taken from her, one death at a time. When she stood up, Lydia could not shake the thought that someday she would endure a holocaust of her own.
Years later, after Bryan died, Lydia thought, “This is my holocaust.”
The image of the Holocaust came to define her personal spirituality at the end of her 38-year-old life. She went from being a Southern Baptist ingénue who grew up believing in salvation through an all-powerful personal God to an adult who had stopped trying to define God. “The idea that most appealed to Lydia is one she got from reading one of the Auschwitz survivors,” said Maria Bellantoni, her best friend. “That idea is that God is whatever exists beyond suffering, beyond comfort.”
When Scott pressed Lydia about what she believed about life after death, she was usually closed about it. But once she told the truth, as best she understood it. “I don’t know what happens after I die,” she said. “All I know is, I will know my babies.”
She died clinging to her children and that fundamental Baptist staple, the righteousness of work. If she couldn’t have her life, then she would give it away—first to her sons and then to other children with AIDS.
My Library
