Walking Home
by Ed Wolf
Image courtesy of Unsplash.
Walking home
Ed Wolf | JUNE 2025 | Issue 46
I spent much of my time on the AIDS ward asking patients “What do you want? What do you need?” and so very often the answer was “I just want to go home,” which was something I was able to do at the end of every shift, walk home through the Mission District, to my boyfriend, my photos, my books, my things, my stuff. Elizabeth Kubler Ross had recently spoken in San Francisco and during her opening remarks she’d spoken about home and what it meant. She asked anyone who’d served in Vietnam to come into the middle of the room and sit down and face the larger circle and then she began to whisper in her deep gravelly voice, “Welcome home, welcome home,” until everyone was weeping for that which had not been said before. I’d sat with a man named Dick, someone I’d work with at a printing company in the time before AIDS, and when the doctor came in to tell him more bad news, Dick said he was half-hoping that he was going to be able to go home and then he laughed about the strangeness of that term, half-hoping. How did people hope for some part of something, but not the whole thing? He was missing his beloved cat Miss Priss and one of his friends brought her to the hospital in a bowling bag so he could hold her but all she did was cry and mew and Dick said she just wanted to go home, so he put on his clothes the best he could and walked to his downtown apartment with her in his arms. Ricky Lee, the youngest patient who’d ever been admitted to the AIDS unit, had no home to go to, having run away from his when he was 15, and a mother who’d gotten to the ward too late to say goodbye to her own son took Ricky home with her. It was kind of miraculous how that worked out, and it felt good walking home that day.
Ed Wolf was born in New York, the oldest of 10 children, and grew up in North Miami Florida. He worked in the HIV/AIDS field from 1983 to 2022, and is featured in the award-winning documentary “We Were Here.” He is currently at work on a memoir, which tells the story of growing up as a queer kid in Florida, attending the University of South Florida in the late 60s, life in New York’s Greenwich Village at the beginning of gay liberation, and the early days of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. He has written numerous segments of his memoir during Corporeal Writing’s virtual hours and is very grateful for everyone who keeps that program alive and well!