My brother Ron Waggener 1941-2004. Portrait.
Whether you do or don't observe Easter, I hope everyone is basking in a beautiful day, with peace and tranquility of mind.
For me personally, this day uncovers a simmering pot of a range of emotions that bubbles to the surface, one after the other. I don't know which is a dominant one.
Twenty years ago today, my brother Ron died of brain complications four days after someone shot him multiple times in the head around the corner of my house.
Ron was born in Baltimore in July, 1941. It was his home the majority of his life. As a young teen, he watched the Orioles parade as our brand new baseball team entered their new home in 1954. He served two rounds of duty in Vietnam. Yes, there were gay men serving in Vietnam. Ron loved a few special men in his life, but wasn't dating when I met him in the late 1980's.
Wait ... don't I call him "brother"? How can that be if I didn't meet him until his 30s? The answer is that I don't believe the term "sibling" should be limited to offspring born from the same biological parents. Sometimes you don't get to find your true siblings until later in life.
The one aspect that made Ron stand out as an individual was his passionate pursuit of, and knowledge of, classical music. It ran the gamut from Scarletti to Stravinsky and then some. I called him my Earstructor. We went to concerts and operas when we could. Although I'll never retain anything near his understanding, I do have a soft spot for a handful of composers, symphonies, and operas.
His biggest love by far was Mozart. He always had the classical station set on the radio. Any Mozart piece, no matter how modest, he'd drop everything and listen. No one interrupted a Mozart performance.
We had been living together for 10 years. On March 27th, he said he was spending the day with a friend, who lived in an apartment around the corner. I went about my day. That evening he hadn't come home yet, but I went to sleep anyway.
The next morning I was puzzled he still hadn't returned. Nor was he there when I returned that afternoon. Then an authoritative knock pounded the front door. It turned out to be a pair of plainclothes detectives. Ron was on his way back to the house close to midnight, when an unknown person drove to the curb, got out of the car, had a few words with Ron, then shot him multiple times in the head and drove off.
After the first reaction of feeling like I just swallowed a long sharp icicle, I cried "HE NEEDS MOZART!" I'm guessing that the detectives don't hear utterances like that from people they're bringing horrific news to very often. I managed to ask where he was. At the nearby Shock Trauma.
I rushed downstairs and pawed madly through his boxes of cassettes (don't ask), found "The Marriage of Figaro", grabbed a cassette player, and sped to the Shock Trauma Unit.
The staff had induced a medical coma on Ron. The nature of his wounds meant that without such intervention, his brain could swell, putting the rest of his organs at risk. I plugged in the player, started the cassette, and proceeded to quietly stay with him awhile and have a chat, with as much calm as I could muster. The same happened when I brought "The Magic Flute" and "Cosi fan Tutti".
As I arrived the following evening with "Abduction From the Seraglio " in hand, I could see something was going seriously wrong. His forehead was puffy. He was sweating heavily. I still put the opera on and quietly talked to him. About an hour later, crisis struck. Emergency doctors burst in. I left the cubicle to give them room. His organs were failing.
I watched for a good long while as personnel threw everything they had to stabilize him. But no sooner did they sustain one organ than another failed.
I knew in my bones that he was leaving. That's what I told his friend when I left to make the call. When I returned, the doctors didn't have to tell me. They were removing the tubes and life support. I asked to go in and hold his hand. Yes I could.
So I drew up a chair, gently wrapped my hand around his, and started quietly chanting nam-myoho-renge-kyo. All through the crisis, "Abduction From the Seraglio" had been playing. The final chorus had begun, a chorus that sang of the power of true love, and the compassion of forgiveness.
The third to final note, Ron inhaled his last breath, and died. As I was taking this in, the cubicle was filled with the Met audience's applause, with shouts of "Bravo!...Bravo!...Bravo!"
Stunned? I felt like I had stepped on a thousand volt live wire. It wasn't my conscious intent to give my brother Ron a magnificent send-off, but that's what happened. This is way more than a series of coincidences. A man who lived his whole adult life never letting anything interrupt a Mozart performance somehow, whilst dying, persuaded death to wait until the Mozart opera finished. Only for his life to get a standing ovation!
"Abduction From the Seraglio" was his parting gift to me. Every March 31st I will take time out to listen to our opera, as a memorial tradition for him. That opera will mean more to me than anyone else on Earth until I shuffle off this mortal coil. I miss him dearly, but the idea of Ron coasting on the Music of the Spheres with Wolfgang is such a joyous one. I can't begrudge his memory that.
Tonight's performance starts at 8:00 P.M. EST. I shall dress in semi-formal attire, warm up some apple cider, and sit quietly as YouTube enables me to listen to Our Opera.
The portrait I painted featured above is one of the earliest ones in the Million Gun Victims March art activist series I've been doing for 11 years. Although I have yet to upload all 251 to date, you check out this crusade on the MGVM website at
https://vilomah.life
