DYING ON HIS OWN TERMS
Artist lived with HIV for decades
As he prepared to die, Richard Darch walked onto his third-floor balcony for a final cigarette.
It was just after 6 p.m. and, as was his habit, Darch closed the sliding door to prevent smoke from wafting into his apartment.
Inside, a doctor, nurse and anesthesiologist were readying to end his remarkable, difficult life.
At 67, Darch had come of age in a perilous era for gay men and had lived with HIV for more than three decades. He had defeated colorectal cancer. He had survived at least three suicide attempts.
Smoking, he always insisted, was not what would kill him.
“Besides, what’s the difference?” he’d demand in defence of his habit.
Darch lit a cigarette that night and surveyed his Centretown neighbourhood: his last place on Earth.
Beneath him, sitting in a truck parked on Lisgar Street, Darch’s three brothers watched him smoke. They were waiting for him to die, and they debated the meaning of his cigarette: Was he having second thoughts?
“To me, it showed how calm he was,” says his younger brother, John.
The three brothers had not been invited to witness their sibling’s medically assisted death, because Darch was afraid they might make him emotional and cause him to abandon his carefully laid plans.
He was famously indecisive, but not about the end of his life.
“Richard was ill for a very long time,” says his older brother, Michael. “And it was very, very important to him that he die at home. He made it absolutely clear to everybody that he wasn’t going into hospital. … Certainly, for the last five years, that was almost a mantra.”
Richard Darch was an artist and hairdresser, a pioneer and a survivor, who endured long enough to see medical assistance in dying become legal in Canada.
“For somebody who fought for so long to live,” says Michael, “he deserved to die just the way he wanted to.”
Richard Darch was born into a military family on April 14, 1950. His father, Maynard, was a Second World War veteran and a warrant officer in the Canadian Armed Forces.
In those years, the Darch family lived on the upper floor of a Bronson Avenue duplex in Centretown. Richard had a happy childhood, which he spent largely in the company of his older brother.
“We didn’t have a lot of money, so a lot of our time was spent together, playing with whatever we could find,” says Michael.
They would often ride tricycles to visit their grandparents, who fed them chocolate. They played cops and robbers. They threw snowballs at the Bronson Avenue traffic.
The family later moved to the Mann Avenue Apartments in Sandy Hill, and the boys would fish with their father in the nearby Rideau River. Richard liked to chase minnows.
Those sunlit days disappeared as Richard matured and confronted his sexuality. By early high school, he was obviously gay and defiantly flamboyant. Other students tormented and teased him.
Darch explored his sexuality in the gay bars of Gatineau but he was desperately unhappy. He inflicted cuts on his arms and legs and, on several occasions, overdosed in his bedroom.
“I didn’t feel I belonged in the world,” he once told an interviewer.
That world was mostly hostile to him. Not until 1969 would homosexual acts be decriminalized in Canada and, even then, discrimination remained part of the institutional order. In Ottawa, the civil service purged gay men from its ranks, newspapers published the names of men who used male prostitutes — one civil servant, Warren Zufelt, jumped from his balcony as a result — and the police famously raided the city’s gay bathhouse in May 1976.
Even at home, Darch wasn’t fully accepted: His father had a difficult time coming to terms with his nonconformist son. “It’s not what you’d call an easy relationship,” recalls Michael.
Darch sought counselling to deal with his feelings of rejection and desolation, and carried on with life. He earned a hairdressing diploma at what’s now Algonquin College and worked in series of salons, including Emil of Switzerland in the Place d’Orleans Shopping Centre, where he developed a devoted clientele.
The success gave him the confidence to be himself: He wore jewelry, had much of his body tattooed, and brought friends and partners home to his parents’ house for dinner. Darch considered establishing his own salon.
But just as his universe was expanding — alongside the burgeoning gay rights movement — news began to spread about healthy young men in the community dying rapidly from unusual infections and a rare cancer.
The AIDS epidemic was about to change everything.
In early July 1981, Barry Deeprose stopped to read a New York Times article stuck to the door of the Gays of Ottawa Centre, where he worked as a helpline counsellor.
The article described a rare, often fatal form of cancer diagnosed in 41 homosexual men in New York and California. “The cancer often causes swollen lymph glands,” the newspaper said, “and then kills by spreading throughout the body.”
Deeprose, now 75, has a vivid memory of the moment. “This was the first announcement of the AIDS epidemic, but we didn’t have a name for it then,” he says.
It would be another year before the mystery disease would come to be described as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
With governments slow to respond to the crisis, Deeprose and a friend, Bob Read, founded the AIDS Committee of Ottawa in July 1985 to spearhead prevention efforts and assist the dying.
They were among the darkest hours of the epidemic: Researchers had yet to decode the T-celldestroying disease; dying AIDS patients were often treated like lepers. In hospital, Deeprose says, food would be left outside the door because staff members were afraid to go inside.
“It was a crucible of fear, anger and grief,” he says of the time. Anyone in the gay community with a cold, a rash or diarrhea feared the onset of AIDS.
In late 1985, the first commercial blood test for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the retrovirus that causes AIDS, became available in Canada. There ensued in the gay community a debate about whether to be tested.
Some believed it was better not to know since there was no effective treatment. What’s more, men who had sex without disclosing their HIV-positive status were being charged as criminals.
Richard Darch wanted to know. Although he was not symptomatic, his test revealed that he was HIVpositive. Doctors told him he had a year to live.
The news devastated Darch and those around him.
One friend and lover shot himself. It’s not clear if he, too, was facing a diagnosis, but many AIDS patients were opting for suicide rather than travelling the grim path of the disease. One study found that those with AIDS were 36 times more likely to commit suicide than other men.
In March 1987, a glimmer of hope appeared when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved AZT, the first drug designed to treat HIV/AIDS. Darch enrolled in a Canadian clinical trial.
AZT was then prescribed in heavy doses and its side-effects were punishing. Darch suffered nausea and debilitating muscle fatigue. The drug had to be taken every four hours, 24 hours a day, and many patients carried beepers to comply with the regimen.
“You’d be in the bar, and you’d hear these timers go off, and you knew it was time for everyone to take their medication,” remembers Kevin Hatt, 61, an Ottawa activist who has lived with HIV since March 1984.