Out in the Mountains

Dignity, Humor In Life, Death

byAndreaHeil

Reprinted from The Valley News -
December 1991

Norwich— Charles Kurtz’s friends gathered
yesterday afternoon to say goodbye to him.
They showed up at the Parish Hall of St Bar-
nabas Church in Norwich to celebrate the life
of a man who was warm, caring, funny and,
as many of them put it, outrageous.

Kurtz, 34, of West Hartford, died last week
of AIDS. He died in the intensive care unit at
Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in the
arms of his friend Peter Seery and his
ACoRN “Buddy” David Williams.

ACORN is the AIDS Community Resource
Network, the local group that trains vol-
unteers — buddies — to be available for
emotional and other support.

“David and I were holding him and he just
sort of slipped away,” Seery said after the ser-
vice. “It was quiet and it was with dignity.”

Kurtz had been discharged from Hitchcock
just before Thanksgiving, and his death on
Dec. 12 came sooner than his friends ex-
pected He had been readmitted to the hos-
pital several days before he died.

He had lived in Greenfield, Mass., and
worked as a bartender in Brattleboro, not far
north of Greenfield. He had moved in with
friends in West Hartford so he could be

closer to the medical center, and to AIDS spe
cialist Dr. Ford Von Reyn and his staff.

Kurtz was an active supporter of ACoRN and
the Brattleboro Area AIDS Project, and spent
much of the last year of his life helping others
with the AIDS disease and their families.
Even though he was ill when the AIDS Me
morial Quilt was on display in the Upper Val-
ley last May, “he was there from opening un-
til closing every day,” said Seery, an
Enfield resident.

He is survived by a brother who lives in Ken-
tucky, and, as his obituary said, by “many
friends in the Upper Valley.”

About 75 of them gathered in the parish hall
to cry and to laugh and to share stories. The
Rev. Fairbaim Powers of Hanover told them
at the outset that they may want to tell some
of “the outrageous ones that Charlie would
have lov ”

They complied.

You could sum up one or two of them by say-
ing simply that Kintz was a homosexual who
was not shy about letting the heterosexual ma-
jority know of his sexual orientation. He was,
in the parlance, “out.” His friends called him


Few people were as inepressibly upbeat as
Kurtz, says Sam Sanders of Windsor, who
founded the ACORN Buddy Program.

Powers said the group was gathered together

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