Rest in peace? Not any more

The Boston Herald

January 21, 1994

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Respect the dead. It's an old-fashioned concept, an anachronism, perhaps, in an age where there is so little respect for the living.

And yet it was once a rule, close to a commandment. Honor thy father and thy mother. And honor the dead, too. All the dead.

It was why when hearses drove past followed by cars with their lights on, you stopped in your tracks and said a prayer no matter that you didn't know who had died. There was somebody in that hearse. That's all that counted. Somebody who had lived on this earth and loved and been loved by some other somebody was gone. So you bowed your head and whispered to God to have mercy on his soul.

Today people honk their horns at funeral processions and curse the interruption in their busy lives. How inconvenient that someone should have died and caused a traffic jam! Just a few stray thoughts this morning only marginally connected to the subject at hand, which is that even the dead have it rough these days. Rest in peace seems to be an anachronism, too. Take, for example, the story of Ryan White, diagnosed with AIDS at age 13. He contracted the disease from blood products used to treat his hemophilia. The school he was attending, barred him from classes. He sued and won the right to go back to school. He chose to move and attend a school where people accepted him. A television movie was made about his life. He played a small part in the movie. But he played a big part in opening up the hearts of Americans to the tragedy of people with AIDS.

The world hoped that he would live and beat the disease. He didn't. Ryan White died in April, 1990.

Last February a company in Forestville, Calif., which makes trading cards, began putting White's picture on its then-new set of AIDS Trading Cards. The company, Eclipse Enterprises, is also responsible for True Crime Trading Cards, featuring mass murderers Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer.

Ryan White's mother wants her son's face and life history off these cards, which come foil-wrapped in packs of 12, complete -- with a condom. She has endorsed a bill filed in Indiana, which would prohibit the use of celebrities' likenesses without written consent from them or from their estate - a perfectly legitimate proposal.

But it won't fly. Once someone becomes a public figure, once his face appears in newspapers and on TV, he becomes public property. Newspapers or AIDS' cards, the law doesn't differentiate. And so, in all likelihood, there will be no 'rest in peace' for Ryan White and his family or for any other so-called 'public' figure.

Nor, it seems, will there be any peace for Colleen Brindamour. Brindamour was just 15 when she was killed in a pickup-truck accident in Rhode Island last summer. An insurance company paid Colleen's mother, Rose Brindamour, $ 350,000 in damages to settle a lawsuit she filed against the driver of the truck and the truck's owner.

This should be the end of the story, but it isn't. Enter Colleen Brindamour's absent father - Rose Brindamour's estranged husband. After not paying child-support for 10 years, after fleeing the state when ordered to start paying some of the $ 69,000 owed in back payment or go to jail, after pleading no contest to sexually molesting an 11-year-old relative, after shirking his financial and moral responsibility to his daughter all of her short life, James Brindamour has suddenly developed a passionate, burning interest in parenthood.

He went to court two weeks ago demanding half the $ 350,000 insurance money, claiming that as Coleen Brindamour's biological father he is entitled to half her estate. Rhode Island law supports this claim. Brindamour stands a good chance of walking away with the cash.

Like buzzards, too many people pick away at the dead, family as well as strangers, taking all they can, hoping to turn tragedy into profit, however and whenever they can. The biggest tragedy of all is not that they do this - people will do whatever they can get away with - but that the law is on their side.