AIDS Day

Today is a pretty significant day for anyone who has lost or is losing someone they love to AIDS. It's an insidious disease, hard to diagnose, hard to fight, hard to survive. AIDS deeply touches us at the root of who we are and how we survive.

When frantic AIDS headlines splashed across the news and we thought it was a Gay disease, a friend of mine's father had the misfortune of needing surgery. It was the early 1980s, and during the procedure he needed two pints from the local blood bank. He was an attorney, a heterosexual family man and strong Catholic whose daughter had to call me one day to say he had AIDS.

How is that possible, I demanded? Her explanation was incredible: we hadn't responded quickly enough to protect the blood and it hadn't been screened for AIDS. Her dad: the quiet man who warmly hugged us as we dashed through their lives during our college dorm years; the husband who adopted three children to give them love and a better life. There was not even hope to cling to.

My friend and I had our babies in the mid '80s and often talked. I would cuddle my boys on my lap as she talked of placing hers in her father's arms as he became increasingly too weak to hold them. She was taking pictures.

I was afraid for her, for them, and shared my worries. How she could be sure AIDS wasn't transmitted casually? She told me she had to believe because she needed to see her children with their Grandfather as much as their Grandfather needed to have them there. I was inspired by her love for her father and ashamed for not knowing if I could make the same choice. That was the first face of AIDS I saw.

My best friend in high school was flambuoyantly, enthusiastically, wholly gay. He was warm and tender, smart, good looking, wonderfully funny, and a talented artist. There were months and years we were inseparable, and years after high school when we were not, but our friendship remained strong.

AIDS took him on in the 80s, and began its slow compromising of his immune system but it didn't take him down. A tecchie guy before it was in vogue, he made his living in a variety of ways until poor health got the better of him. He existed the last 10 years or so on Disability, participating in the Gay Olympics in Pool and bettering the lives of others in the ways that mattered. He passed away this year after fighting the good fight for 30 years.

It's nearly Christmas. What I want this year is for the most brilliant minds funded by the most wealthy countries to throw out the political barriers and channel their energies toward an international, results-driven eradication of AIDS and CANCER. All over the world, day by day, we are diminished until then. I Believe.