On World AIDS Day last year, I made a promise to myself that I would write an article telling the story of AIDS in my life.
At the time, I said to myself, I have a whole year to put together a creative and powerful piece. Only now, 11 months later, have I put pen to paper.
Perhaps my procrastination is testament to how difficult it is to write about this topic. Or maybe it exemplifies my fear that I will be incapable, really, of providing a pillow of comfort to anyone whose life has been touched or beaten up by AIDS.
More important, I am afraid of not successfully bringing a new face to AIDS, or offering a new perspective that will allow for a broader understanding of this epidemic and a deeper empathy toward those who live, suffer, and die with it around the world every day.
In the end, all I have is my story and that will have to be good enough.
Throughout the past 15 years, I devised many different ways of telling people about my parents’ death.
I would try to avoid the topic entirely, nervous at every new event or encounter. If it did come up that my parents were deceased, some individuals would presume that it must have been through an accident. After all, they were so young.
Sometimes, especially in the beginning, I would offer an engineered story of my father dying of cancer at age 57, and my mother one year and eight months later, of a broken heart, a few months after her 61st birthday.
There were times however, scant though they were, that I would tell the truth, and finding myself apologizing for bringing down the vibe of the room, or comforting those who felt badly for asking. My made-up narratives now remind me of those adolescent novels, where one can choose different endings based on a whim and a page number.
The American dream
The truth is, my parents died of AIDS.
I am white, born in the U.S. and raised privileged. I am the only daughter of hardworking immigrants.
My father served in the U.S. Army and worked as a United Airlines radio mechanic for more than 25 years. My mother stayed home to raise her child and was proud to have had a part-time job in the payroll department of Wells Fargo Bank for the last 14 years of her life.
My parents lived the American dream, they sacrificed, saved money, bought a house, sent me to 13 years of parochial school and were proud parents when I graduated high school summa cum laude and started college.
We were, for all intents and purposes, as normal as a normal American family can be.
I remember the day of my father’s death quite vividly. It was Feb. 5, 1991. I was 18. Around 5 a.m., the phone rang in my dorm room at Berkeley.
When I arrived at home in San Francisco that morning, and sat in my childhood bedroom, I was informed that my father died of AIDS and that my mother was infected with HIV.
The news was like Ben-Gay. It tingled, permeated the air, clinging to everything and made me feel hot with the ending result that most people probably wouldn’t want to be near me.
That day, that opaque, heartbreaking, head-throbbing, incomprehensible, I-want-to- pound-the-walls day, changed my life forever. Only now, as a 34-year-old woman, can I say that I am finally coming to terms with their loss.
Alone in this world
Anyone lucky enough to have had loving parents, but who lost them before their time, comprehends the anxious feeling of being alone in this world, the petrifying silence of sitting by yourself in the house in which you were raised feeling it as completely unfamiliar and scary now that they are gone.
At the same time, I have learned to truly work through the grief and have accepted the consequences of events outside of my control. I am beginning to develop a profound gratitude for this experience. It has given me the gift of knowing leaden pain and buoyant happiness and seeing both in all things human.
AIDS Walk
This year I participated in AIDS Walk Colorado and raised a good sum of money for the cause.
I walked by myself.
The event reminded me of the year after my mother’s passing, when I danced in the AIDS Dance-A-Thon at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. I participated in that event alone, too.
There are several differences that strike me as I compare the two times in my life.
AIDS in the early ’90s was still a much stigmatized disease and now, although we still have a ways to go, there is better understanding and acceptance.
On a more personal level, dancing alone at the Fort Mason Center, I felt myself a stranger in a place I was not ready to be.
I felt as if I had to dance for my dead parents, to do something that would be meaningful and forcibly bring some sense and purpose to what had happened.
This year, as I walked through Cheesman Park, although I was by myself, I was not alone, and I was walking with history, and humanity, and interconnectedness, and depth, and intention, and support, and light.
Although thoughts of my parents, and of all those who I know and have known with HIV/AIDS, passed through my mind, this time I was walking for me.
Although I do not carry the antibodies in my blood, AIDS, this wretched and unforgiving epidemic, entered my life and changed it forever. And it can change all of our lives.
All we have to do is look around and see it. Sometimes, it is in the faces, and in the hearts or in the stories of those you least expect.
Marisa A. Medina moved to Denver for graduate school in 1998. She now works at ING, where she has a spectacular view of the downtown skyline, the new Denver Art Museum wing and the Front Range. She lives in Denver with her dog, Harley.
Fighting AIDS worldwide
World AIDS Day, commemorated each Dec. 1, began in 1988 as a way to increase awareness and education and to fight prejudice surrounding HIV/AIDS. According to UNAIDS, there are about 38.6 million people world wide who live with HIV, including 2.3 million children.
This year, World AIDS Day will be marked with a rally on the steps of the city and county of Denver building, noon to 1 p.m. Friday, to remember those who have passed away from HIV/AIDS and to gather strength for the ongoing fight against the disease. Speakers include Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. There will be a mobile AIDS testing unit at the rally.
In Boulder, a rally will begin at 5 p.m. with speakers telling their life stories about the way AIDS has touched them in the Aspen Rooms at the UMC at the University of Colorado. The talks will be followed by a candlelight vigil at the UMC Fountain Area.
In northern Colorado, free AIDS testing will be available in Fort Collins, Loveland and Greeley on Friday. For appointment information, visit ncaids.org/events.html
At Metropolitan State College, a student art exhibition of AIDS-themed work hangs in the Auraria Library Gallery through Friday.
For information on global World AIDS Day, visit unaids.org/en.
