AIDS at 30 - My Story

I've never been good at reading graphs. But this one is personal. There, on the page of the Los Angeles Times, is a graph beneath the headline AIDS at 30. My eyes scan left to right and land on the year. 1994. Deaths from AIDS in the US had exceeded 50,000. My brother was one of them. And there right next to the column reads 1995: Introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy. Missed it by that much.

Thirty years is a significant anniversary. The photo of the AIDS quilt on the mall in Washington, DC, reminded me that I never made a panel for my brother. His name is not part of that quilt. The headline over the photo says A mixed picture of AIDS at 30. Again, the headline rings true. I don't think Bob really would have wanted to be stitched together with those other stories. But that is only a guess because, like the quilt, I have had to piece much of this story together.

The story of my journey with AIDS has distracted me for seventeen years. I have journals filled with it. Poems. Essays. A twice abandoned musical. A play. Even an opera. All unfinished. The file box filled to the brim - containing only one certainty. The story inside is my story. Now, as the news is filled with opinion pieces, editorials, moral judgements, and talk of a potential cure, I've decided it's time for me to tell it. Here, on the thirtieth anniversary of AIDS, and ten days shy of the seventeenth anniversary of my brother's death, I begin to tell my story through chapters of my memoir.

ARIA - A SISTER'S JOURNEY WITH AIDS

PRELUDE
Pavarotti is dead.
I wept when I heard the news.
The deathbed and opera.
Music filling the halls of the Alzheimer’s unit.
Gaunt, hollow, chiseled faces.
Pasty white skin.
Sunken eyes.
Lost in dementia,
my ninety- year -old mother’s tiny hand,
like Mimi’s in La Boheme -
reached out to unseen spirits
as her last breaths
escaped
her lips.
I’d been here before.
Fourteen years earlier
I’d watched
as my fifty-three year old brother’s trembling finger
conducted Nessun dorma from Turandot
as his body lay wasting away with AIDS.
The heart wrenching tenor’s crescendo filling the silence
where words had long since ceased.
Opera and the deathbed
Pavarotti and me at the bedside.
Both times.
Amidst mouth swabs and shallow breaths,
Beauty.
And so I wept.
I wept for the opera lovers.
I wept for Pavarotti.
A giant, who
lay wasting away from pancreatic cancer.
And I wondered
Whose voice did he hear at the end?
And I imagined my mother and my brother
Applauding his heavenly debut
And I wept for me.
My mother is dead.
My brother is dead.
Pavarotti is dead.
A soundtrack of loss.

1993
I knew something was wrong. He looked as ashen as the soot that rained down on Laguna that October of 1993. Fires raged and so did his head. It was a bad time. The inferno was closing in on all of us.
Air
Thick with uncertainty
Eyelids heavy
Moist palms slip into each others’
Staring into the void
waiting.
Breezeless day of anxiety
Hanging by a thread.
We look into each others’ eyes
No one to wipe life’s perspiration from our brow
Nor fear from our lips
unspeakable.
Nothing quick.
Slow.
Relentless.
Pressing Humidity
Suffocation.
A cordial march
to the precipice.


It was the early nineties. I was in my mid thirties. My mother was in her mid seventies . Bob was fifty-three.
AIDS, as it has turned, out, was still in its infancy.
Our family business was in a shambles. My father had died in 1981 of a massive heart attack at sixty-four. Bob had taken over. Abandoning my dreams of becoming an actress, I went to work selling yellow pages which was our trade. Emotion ruled. My mother poured their life savings into the dying business. Emotion ruled as we mortgaged the office building. But there was no use. We were buried and times were desperate. As the fires raged in Laguna that October of 1993, our crucible was just beginning.

(Aria - A Sister's Journey With AIDS to be continued in the next post NO TURNING BACK)