We Are All Living with AIDS

A great uncle of mine passed away a couple of weeks ago. He and his wife were always vaguely part of my life, in and out at various times. They sent cards at graduations but didn't show up at birthday parties. They were family, but more distant family. Because he was around all my life, I didn't think much about his disability. I don't know that I would have ever asked what was wrong with him. My mother just mentioned in passing one day, "Haven't you ever noticed he almost touches the ground every time he takes a step?"

I knew what she meant. He had a strange gait, dipping down significantly with each step. Yes, his hand could have easily brushed the ground had he tried. He'd had polio as a child; this was the lasting effect. I never got any more details.

That great uncle was born in 1920, though, so it shouldn't really be a surprise that he would have polio. It wasn't eradicated in the US until 1979 and is still a threat in other countries. Still, for all intents and purposes, in 1984 I was born into a world without polio. In another country, that wouldn't have been true. However, it was true for my world, my childhood, my schools. No one worried that a sneeze or unwashed hand would transmit a disease that could leave a limb nearly useless. Actually, the interwebs was required to even find out how polio is transmitted.

By contrast, I have always lived in a world with AIDS. Somehow, even in conservative rural Kentucky, AIDS was covered in my elementary school education. Everyone knew how it was transmitted. Of course, no one talked much about what the "sexually" part of sexually transmitted meant. Still, the mystery was limited to origin, not transmission. Blood and sex, that much we knew.

Treatments were more in development than wonderfully effective. It was always there, though, that knowledge of AIDS and HIV as the virus that causes AIDS. People talked about it directly in TV shows and roundabout ways in country songs. Strangely, given everything I know now, I never thought of AIDS as affecting a particular group of people. (That could say an entirely different thing about my education.) I only learned that AIDS had once been known as GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) from an episode of Grey's Anatomy.

Still, on World AIDS Day, I'm always reminded that this is the disease that has come with caution and worry in my lifetime. I am glad to know, firsthand, that diseases that once came with caution and worry no longer do--at least not for me, in my part of the world. Other scary things are gone from every place: smallpox, for example, eradicated in 1977.

I remember the stories of paralyzed men let down through roofs to Jesus. I remember lepers and blind men, outcasts of all sorts, crying out from the sides of roads. I remember a friend who died with AIDS. I remember others diagnosed with HIV and AIDS. But most of all, I remember hope: what was is no longer; what is does not have to be this way. Because that is the story of the leper, the blind man, the paralyzed man, and so many others.

Let us hope more fully.