Forty-five years ago this summer, The New York Times published an article about a mysterious “gay cancer.” Few readers could have imagined it marked the beginning of one of the most devastating public health crises in modern American history.
By the mid-1990s, I was a young lawyer with AIDS Legal Council of Chicago. Every day, our tiny staff traveled to hospitals, apartments and hospices helping people with HIV/AIDS complete wills, powers of attorney, guardianship papers and emergency legal documents. We often arrived when they were at the edge of life.
One client, Rex, has stayed with me for over 30 years.
He was in his 20s when he called asking us to come to his apartment to finalize his legal papers. When my colleague and I arrived, Rex’s living room had become a kind of vigil. Friends surrounded his bed. People shared food, stories, music and laughter. Grief and tenderness held hands.
Rex reviewed and signed his documents carefully. He thanked us. The next day, he died.
At the time, my colleague and I wondered whether completing those papers had allowed Rex to let go. Now, years later, I believe something harder to acknowledge: Rex chose that day to end his life.
Of course, I cannot be sure. But I did know what it meant to live with AIDS in those years — the pain, the fear, the exhaustion. The sense that death was already at the door. What Rex could not know was that effective HIV medications were only months away.
What I witnessed in Rex’s room was not only an individual preparing to die. It was a community creating dignity and agency in the face of abandonment. In those years, people with AIDS often faced not only terminal illness, but also rejection by families, indifference from political leaders and the absence of effective treatment. They built their own systems of care in apartments, hospital rooms, church basements and legal aid offices while much of the country looked away.
There was beauty in that solidarity. There was also profound injustice. Rex died only months before HIV therapies transformed AIDS from a near-certain death sentence into a survivable chronic illness for millions.
Forty-five years later, the lesson of AIDS is not only how so many people died, but also how fiercely they cared for one another while waiting for the world to care too.
— Julie E. Justicz, executive director, Legal Council for Health Justice (formerly AIDS Legal Council of Chicago)
The memories held by a place
Regarding the story “‘A little respect’ for Flight 191” (May 25): The tragic news of American Airlines Flight 191 created an impact far beyond Chicagoland’s borders. The coverage of that day in 1979 unforgettably described how likely it was that those onboard saw the ground racing toward them because of closed-circuit TV showing the plane’s flight. Readers everywhere empathized with those doomed flyers’ last moments.
The adult children of the parents taken that day now know exactly where the crash happened, demonstrating a continuing and permanent connection, not only for their loss but for where it occurred.
My mother was killed in a head-on auto collision 27 years ago. My dad, my brother and his wife were also injured in their struck car. My husband and I witnessed the accident because we were following them home from a dinner out. That night is burned in our psyches.
Because of that trauma, for a number of years I avoided that stretch of road in Fairfax County in Virginia, only 20 miles from where we lived. Then, one day, absentmindedly, I suddenly realized I was about to go past the site just ahead of me, with no realistic way to turn back. So strong was the event to me, its location had stayed a vibrant presence in my head. Yes, in that mindset, my mom’s spirit was still there, and as I drove by the spot, I took off my sunglasses so that she could recognize me.
It’s not logical, but it is human, to remain forever connected to the place and people.
— Georgiana Atkins Havill, Winter Park, Florida
Someone you pass by every day
I survived an overdose, and I’m haunted by my cousin Lee’s death to overdose. Sometimes, while I’m driving around my hometown, I see a man I’ll call John Elway, who asks for money at the town’s main intersection wearing a Denver Broncos jersey. I don’t give him money; I don’t have any.
When I see he’s alive, I turn around and feel some relief. When I do not see him, I wonder if he’s alive. I wonder if he’s surviving. He has a slight stoop, a reddish face, an arched neck and healthy-looking cheekbones. His weight indicates he’s eating or that hopefully he is. I realize John represents something to me. John is America. He’s all of us.
I have no way to help this guy, America. I can only talk about the rhythm of his steps, how he asks you for a reality check. Are you advocating or helping anyone besides yourself?
Come on, America, help John. He is a guy you pass every day now.
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— Jordan McClements, Chicago
Unapologetically American
Rabbi Debra Newman Kamin’s and Steven D. Reske’s op-eds in the Sunday Tribune complemented each other beautifully (“The answer to rising antisemitism is to stand proud, not silent”; “On his 100th anniversary, Miles Davis provides hope for a divided America”). In grappling with the risk of antisemitism that Jewish people are more frequently facing, she writes that such discordant behavior should be not be met with retreat but rather with “being proud enough to remain visibly, publicly and unapologetically Jewish.”
Reske tells for the sake of an analogy the true story of Miles Davis making a “wrong” chord sound “right.” Davis thought it was not the discordant note but the next note that makes what preceded it a launching pad for something beautiful.
Not just for Jewish people or jazz enthusiasts, this approach should be embraced. We are hearing lots of discordance, but it is how we respond that will move us forward to either a glorious crescendo or a dirge. We should all be proud of how in previous generations Americans have heard the discordant and launched into a beautiful harmony. Our nation saw that in the Civil War. We saw that in the civil rights era. We saw that more recently in Minneapolis and elsewhere around the country.
We should continue being proud enough to remain visibly, publicly and unapologetically American. That is who we are.
— Margaret Sents, Glenview
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