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Several years ago I made a conscious decision to stop trying to count the number of friends and acquaintances I,ve lost to AIDS. There were simply too many people, and too much loss, and I was beginning to feel weighed down by the numbers themselves, in addition to the people. Living in a community of people with AIDS and HIV, the losses extend past my immediate personal network to include co-workers and people I may not even have known personally, but whose lives and work were familiar and in some way or other important to me, and although I felt their deaths in a way that was different, it was no less real.
In each of the last three years, I,ve lost someone very close: in OE93, my best friend of 15 years; in OE94, my ex-lover, who,d introduced me to PWAC and the PWA self-empowerment movement; and this year, my co-worker and friend Michael. Each of these deaths was unique, personal, requiring it,s own cycle of mourning, yet still part of a larger experience of loss.
I,m often asked by friends and family not connected to our community how we are able to "keep goingo/oo in the midst of all this loss. Much of the time what I really hear them asking is not how, but why, why do we keep going? why don,t we just give up? quit? find something else to do? My first reaction always seems to be: "What,s the option? I don,t feel like there,s a choice.o/oo And I usually explain about my own reasons for staying involved and about how I benefit from being a part of this community.
But that doesn,t answer those who are genuinely asking about the "how.o/oo They want to understand the process that helps us get through the pain. That answer is much longer and more complex, because everyone,s process is uniquely his or hers, and what is essential for some is impossible for others. Memorial services are a classic example of what I mean. Several years ago I also decided that memorials were more difficult than helpful to me, and that I couldn,t take any more - at least not as a rule. But then I found that for some of my losses, a collective experience of some sort was necessary for me to begin to move past the paralyzing pain I felt. It didn,t take it away, to be sure, but for reasons I still can,t quite explain, it made a huge difference in my own process of grieving.
Most of the above discussion has to do with death, but grief and mourning accompany many more aspects of living with AIDS, or even simply living, and most of us don,t give much thought to those other areas. Every human being experiences all sorts of losses throughout life, losses that are mourned in one way or another, conscious or not. For people living with AIDS, the losses of a lifetime seem to get compressed into a shorter-than-usual time span: loss of physical strength and/or independence; loss of resources; loss of body image; for many, loss of family and/or community support; and all too often, loss of hope. Each of these demands its own adjustment, and each one takes its toll. A new version of the world has to be accepted and dealt with, in whatever ways are available to us.
The loss of hope may be the most constant of all. I don,t particularly buy the notion of anticipatory grief, because it seems to me that we always grieve something in the present, some current experience, rather than something that,s ahead. I think that when we grieve for something or someone that isn,t yet actually gone, we,re feeling the loss of hope that that person or thing will continue to be a part of our lives - it,s not the future that makes us so incredibly sad and angry, it,s feeling robbed of the expectation that we,ll have them in our lives indefinitely. And that,s very much in the present.
It,s much too easy to say that the most important thing is not to deny our feelings. Sometimes that,s exactly what we have to do to survive. Denial can be a very important coping tool. That,s one reason communal gatherings like memorials provoke such mixed feelings - we need to be able to deal with our losses on our own timetables, in our own ways, and trying to force the issue often does more harm than good.
I can,t say exactly what it is that eventually helps me turn the corner. There is some comfort in knowing I,m not alone in the experience, and having work or other interests also helps remind me that my own life is continuing, regardless of how it may feel. Maddeningly, the old saw about time healing all wounds is probably the most critical truth about mourning - it takes what it takes.
Some losses never completely heal, but with enough time, usually, there comes a moment when I realize that a comment or event or thought that a week earlier would have provoked tears for a lost friend or an unbearable sensation of heaviness in my chest, instead results in a sad smile or even a genuine laugh. The pain may not ever go away altogether, but it does get better. Sometimes that,s the best I can hope for.
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