"Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday dear Christopher, happy birthday to me!" As I turned 21 a few weeks ago, I was not celebrating my 21st birthday alone. Happy Birthday to AIDS may have been a more appropriate song to sing. We are the generation of AIDS. It's definitely not as glamorous as the Gen-X'ers or the Cyber Kids of the newest generation. But it is something that none of us can escape.
As AIDS turned 21 this year, I doubt many noticed. We've heard enough about STD prevention, condom use, abstinence and the elusive AIDS vaccine. We've been exposed to the AIDS crisis all of our lives, and the disease is not likely to go away in the immediate future.
What can go away are the stigma and discrimination that still follow those living with HIV/AIDS. This year's theme of World AIDS Day on Dec. 1 is in fact "Stigma and Discrimination." After 21 years, people living with the disease are still looked at in fear, disapprobation and ignorance. It's difficult for me to understand how certain individuals today can carry these sorts of sentiments when HIV can afflict anyone.
HIV is a virus that disregards all societal boundaries we may create to distance ourselves from the disease. It knows nothing of race, gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, geographical location or socioeconomic status. I first learned this lesson after working at an AIDS hospice a few summers ago. That is where I met an amazing man named Robert.
Robert had repeatedly been ill from the virus, and after a major hospitalization, he moved into an AIDS hospice. I first got to know Robert when his nurse asked me to read a story to him. The book was his favorite--Of Mice and Men. Rather than just reading line after line, I stopped and let him talk about George and Lennie.
I slowly discovered that Robert had studied English at college and was a promising writer, but he had never been able finish his first manuscript. Though it was trying at times for both of us, Robert shared a world of knowledge with me. He told me about his life--his parents who disowned him, his partner who deserted him, his boss who fired him, his love for literature and most of all his desire for a second chance.
His message came through clearly in good time, as Robert had to battle against his own body to verbalize the simplest phrase. I discovered that Robert was not just a man dying of AIDS; he was a man of intellect and passion. All I did was give him the opportunity to express himself, and in the end I gained so much more from his dying words.
Two days after I returned to school, Robert passed away. He was 34 years old. In a final battle against pneumonia, his crippled immune system collapsed in spite of his will to live.
Robert was left discarded by society and died in a room without family or friends. The director of the hospice sent me an e-mail to relay the news. I sat in disbelief at the computer wanting to scream. Had I only left a few days later I might have been there by his side. Robert was abandoned for the last time.
I salute all of those individuals at Duke who work tirelessly to comfort a group of people thrown to the margins of society. AIDS is not just a disease we get to read about comfortably in newspapers and magazines. AIDS is about people--people who do not deserve the stigma that surrounds their very existence. Let this year's World AIDS Day allow us to reflect on our own fragility. And more importantly, let the day help us to eradicate the stigma and discrimination that people living with HIV have to face for the rest of their abbreviated lives.
Christopher Scoville is a Trinity sophomore. His column appears every other Thursday.
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