The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer.
It was a Monday morning. I began my shift at the hospital as the pager sounded. “Report to the ICU.” That was 1981. I was a hospital chaplain. I was called to provide pastoral support to the first person with AIDS I would meet.
Over the next 15 years, the HIV pandemic was a primary focus of my work and life. I organized human services and educational programs, wrote the first book published on caring for family members with AIDS, and completed my doctoral dissertation on AIDS-related bereavement. More significantly, I watched people die. It wasn’t just a few people. In 1987 alone, at the height of the pandemic, 27 people I knew died. The AIDS pandemic marked my life from age 24 to 40 — years that shouldn’t have been shrouded in grief.
As COVID-19 began to appear in the news, I had a deep sense of foreboding that was all too familiar to me. It felt as though it was happening all over again. Questions about the illness, the cause, the symptoms, the transmission, and signs of panic. Today, I’m not writing about a virus or how we should protect ourselves. Instead, I want to share a very important lesson from living through the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
In 1988 I maintained a small private practice working with people with AIDS. My clients attended support groups organized by a local clinic. They told me at each meeting they compared symptoms and test results. The focus was on the illness rather than living life with the illness. Two of my clients were pushing me to start some kind of support group. They said things like, “I don’t care what it is. I need something different.”
The page-a-day meditation book written for people living with AIDS, “The Color of Light,” had just been published. I decided to start a simple meditation group. The first half of our meeting consisted of mindfulness meditation. I taught the technique and we’d sit for 20 minutes and meditate. Then we’d read together the page for the day from “The Color of Light” and discuss it. We didn’t talk about AIDS. We talked about the meditation and topics like hope, forgiveness or compassion.
When we started the group, every person who attended was preoccupied with disease and terrified of dying. AIDS filled their lives. They stopped doing things they enjoyed and waited for death. After about six months, I had trouble scheduling meetings. The group members stopped focusing on being sick. Instead, they were focused on living. I remember that one started traveling. Another went back to school. One man who wanted to learn to dance took classes. Every one of them got back into life and was living fully.
Yes: in time, they all died. There were no effective treatments for HIV-infection until the 1990s. But these individuals didn’t stop living and just wait for death. They began to live as fully as they could. Being grounded in spiritual practice gave them the vitality to embrace life day by day. While it remains tragic that they all died before reaching the age of 40, they found things worth living.
We can’t change the way the federal government mismanaged the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Nor can we change the missteps that have already taken place with COVID-19. But we can change the way in which we live each day. We can maintain regular spiritual practice so that our lives are grounded in openness and hope. We can limit the amount of news we digest and focus on accurate media like this paper. Above all, we can focus on living. Even if you need to quarantine yourself, it will be an opportunity to enhance your spiritual practice as well as to have long overdue phone conversations with loved ones.
Many things I learned as a young adult regarding the HIV/AIDS pandemic are important for today. One critical lesson is to nurture life with spiritual practice. I do feel as though I’ve been in this situation before. Yes, there are differences between the HIV pandemic and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Like the early days of AIDS, we didn’t know what to expect. Now we live with uncertainty. In that uncertainty, we can live with trust and hope in life’s goodness which has the ability to inspire our minds and nurture our spirits. It is with trust and hope that I continue to live as fully as I am able.
