remembering…

Due to time constraints, this post in honor of AIDS Awareness Day is coming a day late.  I know remembering and awareness are appropriate every day…

I got sober in 1981 attending meetings in my neighborhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and across town in the Village.  About a year or so into my sobriety people in the meetings started getting sick, very sick, and dying.  This deadly disease didn’t have a name at that time; a virus that seemed to affect IV drug users and gay men.  My sober friends in their 20′s and 30′s began getting positive HIV diagnoses.

In the last few years of my active using I’d become an IV drug user and often shared needles with my gay friends; or when desperate enough, needles found on the street by my apartment, or even from the dumpster at St. Vincent’s Hospital.  My fear of getting a positive HIV diagnosis changed my life in profound ways.

Max told me about a Japanese man, Michio Kushi, who had this way of eating that would support the immune system and help the body to heal.   At that stage of the disease and new diagnoses daily, I focused  my energy on learning about this macrobiotic way of life and eating.  I completely changed my diet to a vegan, whole food one, and learned to like the taste of seaweed, how to cook with a pressure cooker, to eat seasonally, how to cook beans and tempeh, the value of organic and locally grown foods, and whatever I could about the healing effects of food on the body.   I cooked for myself and for my friends in hospital rooms with the big red ‘danger’ sign on their doors.   Along with the diet change, I immersed myself in the yoga I started practicing when I was counting sober days.  I had a daily meditation practice and became a yoga teacher.

The recovery community gathered closely around the sick and dying, with our own personal fears, and no judgement.  The never-ending memorial services became a painful, solemn reality.  Holding my friend Larry’s hand at Max’s service, he whispered in my ear, “I’m afraid the next one will be for me.”  His was close to ‘the next one’…

Twenty-nine years later, I am one of the lucky ones that never got that diagnosis.  I feel I have a responsibility to not only carry the message of recovery, but also to do work that empowers people to heal and care for themselves to the best of their ability through nutrition and lifestyle changes.  I also have the blessing of giving birth to and raising three competent, capable, kind, caring, beautiful daughters.  They are the next generation at risk; we talk openly not only about drugs and alcohol, but also about risky sexual behavior.

I’ve also had the opportunity to do work in rural villages in India where HIV is rampant, along with shame.  The shame of the disease keeps them in denial as the men get sick and die, the widowed women are infected, untreated, carrying the disease and passing it on to their children.  The children in those villages are now the focus for testing and treatment.

I honor those courageous people who live with HIV, some for 20+ years, I honor the sick and dying here and around the world…

But for the grace of God…I honor these dear ones I said goodbye to…Tom, Karem, Dennis, Max, Kevin, Larry, Michael, Eddie, Tom, Charles, Lindsey, Georgette.

Namaste ~

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