Intermittently, over the past couple of years, I hear of the severe illness, loss of mental control, or death of a contemporary – not from HIV or related problems, but from, well, anything else, as it happens. As I am now in my mid-50s, this is becoming more and more a normal occurrence.
Unfortunately, at times I am slightly uncomfortable that my reaction – and by that I don't mean my own and real personal feelings, but my social, written or stated reaction – isn't stronger, more dramatically empathetic. I tend to give the impression of responding with, Well, so what else is new?
It's a weird side effect of nearly thirty years of HIV, HCV, etc.: this sense that illness and death are so unremarkable, so expected, that they are hardly real news, or cause for alarm. There are even the slightly bored semi-professional opinions that roll off my tongue to people who have been shocked at their own mortality – easy things like: make sure you write down all the medications, or: if you're in that much pain you should call and insist on an appointment today, or: oh yes, cremation probably is easier.
It must seem a bit eerie or heartless to my friends. I do know that at points over the past decade – most intensely with my sister Sandy's death, but also with the physical problems of other people as they pass by me – I have had a sense of irritation, of injustice: do you mean to say we, that is those of us with HIV, went through all of that, and we didn't win any points – any relief for the other people around us? You mean all of that just happened, and it wasn't any kind of redemptive... oh well, clearly an irrational underlying assumption that I don't take all that seriously. But it does pop up in the back of my head from time to time.
But then behind that irritation ('you mean to say that just anybody is going to go through all this, too, now? and it wasn't even particularly special that we all did it, so many years ago?') is this rather weak, disengaged response: ah well sorry you have a severe illness and might die in a year, and so how has everything else been going?...
It remains to be seen whether my responses, or at the very least my abilities to generate (real or apparent) social concern, will improve. Meanwhile, there is an odd sense of aging, illness and death catching up with the vast world of Other People Who Are Not Us, not members of this community of whom so many are gone; and also, probably, a selfish sense of being No Longer Special. Ridiculous, I know: but maybe it's only when these old attempts to make sense of things are exposed as nonsensical that we can really see, and let go of, them....
In the meantime, I guess I really should work on my ability to say the right thing at the right time. Hmm....
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