I grew up watching some of my mom’s closest friends die of AIDS. I would go with her to their funerals, standing there, holding her hand, while she and her friends would cry at the impossibility of losing someone else.
She told me that these men were brave and strong. That they had lived their lives to the fullest all the way to the end.
“They are not perverts or deviants, the only thing wrong with them is they have been forgotten by their country and the people who are supposed to take care of them and love them,” she told me. “I don’t care how sick they are, how the disease eats away at them: they are heroes.”
Jeff Leavell 
June 1994 is when I received the test results.
This made me cry, then smile and cry.
So many people that come to memory.
ThAnk you.
S.
LikeLike