Lessons the Dead Teach

I set the needle down on the spinning surface of the record and close my eyes to the sound of fingers rushing over the keys. I don't have to concentrate very hard to pretend that my Uncle Steve is in the same room with me. He would have loved the baby grand my father gave to my sister. Before his death he would sit down at the old upright in our den and play any song my sisters and I requested. If he didn't know a song, one of us would sing it, and he would join in, playing by ear, halfway through our rendition. The music on this record he left me conveys the intensity with which he enjoyed slowly unraveling the music and then weaving it back together in an even more beautiful arrangement than before.

My sister and I would go over to Uncle Steve's house every New Years. He would throw us up in the air and we would squirm, trying to escape before he could kiss us. I loved kisses, but his mustache tickled, and I could never hold back a giggle at the sensation. We would toast the New Year with glasses of sprite at eleven o'clock while watching the ball drop into Times Square. In the morning he would take us to his restaurant "The Corner" where our parents would meet us for breakfast and take us home.

I find it ironic that the year I spent the most time with my uncle is almost completely erased from my mind. I kept two memories from that year, the minute my uncle became a statistic and the last night I was with him. In January 1991 I was a fifth grader hiding from the world behind text books. To me AIDS was just a word written in the pages of those "shields." When my parents told me Stave had contracted it, I wanted to tell them the joke wasn't funny, but I could see in their faces they were serious. Just as my parents were arranging for the family to spend more and more time with Steve, I crawled deeper into my books. I had a purpose this time, though; I wanted to understand AIDS. I needed to know why it had attacked a member of my family. It was easier for me to fight what I knew.

By the time I had read everything I could comprehend on the disease, I decided it was time to look over my book cover and see what typed words couldn't tell me. I sat with Steve the night he died, reassuring myself that my books had prepared me to face his condition. I hadn't flinched once when reading chapters on dementia. But that night I found that no word, paragraph or page would have made me ready to see the dying man that had been my Uncle Steve lying on the bed. His body reminded me of the black and white snapshots of Auschwitz survivors. He was skinny enough for me to wrap my sixth grade fingers around his waist. His mouth hung slightly ajar, and you could see a white, foam-like substance flecking his tongue and lips. He trembled constantly. His eyes floated around the room, unable to focus on a single object. Dementia had clouded his mind. He couldn't remember a single person in the room: his parents, his brother, his best friend, his lover, his niece; strangers all, who gathered around his deathbed.

I left an hour before he died. I slumped into the car seat, and somewhere on the way home the tears started. Try as I did, they wouldn't stop. My mother made me take a shower. She offered me a sleeping pill. (It was the first and only time she ever did that.) I refused and spent the night wide-eyed and empty, listening to the sound of my breathing. By the time I found out that Steve had died the next morning, I didn't have any energy to cry anymore.

Steve's death gave me a purpose for the next three years of my life. I became the "AIDS girl" at my middle school. I set up speakers for my classmates and organized a school team for the local AIDS walk. I trained for an AIDS information hotline run by teens out of Kansas City. I even did some public speaking. I didn't want the people I knew to have to face what I had. I wanted to prepare them for the possibility of seeing one of their own being invaded by a disease that turned one's own body traitor.

Three years after Steve I was the survivor of two more friends, both victims of AIDS. It was then I received a letter telling me that my nineteen year old friend John had died of Pneumocystic Pneumonia, a complication of AIDS. I sat on the edge of my bed waiting for the rush of frustration and anger that came after each loss. Instead, memories of my uncle I hadn't bothered to pull up in two years ambushed me: Steve's throwing me in the air before each hug, the new house he'd bought in the last year of his life knowing that he was dying. I recalled the way he would sit through the entirety of three or more cheesy kids movies, like The Land Before Time or The Aristocats with me and my little sister. I smiled at the way he had laughed incredibly loudly. I imagined him as he was in life, not death.

After that day I still worked at the hotline and raised money for the walk. I still cut one hundred ribbons on AIDS day and passed them out to classmates. I finally realized, however, that I was tired of spending more time remembering the disease that killed my uncle than the man himself. For three years I had devoted my time and energy to ridding the world of what killed my uncle. I was finally ready to use that same effort to celebrate what made his life extraordinary.