Many years ago I went to an exhibition of the AIDS Memorial Quilt at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The size of the thing hit me first, as it looked as though it went on forever, a cavernous room with the floor covered with quilt panels, and bare concrete walkways between sections. Every 50 feet or so there would be a couple of folding chairs, and volunteers waiting to help. The room was quiet, an eerie thing in a hall of that size.
Walking carefully along the paths I browsed the panels. They varied wildly, from gorgeous and professional canvases, to crudely painted bedsheets. Some were intentionally humorous, many joyously celebrated the life of the victim, most included a call to action, all were colored with loss. Favorite shirts were sewn on, stuffed animals wired in place, photographs were everywhere, Bible verses quoted alongside Broadway lyrics, bits of ephemera shared with the world to paint a horrifically inadequate picture of the magnitude of the lives lost.
By the time I had walked around a few groupings my emotions were starting to churn, so I looked up and away from it. And then I realized, I had only covered a tiny fraction of the panels on exhibition, and the exhibition itself was only a fraction of the entire quilt.
Then I began to understand that the volunteers weren’t only there to help visitors find the panel created for a friend or loved one, they were there to steady visitors who were becoming overwhelmed. As I was thinking this, fifty yards away a woman collapsed heavily onto the concrete, the sound echoing across the quiet room. A volunteer helped her to her feet and then onto one of the folding chairs, and she began to sob pitifully, her breath coming in rattling gasps.
I could understand completely how she felt. The concentration in one place of so much loss and anger, the emotional residue left by people building a memorial from cloth and paints a bits of life, is a palpable thing. You could not stand in such a room and not be touched by it, and the response only becomes more visceral if your own friends are memorialized somewhere in that vast space.
There is a certain tidiness to graveyards, a sameness to the stone markers, an innate cultural understanding that this is a place we put the dead, leaving only a name behind. Unless you know the name on the tombstone, there is little emotional resonance. The power of the Quilt is that it strips away that tidiness, forcing us to remember that there are not just names carved into a stone wall, these were people with families and lovers and friends, creative and unique people who had their lives torn from them by a disease, people who might have been our own friends, if we had the chance to meet them — a chance we are now denied.
Today is World AIDS Day. On this day a few years ago there was remembrance everywhere on-line. There was a “Day Without Art,” where sites took down their graphics for the day as a reminder of the losses in the art and design community. Red ribbon graphics — although the ribbon design has now been overused to the point of near self-parody — appeared everywhere. People on the web spread the word, and in the comparatively small and close-knit on-line word of the time, people talked about the crisis and what we could do to help. It was — or so we thought — what the web was for.
Now, though, HIV/AIDS doesn’t get much attention, on-line or elsewhere. Perhaps the media became bored with the subject, or perhaps people just feel that that AIDS, like cancer and other intractable diseases, was never going to get cured, so why think about it. Maybe it only got attention in the first place because the first wave of victims included a lot of high-profile celebrities; now that prevention is better known the A- and B-listers aren’t getting sick as often, and no-one really cares if a few hundred thousand anonymous low income black women get sick and die. It isn’t the kind of story that draws in viewers for the news shows — the images just aren’t as arresting if you can’t say “Hey, I remember that guy!”.
But I can’t bring myself to let this day go silently by as long as the situation remains desperate. I hope that my readers already know the truth about transmission, but you may want to learn a little more about the numbers involved. Avert.org has a good breakdown of the situation with HIV/AIDS in America. Over half a million people have died in the US alone since the start of the pandemic, and it’s estimated that almost 20,000 people die every year.
I don’t expect or ask that everyone become an activist for the cause. But perhaps for this one day a year, you might pause to think about the impact of this pandemic, and ask someone else to think about it, too.
{ 1 comment }
You know I am a fan of your writing. This post is the most touching and heart-wrenching one I’ve ever read from you. Perhaps it is because I myself have lost several amazing and wonderful friends to this horrific disease. Perhaps it is, as you stated, the magnitude of it.
I remember going to see the quilt and my own reaction to it. I, too, was most taken with the silence. Complete silence. In a room that size with hundreds of people in attendance. There were big, fat tears streaming down my face and an ache in my chest that was undeniable.
Pretty much the same as my reaction right now.
Thank you for writing this.
(P.S. The deleted comment was me; I couldn’t edit.)