My " e friend" has died of aids.

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And the damndest thing, I never knew he had aids.
I have been emailing , chatting and posting with this person for almost 10 years. I have not heard from him in about a month, so I sent NUMEROUS emails wondering what was going on?!!!!
He has told me many times that he had alot of illnesses. His partner who he had been with for almost 7 years never had any sort of illness that I heard of.
Of course, all of my nurse red-flags were going off the whole time , but I never asked. I never said a single thing. One time in particular he was offline for several weeks due to a cold. Shocked

Boy if THAT didnt give it away..
but again.. I never asked. And he never told.

Are people with aids THAT scared to say anything ? Him and I talked about serious things for a long time. Some pretty strange personal things, and there werent many things we never talked about. Sex, kids, money, house cleaning, parental fights, how his parents treated him when he told them he was gay.... Mad

grr.... MANY personal things.
But he never said that.

His partner emailed me back. He said in his email that he heard lots about me. And was truly sorry to be the one to tell me. ( I told him that I never knew he had aids)
Why are people with aids so scared? Does our society REALLY treat people with aids SO BAD that they have to live in fear?
Maybe I am in a foo-foo happy bunny land where everyone loves everyone and things like that dont matter..... But is it really THAT bad? How can people hate others who have a disease? Noone asks for aids. Noone SELLS aids, noone wants this horrible disease. So why are the ones with it so scared of those of us who are not ?
>sigh<

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that's too bad

but what could you have done for him that you didn't already do

maybe he felt you didn't need to know, the knowledge would not have made you more caring or sympathetic

it isn't just aids, people do the same thing with cancer and other health problems, some people don't want to be treated or thought of as the sick person, they want to be thought of or treated as themselves

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Sorry to hear about your loss Shewolf.

As to the why of it I just don't know. It certainly inspires different reactiions than someone with cancer. I think that the myths surrounding AIDS are all too prevalent in peoples minds instead of the facts.

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Back in the early eighties, perhaps late 1982, I worked in a building in Santa Monica as a landscape design person with a small firm. Down the hall was a wonderful architect, who used to come in and talk with us from time to time. He told of his good friend who had just died of aids, who had fallen on his apartment building staircase and no one, not the ambulance... no one would pick him up. Well, eventually someone did and took him to a hospital, but it was a long time. His family disowned him. His family name is one many of us would recognize, one of the early big money eastern US families.

The fear and loathing was incredible.

The friend who told me this died himself in the later eighties, but by the time he had aids he could at least talk about it with some.
People fear rejection....

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so very sad.

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I guess I hear what djj is saying, that people also want to be known as their not-sick selves, they don't want to get into it, want to keep it aside and deal with it as they have to.

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I guess I can understand the idea that people will treat you diffrently... as if you cant do for yourself.
I see that everyday. Someone says " i may have cancer.. " and everyone around them all of a sudden wants to clean thier house, wash thier laundry, and begin behaving twords this person as if they can not care for themselves.
No, you are right Djj, knowing wouldnt have changed my opinion of him at all. In the back of my mind I knew it anyways.. you cant cover a sickness like that from a nurse.. ;-) I dont care how good you are! haha!
So maybe he was afraid of that? That I would start to think of him as incapable as a person to take care of himself? Granted, i WOULD have been concerned, would have been questioning his health.. etc. As any friend would. But I dont THINK i would have crossed that line and made him feel any less capable of things.
I know for a fact that he knows I would not have judged him. Him and I have both known people with aids and talked about them and our feelings about them and the disease with each other. He knows how I feel about the rumors and the " Oh its a gay disease" CRAP.
Well he did know.
Wierd, I never met this man and yet this bothers me
alot.

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I miss him. I miss his jokes, I miss his poems, I miss him mistaking Jillians nick name and calling her BEANER instead of bean.. Laughing

I miss his banter. I miss his politics,
I miss a person I have never met enough to where it hurts.
( sigh )
Strange how you can feel this sort of an attachment to someone you have never laid eyes on

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I can speak only for myself, of course, but I think that if I had any fatal disease, I probably wouldn't advertise it online. I detest sympathy and never look for it. As someone else has said, what could you have done for him, shewolf, other than keep saying how very sorry you were to hear of it? Perhaps AIDS makes it even worse as there is still some sort of stigma attached to it. But I don't think I'd be eager to reveal I was suffering from an incurable cancer either. Merry Andrew must always be thought of as being merry.

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good way to put it.
As i said, people always want to help and sort of ' push the sick person aside' when they find out something is wrong. That is annoying.
I remember when I had a stroke, EVERYONE did that to me. I was PISSED. I felt like, for the longest time , that I had to report my bathroom activity because I wasnt capable of doing THAT on my own either. Rolling Eyes

Looking at it from that stand point.. makes perfect sence.
Not that there was a THING I could do for him. Sympathy was all I could ever offer aside from some nursing advice, and since I was a friend, he probally didnt want me to go that route. He wanted a friend who knew HIM and not the disease.

:-(
Still hurts.
but , makes perfect sence.

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Sorry for the loss of your friend, shewolf. It hurts now, but I think he wanted you to remember the positive things you shared, not his illness. Sometimes a terminal illness becomes who we are. It takes over our person and our being and everything we are on this earth. My guess is that he didn't want to become his illness in your relationship. He wanted to keep what the two of you shared.

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Shewolfnm, I am so sorry for your loss .. your friend is in a better place, he has no disease now, he is still your friend:)

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I'm so sorry to hear that shewolf. Losing a longtime friend is
very hard to take, and not being able to say good bye is
even harder. There would have been so many things to
say, so many things to address......but the choice was his.
You have to respect him and his wishes. I feel for you and
I am sorry for your loss. ((((hug)))))

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Shewolf...I am truly sorry for your loss. Although you two never met in person, he was still your friend and losing a friend is never to be taken lightly. My heart goes out to you. I too, have lost a dear friend to AIDS about 10 years ago. What a horrid disease.

Keep your friend deep in your heart and bring him out anytime you need a smile. Those who touch our lives become part of our own tapestries and in knowing him, your own tapestry of life has been brightened with a color and thread that is shared by no one else.

The very best of luck to you, my friend.....

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Shewolf

The saddest thing, to me, is that you knew this person online for 10 whole years & still had no idea of his real circumstances. I do understand Andrew's point about not wanting to advertise an illness online, but ... hey, if he were my friend I would have like to have thought I knew him better, also the cause & the suddenness of his death would not have come as such a shock. I would also have liked to have felt trusted (or something!?) enough to not make judgements about his illness. It might also have been comforting for you, now, to know that you offered him acceptance & support at the time when he most needed it. You never had the chance to do that. <sigh>
There's a whole aspect of your friend that you never knew about & you'll wonder about him for years. That's very sad.

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I very sorry about the loos of your friend, and the circumstances, you found out about his death.

I'm not sure that this is related to AIDS - some people just don't talk about some things, they think to be very special, to some others.

(On the other hand, the leading person in our county's AIDS help group - we were both co-founders - didn't tell anything until 4 weks before he died. But that was more than 10 years back.)

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a song for your friend

Warren Zevon
Keep Me In Your Heart

Shadows are falling and I'm running out of breath
Keep me in your heart for awhile
If I leave you it doesn't mean I love you any less
Keep me in your heart for awhile
When you get up in the morning and you see that crazy sun
Keep me in your heart for while
There's a train leaving nightly called when all is said and done
Keep me in your heart for while
Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-li-li-lo
Keep me in your heart for while
Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-li-li-lo
Keep me in your heart for while
Sometimes when you're doing simple things around the house
Maybe you'll think of me and smile
You know I'm tied to you like the buttons on your blouse
Keep me in your heart for while
Hold me in your thoughts, take me to your dreams
Touch me as I fall into view
When the winter comes keep the fires lit
And I will be right next to you
Engine driver's headed north to Pleasant Stream
Keep me in your heart for while
These wheels keep turning but they're running out of steam
Keep me in your heart for while
Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-li-li-lo
Keep me in your heart for while
Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-li-li-lo
Keep me in your heart for while
Keep me in your heart for while

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Sorry to hear of your loss, Shewolf. I find it disheartening that at this point in time one would still feel a certain stigma about having AIDS. I would have hoped we would have grown past that by now as a society. But, I know we haven't.

Many of us have had long term internet friends that we have held near and dear in our hearts only to lose them to illness. I find it amazing that I and others can have such attachment to people we have never actually met. We have lost several over the years on NYT Abuzz and A2K. Having never met them face to face doesn't ease the pain of the loss. (I still have things that will trigger memories of Mary, Himself and others) I like to think that the friendships formed here and elsewhere online, such as your e-mail friend, are just as genuine and I think that speaks volumes about those that can befriend total strangers. I'm sure you were a light in his life. Keep it lit.

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A fable that's just come to me.

There once was a man whose way was blocked by an impenetrable wall. Luckily, he had a companion who helped him to stack smaller stones into a little stairstep, thus he did not break through the wall, but climbed over it.

Your friend's impenetrable wall was what he never mentioned, but all those talks with you about his parents, his partner, his life, helped him stack a little stairstep, one stone at a time.

No one could wish for anything better in life.

Sweet tears for you this day.

Joe

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You didn't speak only for yourself, Merry Andrew, you also spoke for me, but you put it more eloquently than I could have and you beat me by about 12 hours. I believe that ours is a majority opinion with respect to not wanting sympathy for woes.

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My " e friend" has died of aids.

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