Parents and AIDS

By Crispin Sartwell

There are few more devastating experiences for a kid than losing a parent. And there are few more devastating ways to lose a parent than to AIDS.

According to a report delivered to the AIDS conference in Barcelona, the number of children who lose at least one parent to AIDS in the developing world will nearly double by 2010, to 25.3 million.

This is one of those numbers that boggles the imagination, that fills and spills over our capacity for empathy. And the effects will be devastating, according to the report. Even in fortunate cases in which families can care for orphans, households will have to combine, and thus fewer resources will be available for each child. School attendance goes down, as does economic productivity.

But it's the emotional consequences that are so difficult to take in.

I am raising two stepsons whose father died of AIDS. As young children, these boys had to watch their father decline toward helplessness and dementia. AIDS is usually a slow, debilitating, and terribly painful way to die.

Since Tony's death, they've had another challenge - reconciling the idea that their father got HIV from sex or drugs with the image of Daddy that they remember. Daddy was gay? Daddy shot up? These have got to be hard questions to live with.

The way my wife has tried to short-circuit the shame is by a policy of honesty. They have memories that they hold on to of a loving, attentive father, and it's one of our jobs to help them hold on to those memories without creating a false picture of who Tony was.

Juan Dixon, the final-four star of the Maryland basketball team and first-round draft choice of the Washington Mystics, is an AIDS orphan. Both his parents were drug users in Baltimore, and both died when Juan was a teenager.

Juan's story is a kind of miracle, and one might speculate that the unimaginable difficulties of his life have actually driven him to his success, which has exceeded expectations at every stage. But we don't know the pain he carries with him every day, nor how he overcomes it.

The other night I watched the ESPY sports awards. The wives of men who died fighting the hijackers on September 11 appeared, and they talked about how their children have lost something of inestimable value, but that the kids can take comfort in the fact that their fathers are heroes.

But it's harder to tell a child that their parent died as a consequence of ill-advised sex or drugs, harder for the children to hold onto a sense of their parents as good people. And since kids form their self-image in part through understanding their parents, it can be hard for people like Juan Dixon and my stepsons to figure out who they are or how to be who they want to be.

Losing a parent is hard enough, but losing a parent in a situation of stigma is harder yet. To me, AIDS is no more a cause for shame than going down in the World Trade Center; untimely death in all its forms is hard, but not shameful.

When the AIDS activists shouted down Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson at the Barcelona conference, it was ostensibly to protest American AIDS policy, especially its inadequate support for the treatment of HIV-positive people in the third world. But at its emotional core is the idea that American conservatives still regard AIDS as primarily a moral matter, that American conservatives still blame people for their own infection and regard AIDS as more sordid than any other cause of death.

For the sake of the children of Africa, and for the sake of my own kids, we need to change our thinking as well as our policy.

___

The writer teaches philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art.