There's more than one reason why April is one of my least favorite months. Taxes, for one. And that other only sure thing: Death. Twleve years ago on the 12th, my friend Nick Bucci died of AIDS here in New York City, another statistic in a rising tide of them. Twelve years is a long time in some ways, and it's easy to let that memory recede quietly, so it's only a little ache, a sad memory. By now, that's what I've done, unless it's brought home to me as it was this year, just today.
Nick's death, I've always thought, was particularly cruel, not just because he was so young, but because in a couple more years, the current cocktail of drugs might have saved him. He could be turning 40 this year instead of being missed. What fun that would have been. I always wonder what I missed by not getting to know Nick better. Lots of laughs, certainly.
The irony of losing him in spring, when everything is coming back to life, didn't escape me either. I will always remember that the trees were in bloom on St. Mark's Place the week he died. I can't see them now without some sense of poignancy.
So what prompted me to make this post this year, and remember that Nick died 12 years ago this month, was reading in the Times about the revival of Larry Kramer's play "The Normal Heart" at the Public Theater. This is a play about the very early days of AIDS when the pandemic was just beginning. If you're too young to remember how freaked we were then by this inexplicable and mysterious devouring disease, if the possibility of contracting AIDS just seems like an everyday hazard to you, like walking out into traffic in front of a taxi, maybe you need to see this play. The situation hasn't gotten much better. In many ways, it's worse.
In the last CDC report for World AIDS Day (December 1, 2003) HIV infection rates for the US alone were up for the fourth straight year, and that's only in 29 states not including California and New York. The worldwide statistics are even scarier:
According to estimates from the Joint United Nations programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO), 37 million adults and 2.5 million children were living with HIV at the end of 2003. This is more than 50% higher than the figures projected by WHO in 1991 on the basis of the data then available. During 2003, some 5 million people became infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS. The year also saw 3 million deaths from HIV/AIDS - a high global total, despite antiretroviral therapy, which reduced AIDS and AIDS, related deaths in the richer countries.
Nick's death changed me in ways I probably wish it hadn't, although it also made me a stronger person in some ways. If you think watching your parents get old and have health problems, or burying them, is hard, it can't compare with watching someone your own age struggle with this disease which is so many diseases in one, and lose that struggle. Burying people your own age is traumatic in a way that losing people who've had full lives will never be. So spare your friends and family the pain. If you don't know how to protect yourself, find out.
Live a while longer to pay your taxes.
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