Lesson from a Different Pandemic

It was a Monday morning.  I had begun my shift at the hospital as the pager sounded.  “Report to the ICU. There is a case for you.”  That was 1981.  I was a hospital chaplain then.  I was called to provide pastoral support to the first person with AIDS I would meet.

Over the next fifteen years or so, the HIV pandemic was a primary focus of my work and life.  I organized human services and educational programs, wrote the first book on caring for family members with a person with AIDS, and completed my doctoral dissertation on AIDS-related bereavement.  Much more significantly, I watched people die.  It wasn’t just a few people.  In 1987 alone, at the height of the pandemic, twenty-seven people I knew died.  Over the years, I lost very close friends, a significant mentor, college classmates, and people who were regular visitors in my home – friends who celebrated my birthday and holidays with me.  The AIDS pandemic marked my life from age 24 to 40 – years that shouldn’t have been shrouded in grief.

As COVID19 began to appear in the news, I had a deep sense of foreboding that was all too familiar to me.  It felt as though it was happening all over again.  Questions about the illness, the cause, the symptoms, the ways the virus is transmitted, and signs of panic.  I don’t trust many of the news reports in the US which contradict each other.  As much as I can, I read articles from medical journals and health departments around the world.  But today, I’m not writing about a virus or how we should protect ourselves. (But please:  wash your hands for at least twenty seconds every few hours!)  Instead, I want to share a very important lesson from living through the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

It was 1988.  At that time, I was director of a regional HIV/AIDS ministry which assisted in establishing services in smaller cities in the Mid-Atlantic region.  I was exhausted and overwhelmed with grief.  I also maintained a small private practice working with people with AIDS.  My clients attended support groups organized by a local LGBT mental health clinic.  How they described these group meetings sounded dreadful to me.  It seemed as though at each meeting they compared symptoms and test results.  The focus was on the illness itself rather than living life with the illness.  Two of my clients were pushing me to start some kind of support group.  They said things like, “I don’t care what it is.  I need something different.”

The page-a-day meditation book, The Color of Light, had just been published.  It was written for people living with AIDS.  I decided to start a simple meditation group.  The first half of our meeting would be a simple meditation sitting, much like mindfulness. I taught the technique and we’d sit in a circle for twenty minutes and meditate.  After a short break, we’d read together the page for the day from The Color of Light and discuss it.  (No…we didn’t talk about AIDS.  We talked about the meditation and passages from the book which were often about hope, forgiveness, or compassion.)  We met every week for an hour. 

Something surprising happened. When we started the group, every person who attended was preoccupied with disease and terrified of dying.  AIDS filled their lives.  They stopped doing things they enjoyed and waited for death.  After about six months, I had trouble getting the group members to meet.  The group members stopped focusing on being sick.  Instead, they were focused on living.  I remember that one started traveling.  Another went back to school.  One man had always wanted to learn to dance, so he took classes.  Every one of them got back into life and was living fully.

Okay…. yes:  in time, they all died.  There were no effective treatments for HIV-infection until the 1990s.  But these individuals didn’t stop living and just wait for death.  They began to live as fully as they could.  Being grounded in spiritual practice gave them the vitality to embrace life day by day.  While it remains tragic that they all died before reaching the age of forty, they found things worth living for in their last years.

We can’t change the way the US government mishandled the HIV pandemic. The Reagan administration simply ignored it out of their sense of moral superiority.  The Trump administration is making light of the seriousness of COVID19, as Trump claims his hunches are more accurate than science.  We honestly can’t change the way this administration is mishandling the COVID19 pandemic.  But we can change the way in which we live each day.  We can maintain regular spiritual practice so that our lives are grounded in openness and hope.  We can limit the amount of news we digest and focus on a couple of news outlets known for accuracy in reporting.  (Consider reliable media sources like The New York Times, The Guardian, or The South China Morning Post – all available online.)  Most of all, we can focus on living.  Even if you need to quarantine yourself, it will be an opportunity to enhance your spiritual practice as well as to have long overdue phone conversations with loved ones. 

Many things I learned as a young adult regarding the HIV/AIDS pandemic are important for today. One critical lesson is to nurture life with spiritual practice.  I do feel as though I’ve been in this situation before.  Yes, there are differences between the HIV pandemic and the COVID19 pandemic.  But like the early days of AIDS, we didn’t know what to expect.  Now we live with uncertainty.  In that uncertainty, we can also live with trust and hope in life’s goodness which has the ability to inspire our minds and nurture our spirits.  It is with trust and hope that I continue to live as fully as I am able.

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