Points of light
Every day, the news we scan is filled with misery, blight, blinkered thinking, and the petty but punishing misbehavior of the narrow-minded. (Whether they are running for President or not.)
So I thought I’d share this story that I came across tonight, of a woman who in the 1980s and 1990s personally cared for hundreds of dying AIDS patients who’d been abandoned by their families. They had no one else — but they had her. She tended to them as best she could; in the most maudlin farewell party imaginable (but a necessary one) she filled out their death certificates with them because otherwise she’d have no family information on them; she personally interred their remains in her family’s cemetery plot; she did all of this with no recompense; and she kept their information in a Book of the Dead she began because no one else cared.
And no, this wasn’t in San Francisco or New York City. This was in Arkansas. Which adds bravery to the list of her characteristics, as others frequently pointed and stared.
Why does this story seem special? Because it’s the sort that’s rarely reported. I once knew someone who, unpaid and at personal cost, cared for someone she barely knew who had no family and who was dying, slowly, from Lou Gehrig’s Disease. I also remember a friend who left a well-paying job as a Fortune 500 corporate attorney so that she could offer free or almost-free legal services to the indigent immigrant community of Los Angeles. There are others I could add. I’m sure you have stories like this as well. They just don’t make the news very often.
That doesn’t make this woman’s accomplishment — the tremendous gift she gave to these hundreds of abandoned and painfully dying men — any less significant.
It’s just to say that she isn’t alone, and we all need to hear more stories like this one, about The Woman Who Cared.