How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one loved the pilgrim soul in you... (W.B. Yeats)

If it wasn’t the smell it was the scene that took my breath away.

The nurse scurried out when we walked in and Uncle Tony’s hand trembled in mine. Uncle Tony’s hand trembled, imagine.

The IVs and beeping machines that surrounded the hospital bed couldn’t distract me from the eighty pound body lying silent and still.

“There’s nothing they can do for her,” Uncle Tony said.

I sniffed, regrettably because it carried the terrible hospital smell deep into my nose. I could even taste it.

“The best we can do is to make her comfortable.”

She didn’t move when he smoothed his hand over her dull blonde hair. It looked white in this light. She looked dead in this light.

“I did this to her,” he whispered.

“No,” I shook my head.

“It was Vincent. He gave it to me and I gave it to her. I killed her.”

“Uncle Tony, you didn’t kill her. You didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that it did.”

“You have to stop beating yourself up.”

Perhaps the preacher needed to start speaking the sermons to the mirror.

Uncle Tony hugged me. He had never hugged me like that before. It was desperate. Uncle Tony had never been desperate before. He cried into my hair, “That’s going to be me.”

What could I say to that? I didn’t know a lot about HIV or AIDS but I did know that he was right. Another person I loved would die.

Death was bombarding me. It was everywhere. I suppose when you live like we all did it was bound to happen. We had a high mortality rate. We were like gladiators, life expectancy wise. You can’t get attached to a gladiator. You know they could die at any given day at the office and that was what it was like for us.

I felt like I had made progress when I started to feel again but maybe I needed to attain a functional form of my prior catatonic state if I was going to survive. It was really hard to love people because I kept losing them.