FACING HARSH REALITIES…….

Death sucks. Seriously it does. It is also one of those realities I wish I didn’t have to face. I don’t know about you but I fear death. In fact I don’t get it when people talk about being okay with it and the fact that they would be at peace when it happens. I don’t like going to new places and for me this would mean a big change for me.

Five years ago when the VCT counselor told me I had tested positive for HIV, I saw death in her eyes. Like she was thinking to herself
“Oh God she is too young to die.” I was numb for the next like 10minutes, I could see her lips move but I didn’t hear a word she said. All I visualized was me dead, my parents being crashed by it, my dad yelling obscenities about the man who did this to me and the last part of Philly Lutaya’s movie and that mournful song that use to play in it.
Now if you are in my age group, you probably watched this movie in school (early high school) and afterwards got a very scary lecture on how boys are bad and how AIDS kills.

As she handed me my referral letter, she (the counselor) told me that I didn’t have to be afraid because
“If you do as the doctor says, you can live for as long as 10years or more.” This was meant to make me feel better I guess. It didn’t, I actually panicked. I was just 24; I didn’t want to die 10years later!

From then on I have had death thrown to my face more times than I can imagine. I saw it in the faces of my family and friends as soon as they found out. The fear in their eyes was too evident. My parents started calling me every two days to ask how I was doing-before we would go a month or two. My friend Fred didn’t talk to me for almost six months. He later on told me that he didn’t want to watch me die because it would have been too painful for him. One of my friends actually burst into tears saying I was her safety net and if I died where would she go incase her husband walked out of their marriage(they had been trying for a baby and I guess she was just stressed) maybe that’s one of the reasons why I went into my small world and hid there.

Time takes it all away they say, because with time I sort of got immune to the looks. I guess I had waited for some medical drama to occur and two years gone and I not even having as much as a headache sort of did it for me. My family and friends have gotten used to the idea that I am going nowhere anytime soon and at least my parents and I don’t talk every two days.
I did what the doctor said, read the internet for what the doctor didn’t say and with time learnt how to get my groove back. I don’t think about death so much…well until someone I know of, know or met even once passes on.

Yesterday was one such day. I went to a memorial service for a lady I came to know of in October. I felt the need to go for moral support. As I listened to the eulogy and watched everyone cry, I couldn’t help having that feeling; that scary, dark sad feeling that one day I could fall sick and end up dead. It didn’t help that the girl was 25 and having just cleared college had a lot to live for.

I believe this has got a lot to do with me not going to church often but I didn’t quite understand what the pastor meant by “don’t fear death because you are going to rest”
I don’t want to go rest right now; I want to see my son finish school, I want to advance my career, I want to buy a house and have another baby or two, I want to totally get lost in love again and do crazy things.

As I sat in that church yesterday and semi listened to the pastor as I counted all these things I want to do before i go ‘to rest’, it finally dawned to me why testing HIV positive is such a hard thing to go through. You are hit by this huge reality, sometimes at the prime of your age when you have a long ‘to do’ list to go through. And just like that you have to deal with it, the changes it brings to your life, the conscious awareness that something isn’t quite right with your health, the fear that your family, friends, colleagues and the society may treat you differently once they find out and of course death.

Nelson Mandela once said, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”
Maybe if I work at it, I could work at the little fears I get whenever I am faced with the harsh reality of death.