Dedicated to Danny

Dedicated to Danny

Danny

Gone too soon

Danny was my cousin. He died too early from an AIDS related disease. I wish I had known him better.

I finally got all of Danny's article added to this page. I'm not good with date's unless they are written down. Danny was born, I believe in 1945; he died sometime after this article was written in 1992 but before his mother died in 1994.

What I knew about Danny

The article "What's It Like To Be HIV Positive" is rather long, 7 and 1/2 pages. It is well worth reading all of it. If you don't have time to read it all at one time, copy and paste it into a document program on your computer to read when you have time. Or I can e-mail you a copy.

As children, we saw a lot of our cousins because Dad took us to visit family on a regular basis. As adults we all kind of drifted apart.

I knew that Danny had plans to go to Seminary and become a Minister after he graduated from high school, and he did study for it but became a school teacher for a while.

I suspected that Danny was "different" when I was in high school but didn't know for sure until years later. When he quit his teaching job near where he lived and headed for the West coast I didn't hear much about him for years. I did hear somewhere along the line that he had confessed to his mother that he was homosexual.

Eventually he came back home after ending up in a Mexican jail near death. One of his brothers went and got him to bring him back. It was after this experience that I learned more about him and the lifestyle he had been living and about his writing.

He had changed careers, he was now a Master Chef. He had struggled for years with reconciling his lifestyle with his belief in God and Jesus as his Savior. I found out that when he was young one of the men from the church he attended had molested him and convinced him that he liked it and not to tell anyone. He also told us that 99% of the gay men he knew had the same experience. He said that "we are not born that way. After a lot of therapy and inner struggle, he renounced the lifestyle, returned to his biblical roots, and found a church that was compassionate and did not judge him on his past.

We had some interesting and educational discussions on some of the articles that he had written. I wish that I had a copy of the one he told me about where he told about the scientific proof that he had found that disproved Darwins theory and that the amount of dust on the moon wasn't nearly as deep as it would have been had the earth been around as long as some claim.

I've no doubt that conversations with him in heaven will be very interesting.

The following was written by Danny on August 24, 1992, not long before he died.

WHAT'S IT LIKE TO BE HIV POSITIVE?

Being HIV positive is similar to having ones body in a cat and mouse game between health and disease. Like the competitive cat and mouse my body is continually fighting for health while HIV is constantly setting me up for disease. The medical professionals call HIV a manageable illness. That means an infected person can do things to help in the struggle for health. So far a cure for HIV in the overall war is a lost cause, yet one can maintain temporary wins over the infection with drugs like AZT and the use of good health and hygiene measures.

With HIV infection I have to be more tuned to subtleties of my body. To ignore these body barometers is to invite suffering and death. Some days I know my body is winning. I feel great. I feel strong. Other days its a chore just to get out of bed. Although I am relatively young (46) I feel like the disease has made me old. With HIV I am like someone in his 70s or 80s. Like a body made fragile with age, my body has been made vulnerable with a virus. Like a senior citizen I live closer to the edge of life where I can get sick and die. I tend to worry more. I sometimes ask myself questions like: I wonder what ailment Ill suffer next? Will the next illness be one I cannot overcome? How many years? Months? Weeks do I have?

Whats really strange is that such questions can quickly be swept aside when Im feeling good. When one isnt sick today it is easy to fall into the illusion that one is not sick at all. Unlike the older person who can see their feeble condition, I can look in my mirror and see a youthful picture of health. However I must remember that this picture with the force of a thousand words in it can deceive me. I cannot mistake a temporary win for victory over the whole war.

This temporary health can mask an HIV condition and cause lack of sympathy to rise up in some who fail to see that one really has a problem. Many have a shallow view of health in the same way that they have a shallow view of life. Some determine health simply by outward appearances and fail to grasp what is really happening in the body. How many have died of cancer or AIDS because they had such a shallow view of their health? Is it safe to assume that a person really has no problem until the problem can be seen with ones eyes? Such visually jailed logic follows the notion that only observable things really exist.

I'm going to be adding more of Danny's writings but to avoid the page taking too long to load only links to the articles will be on this page. The pages will be seperate.

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