FebulousFebruary 2025: Lost and Found

Day twenty eight

Ageing in 2020 – An Unexpected Year

12/11/2020

HIV activist Susan Paxton, PhD, reflects on the year.

Ageing in 2020 – An Unexpected Year

Back in 1999, I was looking death in the face. I didn’t think I would see my son finish primary school, let alone be around for over 20 more years. I had gone through the ‘normal’ trajectory of a person who had lived with HIV for ten years: my CD-4 T-cell count was down to 50 cells per cubic mm and my viral load was over 4 million particles per ml. That was the year I started taking anti-retroviral medication, began to return to ridiculously good health, and survived the HIV pandemic that had killed so many people I loved.

Soon afterwards, I ran in the Sydney Olympic Torch Relay, went public in the media and completed a PhD. I began to work extensively in Asia and the Pacific as a public health consultant to governments and NGOs, United Nations agencies, and networks of people living with HIV. I conducted peer-based research into discrimination against people living with HIV and assessed HIV programs in many countries. I also conducted training in human rights, public speaking and facilitation skills. This was an exhilarating time in my life. Once again, I was part of the changes I wanted to see happen in our region. After years of depleted health, I was productive, energetic and able to relish life more fully than I had been able to for so very long.

A few years ago, I retired from formal employment, my son left to work in London, and I anticipated the next years filled with painting and travelling to visit the friends I have made around the world. And then 2020 hit us.

How many of us living with HIV ever imagined that our entry into the second decade of the second millennium could be so dramatic? In February, my son arrived in Melbourne to visit me (how lucky was I?) and on the drive from the airport he was shocked to see the reddish-brown smoke that lingered in the air after the bushfires that marked our apocalyptical entry into 2020. Covid-19 was just making news and I realised it would impact my life and the lives of millions of people around the world. I told my son I would need to hibernate for the winter and I began to stock up my cupboards with protein-filled goods such as baked beans and tuna.

Although I knew, intellectually, that a global pandemic was about to be unleashed, and I had to protect myself, I had no idea of the emotional impact it would wreak not just on me, but on so many people around me and so quickly.

During this year, I have journeyed through the five stages of grief many times (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). Sometimes I have done this over a period of days, and sometimes I have whipped through them in a few hours. Perhaps having lived with HIV for 30 years prepared me with the resilience I needed for this year. Within 20 years, I lost more than 100 friends and colleagues from HIV-related illness. I never imagined I would live through another pandemic, just as indiscriminate as HIV, but this time one that most of us has had to go through alone, without the contact of friends or family. I was disheartened but not surprised when I saw on the news in April, a shot of a garage door in western Melbourne on which somebody had spray-painted “Die Chinese Covid-19”. Immediately I recalled a terrible day in the 90s when my late friend Sonja found scrawled on her fence “Die AIDS Bitch”. Stigmatisation happens by frightened people.

Throughout the HIV pandemic, we have been there for each other, able to hold and comfort each other, but with COVID, those of us who live alone have no ability to hold a loved one in our arms. I did not see or hug my niece and her two daughters for nine months and I found that very difficult.

When the pandemic first started, like many people, I was virtually immobilised. I had many things I could have done – reading, writing, painting – but I had no motivation. The enormity of what was happening was too much for me. Emotions became unpredictable. Two wonderful women I knew died early in the pandemic, both amazons … Dr Gita Ramjee, a South African academic who for decades did great work in HIV prevention among women, and Dolores Dockery who had lived with HIV since ’94, ran the Hyacinth Group in NYC, and had visited Melbourne during the AIDS2014 Conference.

I adopted a two-year-old stray cat (from the Lost Dogs’ Home, where else), and she has been a lifesaver. She is a short-haired, grey tabby, now named Venus – my shining star. She curls up next to me each night and her beating heart and deep purring console me.

I did eventually get motivated, and managed to get into some crafting and painting. In June, I had planned to take my grandniece to Fiji, but that quickly had to be postponed for at least 12 months. So, I decided to bring the tropics to me and painted a mural outside my bathroom window. I also ran a couple of Zoom workshops for women living with HIV, which was great to enable us to feel more connected during these strange times. I had hoped to see my son again within the next year, but this will become the longest time I have ever been away from him. As 2020 progressed, I became more at peace with how radically life has changed, albeit with occasional moments of overwhelming sadness about what has happened in the world.

A decade ago in 2010, I travelled to 15 different countries in a single year, most for work. I am trying to accept the sad thought that if a successful vaccine does not eventuate, I may not be able to travel again to England, my birth country and where I still have three dear cousins and a handful of lifelong friends.

It’s not easy for any of us, but maybe because I have been through such challenging times in the past, I can cope more easily. I cry and I am robust. We can be both. I am a sociable person and at the same time, I have realised the inner strength to ride this one. I have allowed myself to play … spending 24 hours making a two-roomed box cat house for Venus, and decorating it inside and out. I have smashed crockery to make a mosaic and I have woven and felted a massive COVID particle. During my life, I have been unlawful at times, for reasons of politics or pleasure. This spring my unlawfulness amounted to standing in the middle of my road at 4am, unmasked, looking at the moon and listening to the dawn calls of blackbirds.

Having spent most of this year in one of the longest and toughest lockdowns in the world, I have reflected on how grateful I am for so many things in my life. I feel so lucky that my parents emigrated to Australia when I was a child. I am lucky to have safe, warm, secure housing and I don’t live hand to mouth. I have sufficient income to cover my needs and my modest desires, and my health is good and enables me to live independently.

Despite this horrible year, I have now lived long enough to know that everything changes and nothing stays the same forever. I have no idea how I will feel next time I am in the company of dozens of people. Many of us need easing back in. Congratulations to all of us who continue to contribute to arresting this virus. We are not going to get to a new normal for a while, but hopefully we will emerge with greater resilience.

Day thirteen

Shopping for essentials

Essential: completely necessary: extremely important…

Like Art, the Joy of creating, the Passion for life, and the excitement of exploring ideas and worlds inside your head and out there, where birds sing and polar bears roam shrinking glaciers. Like smelling the wind off the snow, and feeling the spray off the waterfall and understanding their songs.
These are not available in Lidl.

Like a meaning to your life, that makes you want to get up in the morning for the joy the day might bring. Like enthusiasm for getting it done, whatever it is. Like understanding how that it fits into your purpose. Like challenges and meeting them head-on… with a fellow human to share the hilarity of your failures and the recognition of your success. Challenges more interesting and varied than surviving day after almost identical day of social media, Netflix and bananabread, and smiling grimly at the observation that we are lucky to be safe. Like a vision of the future, to hope for and work towards, that we are not afraid to seek.
These are not available by click-and-collect.

Like You, my friend, whom I cannot see or touch, and cannot visit, except by the slippery and deceitful glass screen of videochat. Except in my memories, and my hopes for the future. But you are essential to me.
And you are not available via Amazon.
Even though you are one.

Fin McMorran (age 64 and 3 quarters) Eighton Banks, Tynesid

Day twelve

I scream at the sea. 

The sea hears me, but no reply. 

She goes on, being, being the sea. 

Swelling and heaving,

Crashing and sighing, 

Yielding.  

To rhythm.

In peace. 

I stare into the waves, 

The waves gaze back, but still, no reply. 

She goes on, being the sea. 

Swelling and heaving, 

Crashing and sighing, 

Yielding. 

To rhythm. 

In peace. 

I yearn for the sea,

The sea draws me, draws me in. 

I am swelling and heaving, crashing and sighing, yielding. 

To the rhythm. 

To the peace. 

Within me.

Jayne Hazelden (age 50) Brighton

DAY eleven

Four seasons in Lockdown

Spring

Washed our hands and stayed inside

Appreciated spring blossom

Learnt the songs of garden birds

ditched bras and wore trackie bottoms

Our screens became gods and we drank martinis at Corona o’clock

Summer

In May and June we took the knee to show that Black Lives Matter

We recognised our privilege and 

lives that police had shattered

July and August brought the sun

And pub gardens welcomed us outside

Eating out didn’t help us out as we soon again had to hide

Autumn 

Lockdown pounds started taking their toil

I ran and nurtured the body 

I watched the leaves change colours 

and took photos of the sky

pink, orange and purple sunsets

Starling murmurations passing by

Winter

Darkness came and shit got real

No parties or big gatherings

We mostly saw our mates on screen

And missed our seasonal happenings

More people getting sick and dying

We all stay home and drink

await the weekly van from ASDA and the call to vaccinate

Kerry Mitchell (age 50’ish) Brighton

Day ten

Haiku for Lockdown

Was twelve months last Jan

Chemo in a pandemic

Survived it I did

Jacqui Soo (age 59) and a proud Scouser

Day nine

Watching each wrenching episode of ‘It’s a sin’ led me to consider the impact of the AIDS pandemic on the future of our LGBT community and even on society as a whole. Certainly being gay in most countries other than the USA and most of Europe continued to be fraught with prejudice and physical danger but change was taking place and it was often thrilling.

I remember standing in the middle of the Castro in San Francisco in the mid 90s and with hundreds and hundreds of other LGBT people celebrating, and sending off to Washington, the first out member of President Clinton’s administration. And here and there, and more frequently, there followed regular examples of prominent people now publicly acknowledging their sexuality.

Gay Prides sprung up all over the place and the authorities gradually accepted that such events could take place in the centres of cities rather than in the backstreets where they could be ignored. Those marches in London particularly produced a sea of thousands of us claiming Piccadilly and the West End and we were inspired and encouraged by being there together. I remember hearing a gay man saying to his more nervous partner “I told you, you would like it”, or the straight woman being amazed at the thousands marching and being told “now you know what it’s like being a minority”.

The police, whose shameful record of harassment of gay man over the decades and which had destroyed the futures of so many men, now began to soften in their approach. You could see the change as each Pride followed another and hostility gave way to acceptance – even eventually,may I suggest, joyful acceptance. In the late 90’s I remember a somewhat camp young thing approaching an officer and asking “can I have my photo taken with you?”, to which he replied “OK, but don’t kiss me, OK?”

The public belief in the sinfulness of gay sex, with its accompanying abhorrence, also took an unexpected turn. Whereas the government’s pronouncements on the subject more than inferred that we shouldn’t do ‘it’ ever, a saner approach now took its place and no gay pub, club, sauna, or disco (and there were now many of them) was complete without condoms, lube and dental dams being freely and liberally available, and the word now was ‘always use them’.

Nevertheless there were still examples, many of them, where being gay might be tolerated, but would be a bar to promotion, employment or social acceptance. There were for example very few ‘out’ teachers who achieved promotion and the same was true for a number of professions. I remember one of our senior teachers publicly saying that he could never agree to homosexuals being promoted to high positions, and, of course, Section 28 still loomed large over the whole teaching profession.

We also learned the necessity and the freedom of publicly expressing our grief for our ‘fallen’ buddies and to honour them too. It was to be later that official memorials would be set up in cities in many western countries but the creation of the AIDS Memorial Quilt both here and in the USA was a uniquely moving example of how much our dead meant to us. I have no idea where the British one is now kept, but it should surely be displayed regularly to remind us all of those dark days.

At a London Pride in the 90’s one of my ex students held a champagne breakfast at his home before the parade and I was invited. Following the breakfast I stood on the underground platform, to make my way to the start of the march and saw a couple standing close by holding what was clearly a banner. I approached and asked “Are you going to the same place as me?” They replied “Are you going to Pride? It’s our first time. Our son came out to us last week and can’t come today so we decided to come in his place.” They were wearing t shirts which proclaimed ‘We are proud of our gay son’
And I cried!

Roger Newman ( almost 80) Margate

Day eight

Lockdown shockdown stunned

Locktail cocktails, who zooms who?

Sweet pea seeds in pots

A flurry of snow

Swirling and birling so free

Awwwwwww  grandkids with sledge

Fiona Thomson, (age 60) Westgate

Day seven

Memorial Day


Caustic hollow,
Man’s inhumanity to man.
I didn’t drop the ball,
I wasn’t even born.
Excuse enough to turn away? And then get on through,
My own dark, locked down day.
Another decade, another, pointless carnage.
No blame, but still the political shame
Of those born to the means,
Choosing a lack of care Disguised as innocent unaware.

Janet Jones (age 56) Brighton

Day 6

LOCKDOWN.

The gearbox shouldn’t have been visible through where the radiator grill was supposed to be.

In fact, even with the grill removed, it should at the very least been the radiator to rest my eyes upon.

But this venerable workhorse of adventure and toil; a lady probably of the desert or the savana, both radiators and engine had been ripped from her, leaving an unpowered, driveless gearbox with four forward gears, one reverse, and a choice of two or four wheel drive, impotent, stationary; a piece of carrion at the mercy of vultures and scavengers.

Dishevelled as she was, the venerable carcass was still beautiful, almost as exquisite at ‘The Iimes,’ a 1930’s double fronted Art Deco house and home, hiding behind a two meter high wall, only a hundred meters up the road.

Lockdown precipitated these discoveries with its hour of exercise. An hour’s exercise is a walk of three miles, five miles if you jog, maybe ten if you cycle.

My shoes pound the pavement; burning off calories, seeking to satiate that longed for hope of human interaction; ‘Hello, lovely day isn’t it,’ ‘What a lovely dog.’ Barely a philosophical discourse, but contact with another human being.

On foot, I almost stumble on a small bunch of snowdrops; springs coming.

On foot, a stream embolden to riverhood alerts me to its presence by a watery roar. It’s not a place to swim, it’s foaming breast fed by incessant rains is angry. Yet even here, a mother with four ducklings, webbed feet paddling for their lives, instantly think a source of bread crusts has arrived to feed them.

What surprises me the most? Ducklings so early in the season? Or that in thirty years of traversing this road, I’d never realised a water course of such volume awaited discovery.

On foot you see so much more. 

Without lockdown, I’d probably never have taken this walk.

Peter c-Hill, (60’ish) Whitstable