On that Day, I will remember, I will not forget.
I will remember, and you will too, the sound of mothers crying over a lost child. I will remember, and you will too, the quiet look of desperation in the young girl who now knows that she is HIV-positive. You and I, we will not, we cannot forget the children left abandoned by the death of their parents. We cannot forget the children left in the care of the grandmothers. We can not forget the grandmothers who were the last ones standing. I will remember, and you will too, the lines of patients at the clinic, and our long talks with them, and the slow handfuls of pills that kept them alive, day by day, day by day. We will not forget, we will, we providers, all remember how few of our patients had medicine, how many could not get the test, or the x ray, or the pills.
We are providers of care in the age of AIDS. We are both the caring, and the afflicted. We will not, we cannot forget that there was a time when we could do nothing but give our hands and our hearts, and as providers of health care, we cannot forget that once upon a time, our only salve was give solace. At that time, we did not hold the cure. But even worse, we did not have then, what we have now.
There is no more terrible time than now, to be caught, as caregivers, in this great inbalance, between those that possess the future – our patients – and those that do not – our patients by proxy, in the other places we work – whether in prison, or in indigent care, or in clinics for the undocumented, or in Cambodia, the Thai border, the underbelly of Nairobi, Capetown, or Mumbai.
Someday we all will remember this. Because that day AIDS will be a memory. We will stand here, as we do now, and because we did what we needed to do, it will be past. It will be over, and we, working together, will have made a future without AIDS.