EMOTIONAL RESPONSES TO DEATH AND HIV INFECTION
What makes HIV infection different is death at an early age in the midst of the deaths of many friends. Most people who die of HIV infection are in their thirties. Someone who has HIV infection probably knows many others with the disease. Because they are young, they have worries about dying that older people do not. Young people have less time to get used to death gradually. They are not yet tired of living. They have not slowly come to see themselves as dispensable and mortal. They do not understand what to do about mortality, how to sum up and conclude their lives. “I have to face my own mortality,” said Steven, “which I didn’t expect to face until I was eighty.” They look at their relatively short lives and ask questions they are not used to asking. “Usually people ask in their sixties, ‘What have I accomplished?’ Alan said. “I’m going to have to ask that earlier.” They often feel resentful that they must ask these questions so early, and they feel unready to supply the answers. They also worry about dying before their parents. They want to be able to help their parents out as their parents age. “Now I’m looking at dying before my parents,” said Dean. “That changes the natural process. It hurts.” Because people with HIV infection often know others who are dying of the disease, they have concrete images of what will happen to them. They visit their friends in the hospital and think, “Is this what will happen to me? Is this what I will look like? Is this what I will feel?” “I know what the last few months are,” said Alan, “and I wish I hadn’t seen the suffering. Knowing what it looks like is difficult.” Dean lost twenty friends in two years. “It gets stronger with each one,” he said. “Closer to home.” People with HIV infection say too much death surrounds them. “I have so many friends who are disappearing,” Steven said. “In one year, I went to twenty-six funerals. I sit at the funerals and think how wonderful the person was, and how they looked before the end, and how long will it be before I’m there.” For that reason, some, like Steven, no longer go to funerals. Alan said, “I’ve been to forty-seven funerals. That’s my limit.”*222\191\2*
