When I was in the third grade, my teacher called all the girls aside and told us to make sure that whenever we went to a public bathroom, we put toilet paper on the seat before we sat down. If we didn't, she said, we might get a terrible disease like AIDS. I had no idea what AIDS was, but my dad was a doctor, so I went home and asked him. My dad reassured me that I could not get AIDS from a toilet seat and that I didn't need to worry. But I could sense a quiet anger as he explained to me what the disease was and how a person contracted it. Being a doctor, he was really good at that. I probably got the most technical birds-and-bees talk a third-grader ever got. But I got something else from that interaction with my dad. I could see that he really cared, although I didn't understand exactly what about.

When I got older, my dad got involved with an organization called RAIN (Regional AIDS Interfaith Network), which worked with people with AIDS in northeastern Arkansas. He was a part of a care team-a group of people who provided medical, emotional, and psychological support to a person with HIV or AIDS. I started to hear the stories of the people who contracted the illness, and those who died. There was a wife and mother who got the disease from her husband, who didn't realize he was HIV positive when they were married. Another was a man who grew up in Arkansas, moved to New York, got involved with several different people there, and returned to Arkansas sick, angry, and depressed at his own illness and the memory of so many friends who had died. A third was a seventy-year-old woman who contracted the virus in a blood transfusion after a car accident. I watched my father care for these people and recognized what a good person he was. I wanted to be that kind of person.

In high school, I joined a care team and met Bill. Bill had full-blown AIDS but was fairly healthy when I met him. He was a complainer. I spent my time with him trying to make him more comfortable in his chair, heating up food that wasn't quite hot enough for him to eat, and remaking the coffee that was too strong or too weak. Each time I left frustrated that he couldn't just be a nice guy. I was doing so much for him, and his response was to complain even more. Then Bill developed a disease that slowly deteriorated the tendons in his joints. First his left shoulder, then the right one, then his hips. He had to have surgery, which fused his bones together in his hips and shoulders to stop the intense pain he felt there every time he tried to move. The surgery confined him to a wheelchair, and he had to have help getting in bed, taking a shower, preparing his food. One day when I went over to visit, he just cried. For the first time, he said, "Thank you for coming over. I am so lonely." I had to work to keep back tears myself. For all his complaining, I really cared a lot about Bill. Before I left, I helped him into bed, turned off his lights, and wished him good night.

When I went to college, I wanted people to know that I was a good person. I wanted to know that for myself, as well. I thought that in order to do that, I would have to have a "cause." I felt that I needed something outside of myself to fight for, something I could really care about. I knew that I cared about all the issues surrounding AIDS. I cared personally because I had watched Bill go through so much pain. I also knew how lonely Bill was, and I didn't want other people who were so sick to be so lonely. But it was so mixed up for me. I did care deeply about it, but at the same time, used it as a way to assure myself and others that I was a good person. I thought that by working with people who had AIDS, I would be viewed by others in the same way that I viewed my father. I thought that taking a political stand on an issue such as this one would make me a compassionate person.

I also knew that no one would believe me if I just spouted politics. As soon as I got to school, I found an AIDS hospice about fifteen minutes away from where I was living. I called them immediately, went to a three-day training session, and began to work. I went there every Thursday. Quickly, my schedule became very regular. I would show up, take David to the hospital for his dialysis, drop him off there, return to the house, feed J.J. through the tube in his stomach because he could no longer swallow, fix some food for Martin (who didn't like me and wouldn't eat what I fixed anyway) and Michael, who always gratefully accepted the food I brought into his bedroom, then pushed it around on his plate for a while before telling me he was too tired to eat. I'd take his food away, then return to sit on the end of his bed and talk with him until he fell asleep. Then I'd go out, curl up on the sofa in the living room, and do homework or watch TV until the other caregiver returned to the house with David.

Most of the time, I didn't exactly look forward to going there. David was hilarious, and the ride to the hospital was always fun, but returning to feed J.J. was difficult. I never got used to feeding him Ensure through a tube to his stomach. Martin was frustrating, and Michael was so sad. Martin died within a month of the start of my volunteering, and J.J. died soon after. David just seemed to get stronger and stronger as time went by.

Michael was a true friend for me. Sitting on the end of his bed talking with him every Thursday was something I did look forward to. What struck me about Michael was that the first time we talked, although the conversation began superficially-talking about what I was majoring in and where he was from-we fell very quickly into talking about spirituality. Michael didn't have a particular religious belief, but he believed in angels. He didn't believe that we all have our own personal angel sitting on our shoulder protecting us all the time. What he believed about angels was that they had lessons to teach, and everything that happens to you in this world is a gift from an angel, no matter how horrible you think it is. You have to look for what it has to teach you.

Michael had been through tough times in his life, and he'd always been able to find the lesson in it. But now he had AIDS, and on top of that, he had just been diagnosed with leukemia. The doctors said they couldn't do anything about the leukemia because Michael was so weak from the AIDS already. They'd given him less than six months to live. Dying was a gift from the angels that he couldn't quite accept. And I was there to watch him struggle with it.

Holding Michael's hand wasn't enough for me. I wanted to do something more. I wanted to take the caring I had learned and put it out in the world. I also had to admit that I wanted more people to know that I was doing good in the world. I organized a spring break trip that year, taking nineteen other students to Washington, D.C., to work with several different organizations which were dealing with the problem of AIDS. We delivered food to homebound people with AIDS, stuffed envelopes for an educational organization working with different high schools in the area, took AIDS tests ourselves to see what that experience was like, and volunteered in a hospice for people living with AIDS. People were, I believe, profoundly moved by the experience, but for me there was something missing. There was something about the experience I had sitting in Michael's bedroom that I couldn't possibly recreate in that week of service. And I did the trip for the wrong reasons. AIDS was still my "cause." It was still what was supposed to make me more humble, more caring, more giving than other people. It was still supposed to make me a saint.

Shortly after we returned from spring break, I got a phone call from one of the caregivers at the hospice. Michael had died. The memorial service was going to be in a week. I got a glimpse of what Michael must have been experiencing as he tried to deal with his final gift from the angels. I didn't know how to understand that this was a gift. Maybe the lesson in it was that politics are never just legislation or education. Maybe the lesson was that politics don't really matter when you get to such a human level with other people. Maybe it was that my politics were pointless, or that I could never again have a "cause" just to have a cause. Maybe the lesson was that there is something greater than my cause, or Michael's gift, or that disease.

I stopped working at the hospice. Michael's death really shook me up. I couldn't do this just because it was my "cause" anymore. I felt guilty for using these people's lives to maintain my respect for myself. I felt angry that being devoted to a worthy cause could leave me so hurt and confused. I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the disease and the amount of work that would have to be done to eradicate it. I didn't think there was anything else I could do.

A year later, Bill died.

I just moved recently and came across a gift I bought for Michael and never had the opportunity to give. It was a handcrafted wind chime with the title "Angel Song." The memories of the hours I spent with Michael and Bill returned. Four years later, I still have trouble articulating the gift I was given in the lives and deaths of these two men. I was humbled by my own self-righteousness; I lost much of my naïveté about the satisfaction of taking up political causes, but I am still confused. Should I do this kind of service even though my motivations are impure? Did Bill really care why I was helping him get in bed, or did he just care that he was able to sleep for a little while? Does everything happen for a reason? If so, should I work at all? Or is my futile effort part of some cosmic plan? There is always the hope that it isn't futile. Maybe it isn't about changing the entire world. The world might be a lost cause, but perhaps there really is something profoundly important in the conversations Michael and I had when I sat at the foot of his bed. Maybe there is something to be learned from helping a man to eat, from lifting a disease-ridden body into bed. So even with all these uncertainties, I guess, in a way, I believe in angels, too.

Finally To Soar(top)
Leila Plummer

Yesterday right here I saw:
a caterpillar
black and grey
horned and sharp-spiked
arching back
from the dusty dirt
as though in painful shock
as though it wished to fly.

I wondered:
what karma, balance, god
placed it there?
Or did it place itself
and the irony is: it has forgotten.

Today in a distant town:
a Butterfly.
Red and Gold
Antennae crowned
flutters wings
like a glint of sun
dazzling, insane beauty
almost too much to bear

I wonder: if the baroque, lovely, gaudy
is ever too much
if the insect misses
its old ugliness
if metamorphosis
ever reverses
or if simply
finally
it is content
to drink petaled nectar
and Soar.