Holly and I shared a birthday and a few historical life experiences. By the time of our first meeting, we both had experienced unfortunate relationships with men in our youth and were still reaping or weeding through the consequences. In addition to our dates of birth and star-crossed taste in men, she and I were similar in physical appearance, in being raised as generic suburban American girls with fortunately bland childhoods, in our love of children and their activities, in our alternating aversion and attraction to spirituality and religion, in our varied and pop-tinted musical tastes, and in our ability to overcome core shyness with a deep breath and a little chutzpah.

The biggest difference between Holly and me was what killed her.

Holly died in 1994 from respiratory distress during her third bout of pneumocystis carinii (jaroveci) pneumonia, or PCP, a deadly and unusual form of pneumonia that is typically only seen in people with weakened immune systems. Now controllable and even preventable through medication, PCP was once the major cause of death for people with HIV.

The big difference between my friend and me was that she had HIV.

I made the mistake once of saying out loud that it was "but for the grace of God" that HIV had not landed within my own veins. After all, there was virtually nothing that Holly had done that I had not, except that I had never had sex with or otherwise shared body fluids with her husband. My mistake, as it was kindly pointed out by a former-pastor-turned-caseworker comrade of mine, was in assuming that God had anything at all to do with who acquires HIV and who does not. I have never used the phrase again, in any circumstance.

Holly's death, only a year after she held her five-year-old as he passed into another existence, also because of the virus in his body, sent me reeling for longer than the others. By that time, I had been working in the HIV arena for several years, and it would be several more before the funerals finally took their toll on my career. By the time Holly died, unexpectedly and only two days after I'd said goodbye to her as she sat up eating her hospital dinner and griping about having to be held there over the weekend because of staffing problems more than because of her health condition, I had been to countless funerals of people ranging in age from four to sixty years, all of whom succumbed to HIV-promoted diseases. I thought that I had seen the worst and felt as bad as possible when Holly's son Thomas died. I was wrong.

In the decade since she left, I have tried in vain to write about Holly's life and death. I did manage to mention her briefly in an essay on motherhood, but more often than not, my attempts to detail her existence and legacy have started, and then just stopped.

Ten years is long enough to submit to emotional pain or avoid it altogether. Someone, if not I, owes Holly a testament. It may as well be me.

It didn't take me long to figure out what Holly would want me to communicate on her behalf. She was, above all, a practical woman and a woman who cared for everyone who crossed her path. She would want me to simply share the facts, in hopes that others might be spared what she and hers were not.

To wit...

AIDS is a syndrome of maladies brought on after a body has acquired the human immunodeficiency virus, better known as HIV.

HIV attacks the body's immune system, making it less able to fight off infection by common and uncommon illness.

When a person with HIV eventually acquires any of several particular illnesses (called "opportunistic infections" because they take advantage of the opportunity to run rampant in a weakened immune system), that person can then be said to have AIDS, or Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome. AIDS is sometimes described as the most advanced stage of "HIV disease."

The people who are at risk for acquiring and/or transmitting HIV from person to person are:

• those who engage in sexual contact with other people,
• those who use drugs, and
• those who work in healthcare settings or who are intimate with others who work in healthcare settings.

It should go without saying, but I've learned through others' misery to avoid assumptions... it is virtually impossible to tell if someone has HIV in their body without a specific test. You cannot tell whether someone is infected or not by virtue of their appearance, their claims, their socioeconomic status, their general and/or overall health, or any other characteristic aside from the results of a bona fide HIV test.

The 15th International AIDS Conference begins soon in Bangkok, Thailand. It is an important gathering of the foremost researchers and workers in all fields related to HIV: the medical, the social, the political. You can learn the latest information through the links lining the sides of How to Make a Family's frontpage and this page.

There are many more online resources for understanding more about HIV/AIDS. One of the most comprehensive and easiest to read is KNOWHIVAIDS.org. You can also use their database to find testing locations near you.

There you go, Holly.
We miss you.