Quiet

I took down the post I wrote the other day in which I re-published an email from Christine Maggiore, in her own words, about a week before she died suddenly and unexpectedly at home, on December 27.

I want to contribute toward a much needed silence. Things will work themselves out, truths will emerge, whatever is, is.

I don’t want to bring anything loud or contentious to Christine’s memory, or provide a feeding ground for those few vultures whose egos remain tied up in their insatiable death wishes, not only those they projected onto Christine, but onto all HIV positive people they wish to enslave with their cult of fear, and deprive of the fundamental human right to make their own choices.

Christine lived with a (fluctuating) positive HIV status for almost 17 years, not only healthy, but as leader for those who felt voiceless and powerless. She represented, and stood for the highest ideals of truth-seeking, life, love, health, and freedom from tyranny. She represented herself in all that she wrote, said, and enacted, each day that she lived. I defy anybody to find one instance of Christine Maggiore communicating malevolence or ill-will toward any human being, no matter what they had done to her. I also defy anybody to find one example in which her attackers chose to treat her with respect, fairness, dignity, or decency. Find one.

Our actions and words define us. We all get to draw the image of our own face, slowly, into the world around us, and by the time we die, that face will be defined, and it we’re lucky, we will be loved and missed and remembered for who we really were, and wanted to be. We live on in the memory of others. I have been deeply moved by the floods of letters and emails and calls I have been getting from people all around the world who Christine inspired and touched and helped.

What did she die of, you ask?

What did she not die of?

What did she survive?

(Everything, and more.)

How hard did she struggle, how far did she travel, how much did she fight for every underdog she ever met on the dark unlit path of HIV marked people, starving for a chance, for somebody to whisper: “You have a chance, you have a life, you are alive, you are not dead yet, I do not know how or when you will die, so go ahead and live, in the time of your life, live.”

That’s what she stood for.

One day it will be known, documented, what she lived through, who she was, what she suffered, and who, exactly, did what, and why, and how. In the meantime, let each of us live with how we behaved toward a grieving mother. Those who helped assassinate her in the media and on the blogosphere are well aware of what they did, and are now alone with their guilt, which manifests in further attacks, designed to keep them from contemplating what it means to be human.

I defy anybody to find a single communique from Christine Maggiore in which she reveled in the deaths of her attackers or their friends, who have died in the hundreds of thousands, following orders, taking the drugs. There are deaths on all sides; The answers light up like fireflies, then vanish. Who among us can claim to know what is really happening? All we can know, all we can control, is who we are as human beings, how we treat others, and especially how we treat those who think or believe different things than we ourselves do.

Since she died, I have renewed my own vows to remain strong, and do my best, and I believe that if we do our best we will be protected. Not from death, but from the despair that has as its root cause our own cruelty.

I used to read the final passage of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge Of San Luis Rey to Christine, when she was missing E.J. unbearably, when there was nothing left to say.

The last line will be familiar to many of you:

“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”