My Family Kept My Dad’s Secret For Years. I Wasn’t Prepared For What Telling The Truth Would Mean.

With no road map for these circumstances, my parents were desperate to keep life as normal as possible for my brothers and me, and they hoped, I think, that not talking much about Dad’s illness would protect us (even after it was clear to them that I knew). I understood that not talking about the pain I was feeling would protect them. So we all learned to pretend.

Pretending was easy. Even though Dad developed AIDS after five years and suffered (I learned much later) one opportunistic infection after another, until the final year of his life, he didn’t look sick. He didn’t look different from any other dad I knew. Most days he could get up, put on a suit and go to work. He mowed the lawn and weeded the garden on weekends. He downhill skied and ice-skated and swam and boated. He took our golden retriever on long walks. Life moved forward, and we moved with it.

Just beyond the façade, though, the anguish of our circumstances hung heavy in the air. I could see my beloved dad, the man whose charisma and brilliance had always made him seem larger than life to me, shrinking beneath the stigma and shame of his illness. My dear mom, who shouldered the bulk of Dad’s physical and emotional care on her own, bent with the burden. We were all suffering, but the culture of silence created by the secret kept us from sharing in that aching grief together. Instead, we each traveled our own lonely paths of coping.

Two years before he died, Dad started writing a book. It began as a personal, therapeutic attempt to try to understand the mess of what had happened to him. As his narrative took shape, he read passages to my mother, and she added thoughts of her own. An idea bloomed between them: Maybe they had something to say. Maybe their experience living with HIV and AIDS could help someone else. Maybe their unique story could dispel some of the myths that swirled in the AIDS climate of the early 1990s and add a different voice to the mix. Maybe, as Christians themselves, they could call out the Christian community for its destructive and narrow-minded views toward victims of this devastating illness and encourage a more loving, Christ-like response in the face of suffering, no matter what form it takes. Maybe their story mattered enough to break a nine-year silence and spill their secret. Our secret.

I treaded carefully around the concept of the book. I knew how risky writing it was for Dad. To me, the endeavor felt precarious, like a fragile cord being woven together, thin thread by thin thread, to create a lifeline that might finally pull us out of our isolation.