GUS (Gave Up Smoking) is a community support diary for Kossacks in the midst of quitting smoking. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. If you are quitting or thinking of quitting,
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You don't see a lot of those ribbons around anymore, but years ago, it seemed they were everywhere. I still have mine, a frayed, ragged little thing nearly twenty years old. I got it from my big brother on a January night in 1993, along with a few books, a worn sweater, a stopped clock, and some leftover Xanax.
He didn't need them anymore.
When I initially signed up for tonight's GUS diary, I was planning to write a sort of quirky, lighthearted thing on ashtrays (I used to collect them back in the day, when I still smoked). Then I took a look at the calendar, realized what day it was, and decided that maybe today wasn't the day for that diary. Some other time, perhaps.
AIDS has shaped my adult life in ways I couldn't have imagined back when I first learned of it (as GRID, or, more heartbreaking, "gay cancer" or the "gay plague"). I remember listening to guys discussing it over brunch as I poured their coffee. I waited tables in a gay-friendly resort town to put myself through school, back in those post-Stonewall, pre-ACT-UP golden years. Gay culture was also on my radar for another reason: I had a couple of gay big brothers, and I was worried for them.
I had no clue back then that I'd not only lose a brother to AIDS, but that AIDS would also be the focus of my professional life for more than a decade. A year or two after my brother was diagnosed, I was an out-of-work illustrator who happened to spot a newspaper ad for an administrative job involving AIDS research. Because I felt like I had to do something, anything, I applied for it.
It turned out to be with these people, and I would spend the next eleven years there trying to cut red tape and help organize research for a lot of very smart, very motivated people who wanted nothing more than to be out of a job. (They recently lost one of their founders, and the AIDS research community lost one of its most dedicated and brilliant lights.) Like a lot of others who did this kind of work back then, I had personal motivation: I wanted to try and save someone I loved.
It didn't quite work out that way, though I did help with work that established the current standard of care and the drug cocktail that keeps most people with HIV alive. Some of my colleagues also lost family members and friends. We lived with the frustration and guilt that we couldn't cure this evil bastard disease fast enough to save everyone. We sometimes had to face frustrated and angry and frightened protesters, demanding we do something - perhaps unaware that most of us worked countless hours of overtime trying to do just that. For years, before and after my brother's death, I had to walk past the words SILENCE = DEATH, stenciled on the sidewalk near the building I worked in.
We might've been quiet, but if we were, it was because we were busy, not because we were indifferent.
But speaking of indifferent...
I'll never understand the way Ronald Reagan has been practically elevated to sainthood after his death, when in life he did so much damage to so many. His legacy regarding AIDS is one of profound inaction and silence; it took him four years to even MENTION the word AIDS, and longer to do anything about it. Even Dubya (DUBYA, people! The guy who is currently #1 with a bullet on my list of Worst. Presidents. Ever.) did a better job than Ronnie by authorizing PEPFAR. It was perhaps a flawed response, but at least it was something. And for all of the Obama Administration's seeming hesitance to repeal DOMA and DADT, the very fact that this President acknowledges the issue and has a plan gives me hope, and reminds me of how far we've come.
My big brother (a stepbrother, technically, but in my life since I was a young child) was something else: model-handsome, gregarious, friendly, a homebody who spent a lot of time on the road (he sold textbooks), devoted to his partner (they considered themselves married and wore traditional gold wedding bands, even back then), their goofy little dogs, and their house in the 'burbs. He was quick to laugh and he read people well, a trick he'd picked up from his years in the restaurant biz (he'd been everyone's favorite maître d’); he knew how to put people at ease. Unfortunately for him, he'd also partied like a rock star in his youth, before anyone knew the dangers, before anyone could have imagined what was happening.
We both smoked back then, and it's odd and somewhat frustrating to me that so many of my memories of him have smoke wafting through them. He had a fierce will to live, and quit smoking cigarettes - briefly - while undergoing a few brutal rounds of chemo that wiped out what was left of his immune system. I remember being glad that he was doing what he could to remain healthy, and also (in the way of the nicotine addict) a tiny bit bummed out that he wasn't able to be my smoking buddy anymore. He still smoked a little weed, to help with his appetite; it was the only thing that worked. In those last years, I can remember bundling up against the winter chill and parking ourselves on the back steps to share a smoke (or in his case, a toke).
At the very end, when the medical avenues had been exhausted, he took up the cigs again. It's a testament to their addictive pull that he'd risk what little heath he had left (by then, he was wasting away, mostly blind, suffering bout after bout of pneumonia, and starting to experience mild AIDS-related dementia) to have those smokes. By then, I felt guilty for ever having resented him quitting, and passionately wished he'd do so again - but for what?
He knew he was dying, after all. And it wasn't going to be the cigarettes that killed him.
I'm years older now than he'll ever be, which is still hard to wrap my head around. I managed to stop slowly killing myself one cigarette at a time a few years ago, and I think he'd be happy for me (and, frankly, a little surprised that I managed it!). Heck, in a different, kinder reality, I think I might've even talked him into quitting for good, too.
I still miss him all the time. He's been on my mind all day. So this one is for my big brother, and for everyone else out there who has lost someone they love to AIDS. And here's a little Bowie - his favorite - to play us out.
GUS: New Quit Date Reminder, 12/15/2009
The new quit date has been announced! If you are thinking of quitting, this is your chance. You have nearly a month to get prepared, get studied up and make a real go of it. You are of course invited to check in with your fellow GUSsacks and maybe even do a diary or two. December 15th is the six-month anniversary of the start of GUS and falls on a Tuesday. If you feel better quitting on a weekend, you can move your quit date forward or put it off until the next weekend. You cannot give yourself and your family a better Holiday present than to quit the smokes once and for all!
Current members of the GUS team! Please post a comment in the butt can if you would like your name added to the GUS Buddy List:
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