Remembering the first in Asheville to lose their life to AIDS

I've been avoiding putting today's thoughts down on paper because if I go too far, it'll throw me back over an edge I climbed back from years ago. A place I never want to visit again. Dennis immediately became my best friend in Asheville soon after we moved here in 1985. And he's the first person I ever heard call Asheville, Ashevegas. He was a bartender at the old O.Henry's in downtown Asheville when just about everything around it was boarded up. My husband had introduced me to the place as the 'closest thing Asheville has to a New Orleans bar.' He was right. It became our neighborhood pub and was close to the newspaper where he worked. It was a bar full of characters, including a young reporter for Channel 4, and other interesting types. Real freaks of Asheville, including us.

Dennis came down with HIV in the early '90s and although he accepted that *positive* status and stigma , he never wanted to think about what it would be like when the time would come that he might have to experience full blown AIDS. He couldn't; so he didn't. He turned to drugs and alcohol.

Dennis blew his brains out about 13 years ago because he'd rather die by his own hand than wither away with AIDS and have to have his lover of umpteen years change his dirty diaper. They lived in Tennessee at the time. It hurt a lot of us bad. To the core bad. It was a selfish act to go that way, particularly since he left no note and he could've gotten some help. He wasn't at death's door yet. I cried for months and numbed myself with far too much alcohol, particularly when his ex and I would get together, at the cabin where they had lived. I couldn't deal with that place. Every time I'd go out on the front porch, I'd start looking for little pieces of brain matter or some other part of Dennis that might have been left behind.

Finally, I had to stop going to visit. For my own health - mental and physical. We'd still talk on the phone quite often and eventually he moved also. I don't booze it and bawl anymore, but I do think of Dennis quite often. Sometimes with a tear. Other times, with a smile. Always with a 'I wish you were here to see this.' I no longer can say whether it was a selfish act or not, though I tend to fall on that side when I see how his suicide has forever affected his partner. But other times I realize it was his life. His death. His choice to make at the time.

I also remember a lot of other people who went before Dennis, and after. I remember the time when one of the first infected who came home to Asheville to die was mourned at O.Henry's. His name was Charlie. Tommy was the first person in Asheville to die of AIDS. I didn't have the honor of knowing him, but his name was always mentioned at anyone's wake and funeral who succumbed afterwards. I have a friend who has a list. She quit counting at 181.

Thank goodness not everyone took the same path as my friend Dennis. But, many did die because there was no cure nor medicine to prolong their life at the time. It's a whole new world today and no one should ever have to die of this horrible disease again.

There is a Candlelight Memorial Vigil tonight, Dec., 1, 7-9 pm on the lower promenade of Pack Place, in Asheville. If you can find the time, please come and show your support for the fight to kill AIDS, or just to remember a loved one no longer with you. Whatever the reason. And, if you can't make the event, please give a moment of silence to think about the more than 25 million people who have died worldwide due to AIDS.

For more info: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Western-North-Carolina-AIDS-Project/286586386014