The richness of life with friends

It was, as I said on my facebook page, an amazing night of remembering, crying and healing at the 25th Annual Candlelight AIDS Vigil. A true sign of the richness of my life is that I didn’t get the chance to hug everybody that I knew there.

Maybe it was the fact that it was the 25th annual vigil or the fact that it’s been 20 years since I’ve known definitively that I have HIV/AIDS – and have lived to tell about it. I don’t need to know why tonight’s ceremony was extra special.

But as I fill in the details you’ll get the picture.

I sat mere steps away from the AIDS Memorial with a group of friends who have steadfastly supported me in my return to the recovery fold. Later, after several of them held me as I completely shuddered with tears, a total stranger introduced herself, asked if she could also hug me, and quickly became a found soul-mate – a friend I hadn’t met yet – as we began to share about people we both knew.

The evening started with the reading of a message from Cleve Jones, particularly to mark the 25th anniversary. The significance was lost on no one who had seen “Milk” in the past year or so, or those of us who know of him as one of the founders of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Three co-hosts masterfully presided over the ceremonies – multiple-Juno Award winner Billy Newton-Davis, himself a long-term survivor of HIV/AIDS, another long-timer Shari Margolese, and 16-year old Quinn Johnston, Shari’s completely healthy son – the first time a mother and child had shared these ceremonial duties at the vigil.

The music throughout the hour was fantastic. I know these vigils have always touched me but there was something about the music and the stories tonight that really hit home. Several references to long-term survivors (and I’d be in that group) were also very meaningful.

25 more names were added to the memorial, bringing the total to something over 2600. Candles were lit, the light passing from person to person, until the entire crowd was bathed in the glow.

I cried plenty of tears during the live music which included Nathalie Nadon singing “La Vie en Rose” by Edith Piaf, a song – “Can You See Me” – commissioned for this 25th anniversary composed and sung by Glenn Marais, and the nineteen voices of “Guys Like Us” singing “I Believe”. As we placed our candles around the site the Regent Park School of Music String Ensemble performed the always evocative Pachelbel Canon.

That’s when the silence was broken as we hugged and cried, and cried and hugged, met old friends, made new ones and just tried to take in the gratitude we felt for such a touching community event in the early hours of Pride weekend.

A huge thank you to all who were responsible for such an important evening.

At the entrance to the Memorial is this poem:

Cry

Morning through a city garden widens

its swath. Shiny eyes of cinquefoil,

azure eyes of myosotis, bruised lobelia

refuse to blink. Intruders trapped in the cross-

stare harden, crumble into fine

dustings because our sympathies

will not adapt to sun and cinquefoil: our world

steel and concrete, oil and song.

We hoist our lives high over the drone

of traffic and screwing gulls, hoist bags

of soil to terraces at the setbacks; set out

cinquefoil, watch its leavings, count

its days. Some days we doze in the sun

and dream we too are cinquefoil or lobelia,

blowing and blanching without demur.

Then pneumocystis breaks.

We open our eyes to that skyline we incised

and know as a jet cuts through cloud that

cities are our gardens, with their stench

and contagion and rage, our memory, our

sepals that will not endure

these waves of dying friends

without a cry.

Michael Lynch

1944-1991

(whose name is on the AIDS Memorial)

And this, too:

CIRCLES OF STONE:
To Those Unnamed

We stand at this place; among earth and stone, branch and birch -
In darkness and in light, through sun and storm, rain and trees,
leaves and breeze: Life and Death.
Our strength, though withered and sapped, regenerates here.

Each name on each standing stone remarks thousandfold
upon those unmarked from sea to sea; pole to pole.
The earth would quake with the strength of our memories,
flood with the loss of our tears, and in tandem; We exist.

How tall will these stones have to grow?
How wide, how all-encompassing, how awesome?
To announce this radical interruption of humanity.
These standing stones might sprout like high-rises,
watered by lovers left behind.
Further stones planted, the last meets the first; A circle is formed.
Its volume gains inhabitants; Admitting entrance without discrimination.

The world mourns while we embrace the lives and the times.
Whether a name is engraved in steel or in sand, in heart or in mind;
In flesh or in form; we will remember.
And mark the day we have no further need for such
Circles of Stone.

Shoshanna Jey Addley