The Personal, Human Face Of Aids

Beauty crops up in the saddest places.

It can assert itself on the steps of the U.S. Capitol’s Reflecting Pool in a horseshoe made of thousands of pairs of dead people’s shoes. It can be found in walnut and brass plaques memorializing more than 2,000 homicide victims.

Or it can rest in a section of quilt beneath a tree, against which a man sits and sobs, barely noticed.

Beefy, tough-looking and wearing a black leather vest, Scott Swift so embodied the macho stereotype that the sight of him plopped on the ground, his wet face crumpled like tissue, could have seemed odd.

But not on the Mall near the Capitol, where several acres of fabric, an army of teddy bears and 40,000 names stitched onto rectangles made weeping a common sight.

Pointing at the AIDS Memorial Quilt, whose panels seemed to stretch on forever, Swift explained, “I have a lot of friends out here.”

Swift, 39, a student from upstate New York, knew that seeing the panels with the names of dead pals would hurt. But he found himself crying for those “you’ll never meet, never know.”

He paused. But for “the grace of God,” he said, “I could be there.”

I’d bet most people who saw the quilt in its most recent display thought, “It could have been my name” - or my child’s or my brother’s - spelled out beneath the autumn sun. Even some who secretly felt certain names “deserved” to be on the quilt because of their owners’ lifestyles must have thought, “That could be me.”

I mean, the quilt wouldn’t let you doubt it.

If there could be panels for Carolyn Holub-Berg, 32, who grinned prettily from stitched-on wedding pictures, or Krista Blake, 22, infected by an ex-boyfriend who never told her he was HIV-positive, or 5-year-old “Riccardia,” whose name was fashioned from a girlish bedsheet, I knew there could be a panel for anyone.

If “regular folks” such as District of Columbia landscaper Tony Jackson could be there alongside designer Perry Ellis, “Gunsmoke” actress Amanda Blake, “Chariots of Fire” star Ian Charleson and elegant, eloquent tennis star Arthur Ashe, well, anybody could be.

All I could feel was devastation. And yet, the quilt is beautiful - and not just because of the wit and flair sewn into its panels.

Just as flowers are coaxed to life by that which we flush away, loveliness often springs from the unthinkable - when people insist that it do so.

Grandmother of five Levada Austin-Giesey, of Wixom, Mich., had no choice. When her son William, 23, was shot to death in 1987 during a robbery, Austin-Giesey told me recently, she was desperate to talk to anyone who’d understand. So was her daughter, Angela, then 18.

After doing some research, Austin-Giesey joined Parents of Murdered Children, a Cincinnati-based support group for murder victims’ families and friends of which she now is national vice president. Austin-Giesey knew she’d done the right thing after she created a satellite chapter for siblings and saw Angela emerge from its first meeting saying, “Mom, I’m not crazy.”

Certainly, it can feel like you’re crazy when the horrendous happens and no one notices. Daily, we all hear about wars, grave diseases, murders. Daily, most of us push them from our awareness.

Austin-Giesey’s son’s death taught her that “people are afraid to talk about tragedies. They want to step back so they don’t have to think about it. If they know about it, it becomes real. And it could happen to them, to their child.”

To make people think, you have to make them feel, she says - feel how real, how human each victim was.

Recently, protesters from Americans Against Gun Violence lined up 39,000 pairs of sneakers, boots, thongs, house slippers and baby shoes, many of which had been worn by people killed by guns.

Austin-Giesey’s organization created the “Murder Wall … Honoring Their Memories,” a traveling tribute memorializing murdered loved ones that includes 18 plaques, each bearing 120 names. The names represent only a fraction of the 25,000 Americans - one every 21 minutes - murdered each year, just as the AIDS quilt can’t begin to encompass the 343,000 who have succumbed to the disease so far.

Says Austin-Giesey: “Unfortunately, it takes something stunning” - such as 39,000 pairs of shoes or children’ names etched in brass or a quilt that seems never to end - “to make society stop. Nowadays, the common murder doesn’t get any attention. … I’ve met families whose loved one’s death was noted only in an obituary.”

Surely victims - and the people who can’t forget them - deserve more.

As Scott Swift mused, wiping his eyes beneath that tree: “It’s a beautiful thing - to remember.”

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