Well, I never. Me & Carla? Who would have thought it? I can see that you may not believe it - you have all seen my - more or less - non-airbrushed avatar, after all. However, it IS true. I do have something in common with Mme Bruni-Sarkozy, super chic, erstwhile super-model, surviving Stones-ex, presidential consort, tricksy lyrical Franco-Italian chanteuse. Until today, I had no idea that Carla, like me, had also lost her beloved brother to HIV/Aids.
“Because of my brother, of course I am very sensitive to the issue of Aids…”
It could be me talking but, in fact, it is the the supermodel-turned singer, speaking to Elle magazine. Carla’s photographer brother, Virginio, died of an AIDS-related illness in 2006. The title of her third album "Comme si de rien n'etait" (As If Nothing Happened) is named after one of Virginio's photographs. He was 46.
My own brother Rory died, aged 29 in 1995. My World Aids Day post last year - which explains a bit more about him - is here. In it, I tried my best to explain my fury and my frustration at the prejudice and ignorance which surrounded HIV/Aids in the early 1990s. Things have, thankfully, moved on somewhat since then and mortality patterns have changed dramatically. In developed countries, such as the US or the UK, where HAART (highly active anti-retroviral therapy) is now widely available, an HIV diagnosis is no longer the terminal sentence it was two decades ago.
Nevertheless, the number of people, globally, living with HIV has risen, from around 8 million in 1990 to 33 million today, and is still growing. Around 67% of people living with HIV are now in sub-Saharan Africa. We cannot afford, to quote NBF Carla, to be complacent.
We all suffer from degrees of complacency – in all aspects of our lives. Earlier this year, I realised that I had been horribly complacent about my relationship with Rory’s partner, Patrick, who unexpectedly died in March this year.
When Rory was ill, he made me promise more than once, that should he “not get better” than I would faithfully “keep an eye” on Pat, his partner in crime and probably much else for more than a decade. I assented several times, (mainly in order to move the conversation onto less morbid subjects). But blow me, my little “Bother” did die on me, leaving me with the then unenviable task of keeping to my word. Patrick was a quiet, only occasionally camp, casualty of a misjudged 1960s marriage, a highly intelligent and sensitive auto-didact, with a passion for art and architecture, and a zest for life and experience that the straitened circumstances of his childhood and adolescence had effectively denied him.
My brother was dead; his ashes interred in my mother’s grave. What could I possibly have in common with this shy bloke, whose relationship with my sibling I had never fully understood? There is no space here to go into the details of my own 20-odd year relationship with Patrick. That story would need a novel to do it justice.
However, we eventually became dear, dear friends and when he died, aged only 49, I was utterly and debilitatingly devastated. Pat did not die of HIV/Aids – (although, succumbing to pressure from friends such as myself, he had finally taken the test and, for the last few years, he had been receiving the latest anti-retroviral therapies from an extraordinary medical team at UCH in London). In the end, he succumbed to a primary cancer, horribly, but mercifully swiftly and more courageously and stoically than I can adequately explain. He thus joined the First World statistics of boys (yes, they are mainly) who are HIV positive but who do not, and will not, ultimately have Aids on their death certificates.
You no doubt will be acquainted with somebody who is HIV positive – whether you are consciously aware of that fact or not. New and ever better drugs mean that our siblings, cousins and friends have been able to continue living under the shadow of this once terminal diagnosis for the best part of two decades. It does not, however, mean that any of us should be in any way complacent about the fact that they are – for the moment – still here with us.
