I am here for several reasons. I do feel a bit of an intruder because I am negative. Yet my big sister lives with HIV and my beautiful niece, her daughter, was born with it. I feel I must tell their stories. They are the most inspiring and the most precious people I have in the entire world. Tracy, always said that I can put everything right in words, that I am good at it, so she gave her blessing to write about her.
It was she who encouraged me to start blogging and to become a professional writer. She supported me in my first tentative experiments on Women Writers and Medium. She was the one whom I always looked up to, my role model. Strong headed, passionate, confident.
That is why one of the strangest, most surreal memories I have from my childhood is when I saw her vulnerable and defenseless.
Tracy used to pick me up from the daycare after finishing school and we would walk home, which was only fifteen minutes away. Sometimes she would come with her friend, Helena. I liked her, she was chatty, bubbly, and seemed to genuinely enjoy talking to me, a “baby sister”, which was rare among teenage girls.
That day they were more giggly and agitated than ever and I was excited and expected them to play with me, but when we got home they sent me into the living room to watch cartoons on TV. Later, when I got bored, I came to the door of my sister’s bedroom and tried the handle. It was locked. I wanted to knock, but I froze in the middle of raising my hand because I heard sobs. I went back to the TV and watched it in silence.
I remember faintly, as our parents came home a few hours later. I remember them looking worried and running around with a basin, towels, and glasses of water. I remember my brave sister crying: “I don’t want to live like this!” as she was leaning over the toilet bowl and our father was holding her hair back, as she vomited. Helena was feeling unwell too, so much so that she stayed in the room (the basin was for her to throw up in).
Then Helena’s mother came to pick her up (my parents called her). There were some words and arguing about who is the bad influence and who is the victim, and the parting wasn’t very friendly. It felt so wrong. Tracy and Helena were inseparable BFFs and now, when they were ill (as I thought back then), their parents were at each other’s throats, instead of tending to them, blaming each other or one of the girls for the condition of the other…
That was the time when I came in contact with the complexity of grown-ups’ live. This complexity never left our home ever since.
When Tracy was diagnosed back in 1997, she was only fourteen. She took an anonymous complex test after a non-profit visited her school with a lecture on STDs. HIV wasn’t something she expected to be found. She had unprotected sex with her boyfriend, who turned out to be a promiscuous jerk, so she was worried about things like chlamydia or herpes. The results she picked up on the way from the daycare with me and Helena, knocked the ground from under her feet. She confided in Helena – they both were devastated. They tried a remedy that they saw adults use for grief – and drank two bottles of whiskey they’ve found in the liquor cabinet. They were extremely intoxicated when my parents found them.
Our parents took it badly. Being Christian, they saw it as punishment for her “sins”. She has always been a rebel – tried smoking when she was thirteen and started going out with boys. I didn’t understand much at that time but the way they explained it to me it was something along the lines “She is going to die because of everything she’s done”.
But she was defiant. She was not going to be a victim. Growing up, she was my big sister and my idol, now she is my inspiration and my courage.