Visual AIDS

After a relentless week of work in the library, Friday brought with it a refreshing change--a quiet smallness that filled me.  By afternoon, though,  having recently forgotten how to relax, I roused myself to focus on my "to do" list and settled on the "gather stuff for our 'protest' display" bullet point. My commitment to the project was short-lived, though, because Helen had found a photo of the AIDS quilt, which set me off on a sidebar activity-- searching for evidence that my brother Mike had lived.

What I bumped into was a bit jarring.

Mike died of AIDS-related cancer in January 1996--two months after Allison was born.  And, in my Friday-afternoon search for my brother, I was reminded that Allison wasn't the only youngster back then.  Still too young for kindergarten, the Internet didn't have much to show for itself in 1996. Which meant that Friday's Google search for Michael James Raglin turned up nothing.

. . . as though this vibrant, funny, well-connected soul had never existed.

Lest we think the Internet is the be-all-end-all of storytelling mediums, a bottomless storage bin for human history, my brother stands as proof of its shortcomings.

And so, I made do in the face of my fruitless Google search, going old school instead and telling Helen stories about my brother.  About his artistic bent, his funny laugh, his extensive and eclectic collection of friends.  I talked about how he had lived and how we managed to find a way to carry on after he died.  And she did what no Google search could ever do--she listened and, in her listening, made my brother real again.