Does anyone else remember the Die-ins of the HIV-AIDS years?

When it was really bad, when the federal government and the states refused to acknowledge or aid those who were already sick... I remember we kept going to their offices and their events. People in wheelchairs and on oxygen, with Karposi spots visible. Didn't matter that catching the flu or a cold could be what sent their immune systems over the edge. We just kept going and making them see us.

I don't know if anyone actually died in an office, but I know a lot of people came very close, and I know a lot of lives were shortened because the stress of getting places before the ADA and the toll on immune systems was overwhelming. I was a child then, part of the movement because I had a cousin who was one of the early blood transfusion patients and I couldn't let it go. I made a lot of casseroles and did a lot of laundry, and got co-opted for Legislature office visits during school breaks because I could help with chairs and was small enough to squish into a backseat full of wheelchairs and O2 tanks and all of the paraphernalia of being terminally ill. And for optics' sake, because a child who isn't afraid to hug a sick person makes a grown man feel ashamed.

I have wanted those friends back since they left us. They became my uncles and aunts and mentors, the people who taught me to believe in myself, to trust myself and just keep fighting.

I don't want to have die-ins again. It terrifies me we might have to.