Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt

Every life has a story. Here are a few of the stories of people who died from AIDS, told by their survivors.

More than three quarter of a million Americans have died from AIDS since we began to notice it, about forty years ago. Worldwide, the figure seems to be a bit more than 40 million. Do a little math, and we as a nation look lucky. Human lives are not measured statistically, and people do not die by nations, but individually. Try to speak of the enormity of something, saying eighty million people have died from AIDS, or 6.9 million from COVID-19 or what have you and the horror and sadness gets lost in the the crowd. But one by one, with those they leave behind to assess the values of those lives. "My son died"; "My lover died"; "My friend Jim died": these are the words that make me weep. That's why this movie is so effective.