AIDS Memoirs
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elements. Reducing physical distress encompasses pain management and the easing
of distress caused by nausea, vomiting, and constipation (85). According to Corr,
the psychological aspects focus on maximizing three features of life: security,
autonomy, and richness. He notes that to be secure is to be as free as possible from
anxiety, fear, or apprehension, and that autonomy centers on a person’s ability to be
self-governing. Richness, Corr observes, describes that which makes life satisfactory
or bountiful. “What richness will mean for individuals must be left to their
determination,” he writes. “One person might prize serenity and the absence of threat;
another might choose activity, creativity, and a degree of risk or danger” (86).
Meanwhile, Corr states, social task work hinges on sustaining and enhancing
interpersonal attachments significant to the dying person in question. Interpersonal
attachments must be honored, Corr points out, because humans are social creatures
by nature. He adds: “In the midst of the challenges of coping with dying, it is
critical ... that they be the interpersonal attachments valued by the person in
question, not those whom others think that person should value” (86-87). Finally,
Corr says that the spiritual aspects of coping with dying involve those sources
from which one draws spiritual vigor and vitality. These sources depend upon the
person’s fundamental values and moral commitments. Corr adds that in the name
of achieving a sense of wholeness, spirituality encompasses acceptance,
reconciliation, self-worth, meaning, and purpose in living (87).
Corr maintains that in contrast to Kubler-Ross’ stages of death theory, a taskbased approach is designed to empower individuals coping with dying, with the
person deciding “which tasks are important to me, how and when, if at all, they
will be addressed...” He holds that a task-based approach does not concentrate on
that which is obligatory (“must”) or normative/prescriptive (“should” or “ought”).
Instead, it emphasizes choices among possible tasks. “In this way,” Corr notes, “it
avoids the twin pitfalls of linearity and directedness that are prominent risks in any
stage-based approach” (90).
Borrowed Time
In 1988, poet and novelist Paul Monette published the first personal account
of AIDS—a riveting, poetic, heartbreaking work titled Borrowed Time: An AIDS
Memoir. Borrowed Time is a ground-breaking chronicle of Monette’s relationship
with his lover Roger Horwitz, and how their lives were forever changed when
Horwitz was diagnosed with AIDS in 1985. More specifically. Borrowed Time is a
searing, gut-wrenching account of the last nineteen months of Horwitz’s life, and
how Monette and Horwitz fought against impossible odds to try to overcome the
disease. And what makes the memoir all the more poignant is the reader’s knowledge
that Monette succumbs in 1995, at the age of forty-nine, to the same disease that
claimed his lover.