How IN THEIR PRESENCE Came to Be
You might be interested in knowing what led me to write this book. From the mid to late 1980s, articles about acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) appeared with increasing frequency in newspapers, magazines, and on television. I wanted to learn everything I could about this deadly disease of the immune system, brought about by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus—HIV. Although I personally did not know anyone with the disease, I knew people who knew people with AIDS, but it had not affected my own life directly.
That changed in 1989, the year I started Heartbeat Productions, a small video production company I ran from my home in Brooklyn Heights in New York City. A client hired me to create a fundraising videotape about a pilot summer camp project her non-profit organization had designed and run for one week for families of women and their children with AIDS, as well as the healthy siblings.
While at camp, whether chatting casually or videotaping interviews with mothers and other caregivers, I was keenly aware of being in the presence of heroes. Miraculously, these women were able to juggle the elements of their hugely complicated lives. They not only had to manage their own and their children’s terminal illnesses but also had to do this while meeting the demands of their healthy children. Most of the attendees were single mothers and did all the housework, shopped and cooked, kept medical appointments, met with their children’s teachers, and so much more despite being seriously ill.
Over the next two summers, I produced additional fundraising videotapes. Attendance at camp increased from five families in 1989 to twenty-four families in 1991. I went from never having known anyone with HIV/AIDS to mingling closely with dozens of people with this diagnosis. I felt as if my experiences of being with those families had altered my DNA; and I promised myself that I would try to get a job working with people like those I met at camp. I sensed it might be the most meaningful thing I could do in my professional life.
Almost five years later, I fulfilled this promise. For the next ten years (1995-2005), I worked at Children’s Diagnostic & Treatment Center in Fort Lauderdale. And YES! That job was absolutely the most consequential and fulfilling job I had in my professional life.
I then made another promise to myself. I would write a book about those remarkable women and children I met and served, and chronicle what it was like to be their social worker during the epidemic. The families who so generously invited me into their homes and lives in deeply intimate ways deserved to have their stories documented and read about. In 2018, I began writing my book, and in 2023 I was finally able to hold a copy of IN THEIR PRESENCE, Untold Stories of Women and Children During the AIDS Epidemic in my hands.