I have been Chief Executive of Sahir for 90 days, and almost since the day I arrived I have been meaning to spend some time with Sahir’s AIDS Memorial Quilts.

Today, I finally did.

For many people, HIV is understood through numbers. Around 15,000 lives lost in the UK. More than 44 million worldwide. Numbers so enormous they can become almost impossible to comprehend.

But nobody is a number.

I last lost a friend to HIV in 2003. I count myself extraordinarily lucky that advances in medical science have transformed HIV treatment so completely. There was a time when funerals seemed to arrive with frightening regularity; when another diagnosis could mean preparing yourself for another goodbye.

Thankfully, those funerals no longer fill my diary.

And perhaps, with the passing of time, it becomes easier to forget just how much was lost.

Then today we unfurled the quilts.

Suddenly, HIV wasn’t a statistic. It was names. Photographs. Dates. Pieces of clothing. Messages from mothers, partners, friends and families. Carefully stitched pieces of lives that ended far too soon.

I didn’t know any of the people memorialised on those quilts, but I felt their absence.

One panel in particular stayed with me: Gerard Murphy.

I found myself thinking about his mum. About the hands that may have chosen the photographs and fabric. About the unbearable act of reducing a son’s life to a square of cloth because there would be no more birthdays, Christmases, phone calls or ordinary days together.

Thirty-three years later, I wonder about her.

Grief doesn’t disappear because the years pass. A mother’s love certainly doesn’t.

That is the extraordinary power of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. It refuses to allow people to become statistics. It says: this person was here. They were loved. They mattered. Remember them.

Next year, the national AIDS Memorial Quilt will come to Liverpool, bringing with it hundreds more names, hundreds more stories and countless reminders of a generation we lost.

And remembering matters.

Because HIV has changed, but it has not gone away. Neither has the stigma that surrounded it then and, shamefully, still exists today.

In Sahir’s earliest days, much of our work was about managing death: supporting people through illness, loss and grief at a time when there was so little hope.

Today, because of extraordinary advances in medicine, our work is overwhelmingly about supporting people to live — to live well, confidently, openly and without shame.

That transformation is something worth celebrating.

But our job is not finished.

We must continue fighting stigma. We must continue educating. We must continue supporting people living with HIV. And we must continue saying the names of those who never had the opportunity to benefit from the treatments available today.

So today, we remember Gerard.

We remember every life stitched into those quilts.

And we remember that behind every HIV statistic there was, and always will be, a human being.

Someone’s child. Someone’s partner. Someone’s friend.

Someone who mattered.

 

Simon Harris