2024 AIDS Ride Dedication

I’m dedicating my 2024 HIV/AIDS ride to two VIP supporters, Sam Granato and Alma Davis. 

Sam has continually been a quiet yet mighty advocate for social justice, primarily in the field of child welfare. None more important than the welfare of his children – all 7 of them, including me. Dad was the first to know of Bret’s AIDS diagnosis when called to escort him home from a Tokyo hospital without disclosing his condition, thus breaking the law of both countries at the time. Dad and his wife, Sharon, nursed Bret from that initial brush with death and kept the secret that was Bret’s to tell in his time. Supportive of his eldest son to the end and beyond, Dad became and remains a founding member of my ride support team. 

Crew Mama Alma & her daughters

Alma took ride support to the next level when she signed on to crew the inaugural Alaska AIDS Vaccine Ride in 2000. An Alaska resident at the time, she was well-suited to hosting exhausted, hurt and/or freezing cyclists needing a warm motorcoach ride to camp. “Crew Mama Alma” handed out Tootsie Pops, read aloud raunchy Alaskan tales, spread encouragement, and shared her gratitude for 7 days across that state; then she signed up to do it again in 2001! Did I mention she slept in a tent every night right along with the rest of us? A renown quilter, Alma also made 3 different quilts donated to ride fundraisers and established my base of Alaska donors. Alma was always proud of her own 5 children and easily took on as many more as needed a mother’s love. Mom was my biggest fan in all things and #1 contributor on my ride team every single time. 

Mom and Dad had both been in failing health and coincidently passed away within days of each other at the start of this year. Amid the shock, we siblings teased that it was Bret’s turn now; bet he’s surprised! But then, surely all three are delighted to be reunited again. When I see those 3 empty chairs on Day 1 of this year’s AIDS Vaccine Ride route, my mind will be on the people in my life to whom this ride meant the most and our mutual dedication to those whose families should have more time together in this life.

Pack the Bike and Carry On!

It's my habit to register for a ride by World AIDS Day on December 1, as a show of my commitment to bring an end to the AIDS pandemic. Soon after, you hear from me fairly often with the latest research news advancing that shared goal and multiple requests for your own ongoing support. 2024 rolled out a little differently this year, throwing me into what I can best describe as a state of suspended animation. I'm told it's normal when a parent dies, let alone both parents within weeks of each other. I'm doing my best not to rush the process and remain grateful for all the grace bestowed on me along the way. Now the calendar has rolled on, airline and ride posts have started their countdown. It's time to pack the bike and carry on! The heavenly throng of witnesses has grown and far too many arrived there too soon. Let's move forward together, doing our part to remind our family, friends and neighbors that AIDS is not through with us yet, that HIV may be slowed but isn't going anywhere fast enough; that we are still on a mission to make AIDS history!

Pandemic Needs

 First published, not published, in mid-March 2023

“So grateful for vaccines. So grateful for vaccines!”

My running mantra the entire 8 days of my recent COVID quarantine. This first-timer spent a lot of time on the couch, getting little done yet deeply grateful that every vaccine and booster did its job, kept me from feeling so much worse and now fully recovered. Coincidently, my 85-year-old mother and 25% of residents and staff at her assisted living home were going through the same. So grateful for vaccines!

I was prepared to get COVID one day. I wasn’t prepared for how easily my brain substituted “HIV” with every test result and my vaccine gratitude. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise given my near constant appeals for HIV vaccine funding over the last 3 decades. It was humbling, just the same.

Yes, I’m peddling HIV/AIDS vaccine research progress at Emory Vaccine Center. Yes, I ask for your donation to keep that research pressing on to the same success EVC contributed to COVID vaccines. And yes, I’ll pedal my bike this May in Action Cycling Atlanta’s AIDS Vaccine 200 cycling event. In its 20^th anniversary year, participants will press on to bring attention to a need still with us, a virus that still kills at pandemic proportions despite much-welcome advances in treatment and prevention strategies. COVID put a crimp in my training schedule but boosted determination to make my COVID mantra relevant for a world affected and at risk for HIV/AIDS.

Leave No One Behind

Walked bleary-eyed through Sea-Tac airport at 4:30 this morning, spotted this poster, stopped in my tracks and smiled.

For a split second I thought I was dreaming of a time when AIDS was the spotlight pandemic in the news, on the lips of celebrities and forced onto politic agendas. When AIDS essentially wiped out an entire generation of income-earners, leaving elderly parents to raise their orphaned grandchildren and too many adult children to die alone, discarded by fearful or ashamed family and friends. 40 years of tenacious advocacy, research, trial and error have yielded amazing results that do make me smile, big. 

Yet you know me so you know it's not enough. I'm a finisher. If a goal is worthy of my time, I'll hit the impossible deadline, take on extra work, publicly share my vulnerabilities, cycle across high bridges and ride in the snow/ hurricane/heatwave. Most challenging of all, I'll ask for your support because I can't do it alone. I'm so grateful for knights like Sir Elton who feel the same way.

"We will not leave anyone behind." - motto of the Elton John AIDS Foundation

The Elton John AIDS Foundation has raised $450 million toward ending the pandemic of HIV/AIDS. It's not enough. My cycling team, the Puget Sound Riders have collectively raised $700,000. I've met hundreds who work hard to raise a few hundred dollars and thousands more who selflessly contribute what they can. Every penny gets us closer to that goal of assuring HIV/AIDS is left in the rear-view once and for ALL.

World AIDS Day is December 1, every year. Take a moment on this day to join the finishers with your contribution to my 2023 AIDS Vaccine 200 or the fundraiser of your choice. We're out there, still committed to making AIDS history. 

Reflections in Gratitude - 2022 AV200 Epilogue

 THANK YOU!

The impact of your generosity to rid the world of HIV/AIDS is more evident than you might imagine. When I experience that impact, I wish you could hear it with my ears and see it with my eyes because I struggle to do it justice in the retelling though I will certainly try.

The Puget Sound Riders last travelled to Atlanta for the AIDS Vaccine 200 in 2019. We’d kept in touch and participated virtually through the COVID years but the time away had its influence on the ride and its participants. Only half of our usual team foursome was available to travel this year, had done very little road training and knew we’d struggle to finish each 100-mile day; we also knew that wasn’t our main objective. You gave. Steady donors and newcomers, family, friends, former teammates, and strangers gave like never before and kept giving through the weeks following our May event. So far, you’ve contributed to more than $140,000 for HIV/AID research at Emory Vaccine Center this year. Congratulations and thank you!

The roughly 150 people that gathered at Emory University for the 2022 AIDS Vaccine 200 were a humbler lot with far fewer strong racers and more relay participants. The tone had mellowed somewhere in the fog of a new pandemic that brought on reflections of the pandemic we still fight to live through; some have fought it a very long time. It’s now 27 years since the deaths of my brother, Bret, and my teammate Mary’s brother, Peter, and 25 years since Mary and I discovered that fact when we met on the start line of our very first cycling event to end AIDS. I think we knew then that our brothers had unfinished business with this virus, and we’d found a way to carry on their work.

Bret never knew he had HIV. In the 80s, people hardly understood or could agree how the virus was transmitted. Bret was diagnosed on what should have been his deathbed in a Tokyo hospital; his HIV had already progressed to AIDS and he was lucky to survive that illness. By the kindness of his doctors, Bret able to slip out of Japan and sneak back into America since it was illegal to be in one and cross into the other with HIV. COVID travel restrictions brought those memories flooding back. Remember how anxious people were to get COVID travel restrictions lifted? The United States was one of the last developed countries in 2010 to lift its travel ban on those testing positive for HIV from entering the US. The ban had been in effect for 22 years.

Bret and I had an uncomfortable but necessary conversation about his final wishes at an airport fast food table in the middle of the night on our way to DC. Bret knew he was living on borrowed time and volunteered for every treatment trial available from a desire to help others and desperately wanted to donate his entire body to medical study at his alma mater, the University of Washington; they turned him down. He was devastated. The week after Bret died, I took a big box of leftover pills to his doctor, prepared to plead with him to give the drugs to someone who couldn’t afford them. Dr. Shalit gratefully accepted the pricey pills and did just that. A person infected with HIV today must remain diligent with their healthcare but can now count their daily medication regimen on one hand instead of by the handful.

The infrastructure built to study HIV, from the lab to global human trials is now highly regarded and utilized in collaborative health studies of many kinds – immunology, cancer, healthcare delivery and public policy to name a few. Last week I met the local bakery owner whose day job is scientific research on genetic variants that alter immune response and lead to an auto-immune disease. She admitted that as much as we all want HIV eradicated, her work is made easier by testing theories on the more dynamic HIV than on any other virus that attacks the immune system. The Emory Vaccine Center took pride in their contributions to the rapid development of COVID vaccines. Today’s message on how to recognize and avoid the spread of monkeypox is being delivered over communication channels that weren’t available 30 years ago and to ears that are now more accustomed to listening.

Bret didn’t want people to know he had AIDS because it would cause them to jump to the conclusion that he was gay - a social death sentence. Last month I made a trip to walk among the largest display of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in San Francisco history. Each of the 3,000 panels held the name of someone who died of HIV/AIDS; each told a story of a person who was loved, celebrated and missed. I made my way to a tent at the far end which was accepting new panels to be stitched into the quilt which now includes more than 50,000 individually sewn panels and 110,000 names. The back of the area was set up with several tables, scissors, needle, thread and piles of fabric panels – newly completed additions, starter background pieces for those wanting to get started and unfinished panels for volunteers to lovingly complete. A couple of those were laid out on tables surrounded by people who felt compelled to sit and stitch a while. I joined them. It was a mostly contemplative exercise periodically broken by someone lifting a memory, a sorrow, a hope. In the background was a steady flow of people in their 60s and 70s with an armful of fabric admitting something like “He needs to be included but I just couldn’t finish it”. We took the bundle from one person, laid it out on the table and 4 of us helped her finish the square in time for the formal
donation ceremony. In doing so, we learned about “Bear”, her friend and castmate

panel for Bear

in 80s Broadway musicals. We laughed, sang and could feel Bear honored by her design and testimony to his talent and friendship. Another story was told of a couple very interested in honoring their son with a panel until it was explained that the purpose of the quilt was to display to future generations that “never again will a community be harmed because of fear, silence, discrimination, or stigma”. The couple was too afraid of how their own generation would react to knowing their son had died of HIV/AIDS. They returned later that afternoon and asked for a starter panel.

Serendipitous meetup w/Chad & Toby, ride mate, donor, friend

My mother was a master quilter. She made each of her children and grandchildren at least one quilt. I have Bret’s quilt of beautiful blues interspersed with masses of big-eyed frogs reminiscent of the ones he drew as a child. My family never made an AIDS quilt panel for Bret. Not because we were ashamed to display his name in that way but (this is my guess) because Bret didn’t want that. I think he’d feel differently now. It’s hard for me to imagine exactly how Bret would have responded to the evolving acceptance of his unconventional lifestyle. I do know he would be happier, less afraid and not have to travel so far to feel safe and accepted.

I’ve been honored to witness the results of your generous support over the past 25 years. Our progress is real and should be celebrated, yet our grasp on it remains tenuous. AIDS is not cured, HIV is still considered a global pandemic and hard-won laws can be too easily set aside, yet I remain hopeful every time I look back and see how far we have come. Maybe it’s time Bret had a quilt panel.

P.S. Happy birthday, Bret