Do you miss the friends you lost..

rayray

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If your young enough when HIV and Aids was the mystery disease that it was in the early 80's..I lost all my closest friends..There were 4 of my best friends. We did almost everything together..My first friend died in 91 and the others very soon after. It was a nightmare of a time for me and of course these great friends I lost. I always wondered why I survived. I miss these people alot today.Over the years I have survived cancer and a few other difficulties. I just felt like expressing my thoughts this evening. I think I put it here in the relationship section. They are just friendships that are gone.
 

zpstackz

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Hell Yes, rayray:

I always think of the friends who I lost in those horrifying years. The terror in their physical and emotional turmoil, the distance that some of their family members manufactured, and the courage that I saw as they faced the end of a life that was full of promise and potential.

What comforts and invigorates me is the knowledge that I knew them and I can carry their memory. I can represent many of the things that they taught me and the qualities that they held dear.

What greater gift is there than the opportunity that we had to know, love, encourage, and, in the end, promise to meet again these people who went ahead of us? There are so many people who will never know what we have known. And the fact that we opened our hearts to these friends when they needed it most is their final, infinite blessing to you and me.

The beauty of their lives is alive and well and it is ours, now, to share.

Thanks for the post (and the tears that i shed in responding to it).
 

invisibleman

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I miss a LOT of my friends. Some of them died of HIV complications. Some died of non-HIV related reasons.


I used to have a lot of friends in the local gay community. But I stopped going out because I was with a guy. Got domesticated. Lost contact with all the guys in the bar. The dude I was with got with three other men and kicked me to the curb.


I miss having friends. :frown1:
 

nudeyorker

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I've lost friends and loved ones to everything from war and terrorism to AIDS and cancer and almost everything in between. Sometimes the loss was so difficult I was not sure I would be able to get up from it again. I think about all the important people in my life living and dead and how we have enriched each others lives and what we have learned from each other and our experiences (happy and sad) and very often that helps in the cold grey light of dawn when I have questioned life and death on sleepless nights.
 

B_Lightkeeper

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I have lost many, many friends to aids I met and knew in Birmingham. I feel my still being alive now was from getting a little older, practicing safe sex religiously - even using condoms forgiving blow jobs, and eventually moving to a rural area.

No gay bars and less exposure to gay life. Thank God for LPSG threads and photos!
 

horneyoldguy

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Yes, my brother - best man at my wedding and a really fun guy who is was well loved by all. Watching him die was one of the hardest things I have had to endure.
 

hrdhatdad

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I think about it. It's funny but we don't really talk about it. I had just turned 21 at the very beginning of the epidemic (newspapers were still squeamish about reporting it or warning the general public). I often feel that the one thing that seperates me from my college/fraternity buddies is that they didn't experience the loss of so many friends/aquaintances early in life. Perhaps guys that have experienced combat understand this but I never felt the same after the 80's. For me I think it brought about a profound loss of trust.
 

B_Nick8

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I've lost friends and loved ones to everything from war and terrorism to AIDS and cancer and almost everything in between. Sometimes the loss was so difficult I was not sure I would be able to get up from it again. I think about all the important people in my life living and dead and how we have enriched each others lives and what we have learned from each other and our experiences (happy and sad) and very often that helps in the cold grey light of dawn when I have questioned life and death on sleepless nights.

This. It has, unfortunately, been my lot in life to have lost an inordinate number of people I have loved at an early age. Yes, it started with AIDS when I was only in my 20s but it has continued, as NudeYorker has said, due to terrorism and disease and bizarre accidents, to this day. Not a single day goes by that I am not reminded of someone I loved deeply and miss terribly. Sadly, I don't have the kind of belief that we will be reunited after death, but I do cherish what they brought to my life and I relish the memories I have of them and what they gave to me.
 

NCbear

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I was somehow shielded from that; I didn't know someone who was openly HIV+ until I was in graduate school in the middle 1990s.

Early deaths: A high school classmate died of a gunshot wound a few years after graduation while trying to break up a fight, a former professor died of AIDS-related complications, a very close friend died of breast cancer, and a close colleague's son died in a car accident on a snowy road in the NC mountains. Deaths at later ages: Relatives have died of diabetes, cancer, heart attacks, and other issues connected with smoking, eating fried food, exercising too little, and/or having undiagnosed/uncontrolled mental/physical comorbidities.

I graduated with ~150 people from my small-town high school and with ~3000 people from my small undergraduate college. I could still tell you their names and recognize their faces.

While I haven't experienced the wholesale loss of friends/acquaintances/people from my past that many of you have, either through combat or by living through the AIDS epidemic, I'm not looking forward at all to growing older and finding out every so often who died recently.

NCbear (who's wondering whether the trauma of slowly losing friends and acquaintances over time is any easier to bear than the sudden shock of losing everyone at once, as in war or pandemics--and who's also thinking that making a comparison of "which is worse" isn't really what I intended, with this post: I was just wondering how any of us bear the pain and grief of losing friends, family, and acquaintances, whether it's a slow or a shockingly fast process . . . . )
 

Charles Finn

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yes I miss all my friends I have lost to cancer hiv/aids car crashes and just death bad joke but here it goes me too god all my friends are dying what do I do god to me get younger friends
 

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i have had a couple of family members die from AIDS and 3 dear friends also. One of the dear friends i thought i knew real well. He had been with his partner for about 8 years and they seemed like the happiest couple. I wasnt aware of what was going on cos he would not answer my phone calls and had moved to a different location where i didnt know of. I couldnt locate his partner and his family was of no help. Its like he just dropped off the face of the earth. Then one day he called me out of the blue and apologized and said he was coming out of hiding. (still not telling me anything). Well he didnt come out again. One evening we were getting ready to have dinner and my sister, for whatever reason, opened the newspaper and started going through it and then she says "hey isnt this your friend ***?" i look and there in the obituaries is his picture. The rosary is to be held that evening and i had time to go and visit with family. His sister tells me he died of "the stomach cancer that guys get." I dont really care how he died i just know that i lost a great friend and his being a part of my life did have an impact on mine.
 

kikos

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Im sorry i got caught up in my story and didnt really get to why i thought i knew him real well....i saw his partner like about a week later (he didnt go to the funeral) and asked him about it and he told me that my friend did not get the disease from him. The main thing that bothered me about this was that I was struggling to find me a good partner and i realized others were just taking advantage of theirs.
 

rayray

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I've lost friends and loved ones to everything from war and terrorism to AIDS and cancer and almost everything in between. Sometimes the loss was so difficult I was not sure I would be able to get up from it again. I think about all the important people in my life living and dead and how we have enriched each others lives and what we have learned from each other and our experiences (happy and sad) and very often that helps in the cold grey light of dawn when I have questioned life and death on sleepless nights.

I was exposed to my Fathers death at a very early age. It was before the epidemic. I too have lost other friends from other reasons. i was just sitting here the other night when I started to think about one friend I had lost. We were room mates. After he passed I was moving to another place to live. I was giving some of his furniture away because I had to down size. My land lord wanted a table , at that time people were so ignorant about the disease that she asked me if it was safe for her to take it.
 

nudeyorker

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I was exposed to my Fathers death at a very early age. It was before the epidemic. I too have lost other friends from other reasons. i was just sitting here the other night when I started to think about one friend I had lost. We were room mates. After he passed I was moving to another place to live. I was giving some of his furniture away because I had to down size. My land lord wanted a table , at that time people were so ignorant about the disease that she asked me if it was safe for her to take it.

I remember when people were that uninformed (I sometimes thank many still are) My post just was a reflection on yours I suppose. I remember I was sitting with a friend at the hospital in his final days and I ran into an old acquaintance in the elevator and he asked me if I was there with someone dying of AIDS complications and I said... " No but death is death and I'll miss my friend as much as I miss the friends who died of AIDS and others causes."

I guess to answer your question directly; when I moved to NY I had a group of friends far flung across the globe who I had counted on growing old with and I'm the only one left. I feel lucky having very good friends still living but I miss my old friends and some nights it's difficult being the only one left with the wisdom and memories of those friendships.
 

Gisella

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yes very much so...we never forget them..I tend to start to feel blue around their death anniversary, or their birthdays or both..sometimes I feel blue and bingo..is some traumatic anniversary I forgot was coming..but soon remember.
 

FuzzyKen

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If your young enough when HIV and Aids was the mystery disease that it was in the early 80's..I lost all my closest friends..There were 4 of my best friends. We did almost everything together..My first friend died in 91 and the others very soon after. It was a nightmare of a time for me and of course these great friends I lost. I always wondered why I survived. I miss these people alot today.Over the years I have survived cancer and a few other difficulties. I just felt like expressing my thoughts this evening. I think I put it here in the relationship section. They are just friendships that are gone.

In my case and because of my age and what I did as a living my losses were horrendous in those years. Mine included even people I dated, with whom I attended High School and College, a cousin and five people I dated. Business relationships and people with whom I worked multiplied that number nearly exponentially.

I miss each and every one of these people every day and there is in my home a little framed plaque hanging with the names of all those losses stating that they will always have a place in my home.

Some years ago when time permitted I also gave whatever time I could doing volunteer work for HIV patients. Then there was time in Los Angeles at the Wayland Flowers Hospice in the San Fernando Valley visiting a friend who passed away there. Visiting that friend was difficult as little by little beds would empty as the people died and new people would take their place. There were incredible numbers of great people who died horrific deaths. Witnessing a P.M.L. death in a very close friend was probably the hardest of them all.

You have to be in the right age group to have really been hit hard by this one. The younger men coming up today have no idea what that time period was like. They are the fortunate ones.
 
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