Soldiers of the Great War

I've been considering this question for the past several weeks as I return to school, ostensibly to complete my pre-med studies. The reason I've thought about being a doctor is because I want to make sense of my experiences, particularly of my long engagement with the AIDS epidemic. In many ways, until the present, I have felt, deeply, that the story of the AIDS epidemic among gay men in America is *my* story. I came out in 1990, into the thick of the epidemic, the same year my brother tested positive for HIV. Fourteen years later, after the deaths of my brother and so many others close to me, after all the participation in research, after all the work with people with HIV, after the obsession with understanding everything I could about HIV disease and developing treatments, and after trying to fulfill this past with a trajectory into a life of service as a medical professional...I'm not sure whether I want to do it. I'm starting to think that just because it's been my story for so many years, perhaps doesn't mean it has to continue being my story. Perhaps there is a larger world, perhaps there is more I could do, perhaps it is not a betrayal of the dead to decline the invitation to dedicate my life to people afflicted with this disease. Perhaps it's not.

I am reminded of Andrew Sullivan's article in the New York Times Magazine, "When Plagues End," published in 1996, at the sea-change in the epidemic among gay men. I remember that moment in time. And I remember resonating with the truth of what he wrote, but HIV wasn't done with me yet. I still had my own seroconversion to experience, and my brother's death. I still had almost five full-time years of work at an AIDS service agency ahead of me and six-plus years of dogged treatment with life-saving drugs. But now I have the breathing room to ask: could it possibly be over? Can I relegate it to a formative period and my life and begin something else?

Even as I think about it, I consider the quote in Andrew Sullivan's article, as follows:

...as Mark Helprin expressed so beautifully in his novel ''A Soldier of the Great War,'' what almost every gay man, in a subtler, quieter way, has also learned: 'The war was still in him, and it would be in him for a long time to come, for soldiers who have been bloodied are soldiers forever. They never fit in. . . . That they cannot forget, that they do not forget, that they will never allow themselves to heal completely, is their way of expressing their love for friends who have perished. And they will not change because they have become what they have become to keep the fallen alive.'

If I allow myself to heal completely (is that even possible?), will I betray the memory of the dead whose legacy is ever before me?