World AIDS day today.. a little story
On June 14th 1980 my mom met a man at his birthday party thrown by mutual friends and drew an instant connection with him.
He was gay and had always wanted a family and my mom was looking for someone to be part of my life also… a few months later he asked her to marry him, A marriage between friends, a family for him. But things where cut short because he was illegally in Canada at that moment. I am not too sure why exactly because I have heard many stories… but hadn’t been able to get across the border, so he had sneaked in through the woods north of Spokane WA…
He was discovered a few months later and had and had to leave immediately…
We headed to AZ a few months later, then he came back to see us and then again we went back to him… Around his birthday again in 1982 while we where in AZ he and my mom saw the “White Wedding” music video and decided to get married within a few days… On June 21st 1982, Miguel became my “Daddy”… and from that day forward I saw him as my Dad…. he was a big part of my life, his family became mine and he was proud of me…
My mom wanted to live in Canada and he wanted to stay in the US but that didn’t keep us apart for long. We either went to AZ or he was with us in Nelson.
The most important part of all of it was that he was committed to me, the marriage that he had with my mother was to become my father and it was a role he didn’t take lightly… However, in 1984, he found out he was HIV+ …
When we moved to Quebec however, things changed a bit because it was farther but we tried to get down to AZ as often as possible and we always had a relationship through the phone and letters….
He got more sick as the years past and in 1996 he was getting sicker but it was more because of the meds then the disease itself so he stopped talking the meds all together at that time… In April 97 I talked to him one day and he told me that his T-Cells count was down to 4… A few weeks later, on May 8th, a Thursday night, 13 years after he found out he was HIV+ , the night of my last College Exam and I was out partying, I came back to my boyfriends apartment and came face to face with a note from my mom… it was not like her to call without a reason and I learned a few minutes later that he had died that morning…
Miguel was an amazing, intelligent, funny, charismatic, handsome, loving man and the most amazing father that I could have had in those crucial year of my life…
I still think of him often, I still talk to my family in AZ, I wonder if he would be proud of me now, I would have loved for him to see his grandkids…
Most of all…..
I miss him…
Micheal “Miguel” Keith Kirkman
1944 -1997
