HIV and my dad

My father is probably the most paranoid person I know. His imagination is so wild that it becomes difficult to make sense of what he wants to convey. Most of the time, his paranoia is so compelling that my siblings and I just want to drop any activity that we would like to engage in.

Our house feels like a garrison with so many padlocks here and there. Each bedroom has a peephole, and part of the process of opening a door means first looking through the peephole each and every time. There are also some doors with locks outside, particularly the bathroom, so in case a burglar comes in through the bathroom window, he cannot advance farther in the house. These outside locks must be locked every night.

My friends tell me that these things seem like details in some comedy-horror movie, but to me, they’re just normal. We’ve lived like this for as long as I can remember.

If there are micromanagers in the corporate world, then my father is a “microreminderer.” He would remind me and my elder sister and brother of the most mundane details that other parents wouldn’t bother their kids with.

Here are examples: Don’t play with stray dogs. Don’t stare at strangers. Don’t get off the bus with both feet (in other words, don’t jump). When getting off the bus, use your right foot first. When crossing the street, look left and right.

And so on.

He would repeat these and other reminders over and over again as my siblings and I are about to set foot outside the house. These reminders would have been relevant if we were five years old, or even 12, but we are adults now. I appreciate his concern and his efforts to remind us that it’s a harsh world out there, that it won’t be easy outside the confines of our home. But we are already at that point in our lives when we can take care of ourselves!

On the other hand, my dad never reminded me not to smoke, or to drink, or to take drugs, or to engage in premarital sex. He never reminded me to practice safe sex, either. He never reminded me about sexually transmitted diseases. He never reminded me about HIV.

And so, in December of last year we got the horror of our lives when we found out I was HIV-positive. I was not there when my mother broke the news to my dad. She told me later that he just shed some careful tears and decided to proactively deal with the situation. You see, my father has always been stern and tough, emotionless mostly, and just walled up. He was never the best husband, I know that. But he has always been the best dad—a very good provider in so many ways.

I feel so very bad for bringing this terrible disease on myself. But more than that, I feel bad about the emotional impact on my family, especially my father who had been very protective of us since the day we first breathed air on this earth. I would not like him to think that he had not “reminded” us well enough about the world’s harshness, because God knows how much he had tried to.

Since the discovery of the disease, my father has remained his paranoid self. But he has been more protective of me than ever, for fear that I would contract debilitating HIV-related illnesses in the future. But more than these things, he has slowly opened up, and has shown more emotion and concern that are more understandable through the human language.

My dad has begun to show affection in the way I want it to be communicated, in a way I best understand it. And for that, I am truly thankful. Ours has never been a perfect picture of a family, and my father is far from perfect. But who is perfect, anyway? It’s so ironic, but perhaps HIV was all I needed to be able to see, find, and appreciate these little things that had been under my nose all along. Ironically, everything is falling into place, not just with my father, but with the entire family as well. And I can say that since the arrival of the disease, things have never been better.

I haven’t gotten the chance to tell my dad, “I’m sorry, please forgive me.” It has always been just implied. And I’d probably never muster the courage to say it, for some reason. So I am saying it to him now in this little narrative of mine. He may never find this little story, but I would like to let whoever reads this know that I’m so sorry, and that if I were to be reborn, I’d probably not change a thing about him, and myself.

“R12GGG,” 26, is a patient at the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine.