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Inside Joseph's House
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Sitting at the dining room table one recent Monday was a 52-year-old woman who started using drugs at 17 and thinks that is how she got the virus. She was living at a shelter for three years and had withered down to 87 pounds when she reached out to Joseph's House, which began taking in women four years ago.
"I wasn't taking my medicine at all, period. I mean, I had medicine six months in my locker," said the woman, who asked not to be identified by name. "For what? For what am I going to take it for? I'm already homeless. Here's the old song . . . you're afraid of living and too scared to die."
At mealtimes, she reaches for second and third helpings, sometimes reminding herself out loud to slow down. She has also started collecting postcards from whoever will send them in order to keep a positive attitude.
"I was rescued, I wasn't just saved," she said, adding that life is now comfortable but that she still struggles with her reality. "I'm crushed. I don't care how good I look, or how high I talk, or how educated I am, I'm tore up. Now, I am not contradicting myself. I can be anything I want to be as long as I keep my high spirits. But deep down, all the way inside, is a little something in me saying, 'Damn, I got AIDS,' that I will never be normal."
She was not there when Wylie died. But her roommate Kim Corbin was.
Corbin, 44, spent her life avoiding trouble, going home straight from school as a child. She said she loved the man who gave her HIV.
"I thought we was gonna get married; that's why I wasn't worried about it," she said. "Shoot."
Her hair is gone where doctors operated on a tumor and she limps when she walks, but like some of the people who have come to the house, she has recovered enough to leave soon. Not everyone who is sent here to die by hospitals, case workers or shelters actually does. Some get better.
For those who don't, there are memorial services in the living room.
Corbin sat at Wylie's service in a gray sweat suit but did not participate as more than a dozen people (nurses, volunteers and former residents) took turns lighting candles and sharing memories of him. Each spoke of Wylie as if a relative had died and not as if they had attended dozens of these memorials.
"I was a latecomer to the Rob scene," volunteer Kevin Sullivan says after lighting a candle. " I remember the week before he died. . . . He and I went shoe shopping. He wanted two pairs of shoes from Payless. Me being me, 'Okay, let's try this pair on. Okay, that's good. Let's try this pair on.' I forget his exact words, but his message was, 'Stop. I'm in no rush. Take your time.' "
