The man was partially covered with a yellow plastic sheet. Policemen stood in a ring around his prostrate form, partially obstructing the view of craning necks and picture snapping smartphones. “Have some respect,” a cop said. A few phones were sheepishly stowed away; the owners of the arms that were holding them suddenly reminded that not every moment is Instagram fodder, not every event a spectacle. 

As I crossed over to the 86th street subway station the medical coroners struggled to slip a white plastic tarp under the body. All in a day’s work. 

Less than an hour earlier that same morning, I’d opened an email from the Dominican Republic. Around the same time as over a thousand people perished in Nepal, the result of a massive 7.8 earthquake, Alice, a young and vivacious teenager, had died of complications related to AIDS in the Dominican Republic.

The panic hit me like a tidal wave, pulling me into a downward emotional spiral I struggled to get out of. I was already running late for breakfast with friends, I needed to get out of the house, I needed to see someone, anyone. I needed to hear happy life updates and laugh. I needed distraction. I needed to stop thinking about her.

I met Alice my first time in the Dominican Republic and my first summer working with Campamento Esperanza y Alegría (a program of La Clinica de Familia de La Romana). We, my mother, a high school classmate of mine, and I, showed up at the clinic early that morning to pack up the supplies needed for a week with 30 children in Jarabacoa, a cool(er) oasis from the city heat up in the mountains of the DR. The buses were coming that afternoon, and there was way too much to get done before the kids started to arrive and a lovable chaos descended on the clinic.

It was there, right inside the gates of the clinic, that I first saw Alice. She, all of 9 years old, marched in carrying a puppy she picked up off of the street and a suitcase so small that I could only imagine it was manufactured for American Girl Dolls, and announced that she had arrived. Even then, she was a force to be reckoned with, ordering the doctors, nurses, and camp staff to come look at her new dog. Getting her to put the puppy down was close to impossible, and she argued like a champion debater, but eventually she relinquished the furry ball and helped us pack before the other kids arrived.

As the summers passed, and she got older, her outspoken spunk was tempered by kindness and a nurturing nature that made her routinely one of the most well-respected and well-liked kids at camp. She was enthusiastic, throwing all of herself into activities even on days when the Antiretroviral cocktail she was on to keep AIDS at bay caused her to be sick.

She was one of the first kids who I had to convince to take her meds when they made her feel sick, and she was the first who I listened to as she tried to explain what it was like to be a larger-than-life person trapped in a body that constantly felt like it was failing her. And, while I knew she was not always in the perfect health, I never thought that anything could possibly snuff out what was, to me, an inspiring spirit.

There is, in working with HIV+ children, an accepted death rate that is neither acceptable nor easy to cope with. Alice was, to me, and all those who knew her, just like any other kid. A little more fragile perhaps, but there were more days that I forgot she was sick with a virus that has killed over 1.5 million people, than days I remembered.

She didn’t live like a sick person, perhaps because she knew no other way to live. I imagine that when sickness is all you’ve known, to let it rule your life is to finally succumb to it’s true potential. And while there were rough days, increasingly so in the last few months I was told, she set the standard for positivity in the community in which I worked.

I often say that we are in a time in which an HIV+ child can grow into an HIV+ woman, become an HIV+ mother, and have HIV- children, and it’s technically true. Medically, we are there and it’s miraculous, but when the young teenager you wanted to see grow into a strong and beautiful woman is unable to meet this difficult to attain, but entirely possible future, it’s hard to keep repeating it without a tickle of doubt in the back of your throat. She was, after all, my favorite success story. An example of resilience and strength that I regularly used at conferences and speaking engagements when asked, “How do you know when you’ve done something right?”

Alice was, whether due to our programming, her own hard work, or a combination of the two, something right.

And yet, she is now gone. Another statistic in the World Health Organization’s ledger book for lives cut short by AIDS.

I tried to Google what had happened to the man I saw dead on the street. Nothing came up. A man who presumably has friends and family and a life away from that NYC sidewalk was rendered, it seemed, completely anonymous – a check mark in the coroner’s ledger book.

I tried to explain Alice’s death to a few friends. By and large they, from the moment I mentioned AIDS, took on a pitying expression, “But isn’t that pretty normal? I mean, she had HIV.” And they are right in a sense, a lot of people who have HIV die of AIDS. But where they see a girl who died from a virus, I see a girl who survived for 17 years in spite of a virus that tried to make every day her last. For her, fighting death was all in a day’s work.

*Names and ages have been altered