Managing Chronic Loss and Grief

Typically, an AIDS patient, particularly if he is gay, must prepare for his own death while dealing with chronic bereavement in his personal support system. As I write, in the late 1990s, most HIV-infected gay men—indeed most gay men, particularly those mature in years—have had multiple losses to the disease. Integrating these is quite a different matter from integrating the loss when a single loved one dies, or even when there are multiple discrete deaths in an individual's network. Coping with chronic loss and grief is tremendously difficult for anyone; for someone suffering from AIDS, such chronic mourning is potentially life-threatening.