This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from A Hard Silence: One daughter remaps family, grief, and faith when HIV/AIDS changes it all by Melanie Brooks (Vine Leaves Press, 2023).
Prologue
Four days earlier, Randy died from complications related to AIDS
after a period of prolonged illness. In the final two years of his life,
Randy’s had become one of the most recognizable faces of a national
tragedy: Canada’s tainted blood scandal. Between 1980 and 1985,
close to two thousand Canadians, most from within the hemophiliac
community, were infected with HIV from contaminated blood. More
than seven hundred have since died. A person with severe hemo-
philia, Conners had contracted HIV sometime in the early 1980s from
Factor 8, a government approved blood-clotting product derived from
donated human blood plasma. He’d learned of his infection in 1987.
Despite Randy’s doctors’ repeated assurances that there was little
chance he could infect his wife, the couple learned in 1989 that Janet
was also HIV-positive.
The Conners’s heartbreak encapsulates what has been character-
ized as Canada’s “worst-ever” public health disaster. Despite mounting
evidence that infected blood products were known to be transmitting
HIV, administrators of Canada’s blood supply were slow to implement
adequate measures to protect the public. Appalling mismanagement
by the Canadian Red Cross and its regulators and systemic corporate
greed by blood-product manufacturers and distributors showed blatant
disregard for public safety and allowed infected blood to be knowingly
distributed nationwide. The tragedy is the result of a complicated web
of action and inaction by the parties involved, whose biggest failures
included a lack of proper screening to eliminate high risk donors,
unnecessary delays in implementing available screening methods of
the blood products for HIV, and fateful decisions to save money by
using up inventory of suspected contaminated products.
Melanie Brooks (she/her) is the author of A Hard Silence: One daughter remaps family, grief, and faith when HIV/AIDS changes it all (Vines Leaves Press 2023) and Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma (Beacon Press 2017). She teaches creative nonfiction and narrative medicine in the MFA program at Bay Path University. She holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and a Certificate in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. She’s had numerous interviews and essays on topics ranging from illness, loss, and grief to parenting and aging published in the The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Toronto Globe and Mail, HuffPost, Yankee Magazine, Psychology Today, Ms. Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, and other notable publications. She lives in NH with my husband, two kids (when they are home from university), and chocolate Lab.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, Puerto del Sol, ANMLY, Fruitslice, among others. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
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