Third Eye Open
About Shelly
Rhonda Chittenden
"It is the trained expectation that there are only two choices, invincible or destroyed. It is the shame that tells us to press our hands against our own mouths, biting down on our lives to keep from making any sound, to keep from telling any story." J. Keiko Lane in her essay "(Un) Safe Sex" in Sex & Single Girls.

I met Shelly eight years ago. I was working as the program director of a local women's center and she had recently been diagnosed as HIV-positive. At a client's suggestion, I called Shelly to invite her to speak. At a time when our nation was just beginning to see the trend towards increasing HIV infections in women, Shelly was an anomaly in our small midwestern city. Seeking health and social services that addressed her unique needs as a single mother, she quickly found a sore lack of women-centered HIV-AIDS services. Emboldened by anger, like so many angry women before her, she harnessed this emotion to found a grassroots support organization for women and families infected and affected by HIV-AIDS.

She did not press her hand against her mouth.

Shelly spent the next several years telling her story to local colleges and community groups. She educated thousands of people about HIV transmission, safer sex practices, and the unique circumstances of women living with HIV. At her invitation, I joined the board of directors of her support organization and spent the next three years intensely involved with event organizing, fundraising, and occasional rabble rousing. Over those years, Shelly and I developed a friendship based on sincere mutual respect. (Writing these words, I remember the respect in her eyes when she watched me speak and this makes me cry.)

Shelly had working-class sensibilities and a healthy sense of entitlement. She was a woman who grew tomatoes in her garden, then made gallons of salsa during the hottest weeks of Iowa summer. She had fiery red hair and loved the color purple. She could talk on the phone for hours and often did. She was stubborn and private. She bragged about her son, his intelligence, kindness, and aspirations. She was the homeroom mother of his class every year until she became too sick and would sometimes arrive in homemade costumes to teach the kids about some historical figure they were studying. As a friend, Shelly offered quiet gestures of support during tough times, sending cards and homemade gifts. She could be difficult and very funny. From her I learned that your house can never be too messy, your dress can never have too many sequins, and you can never prepare too many rum balls for your holiday party.

My friend Shelly, like more than a million women worldwide, met her death decades too early because of AIDS. She died this March at age 42.

Driving home after her memorial service, hot tears poured down my face. I screamed to the April sky. I screamed to Shelly's ghost. I screamed promises to myself to live a more clearly loving life. To keep my hands away from my mouth, to spend my life and to tell its stories.

For information on women and HIV, follow these links. www.safersex.org
www.cdc.gov/hiv/
www.thebody.com
www.hivpositive.com

Rhonda’s monthly column, Third Eye uses truth telling to draw connections from women’s most intimate decisions and experiences to the continual unfolding of third wave feminism. Honoring that women’s lives reflect diverse realities, she seeks to illustrate how feminist truth telling can simultaneously embrace and extend beyond the personal and the political.

Rhonda Chittenden, MS, is a creative writer and a sexuality educator. She has organized feminist conferences, film festivals, and fundraisers with more in the mix. Because she loves the trees, landscapes, and wildlife of the Midwest, she currently makes her home there.

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