PRINCE ALBERT, Sask. — There is a lot of silence around HIV and AIDS, which makes the death of one young man so inspiring.
“The funeral ... surprised me because we have trouble getting people to talk openly about HIV and AIDS,” said Natalie Kallio, support services co-ordinator at AIDS Saskatoon, about Robert, a client from La Ronge, Sask., who quickly grew to be her friend.
But she showed up wearing an AIDS ribbon and suddenly everyone wanted to wear one, she said.
“We all wore them, all the pallbearers and his family and when we were putting him to rest ... the AIDS ribbons went onto his coffin that went in the ground. We talked about it,” Kallio said.
“It was one of the most sad and wonderful days I’d ever had, because what Robert wanted when he died is for people to talk about this.”
Kallio met Robert when he was in jail. She said she knew he didn’t trust her, but he needed support for an upcoming court date. When he was out of jail, Kallio helped get him into detox.
He was a former gang member, joining when he was young. Robert, whose own parents were separated, struggling with addictions and homelessness, was looking for some form of family, said Kallio.
When someone is young and from a rough background, the gang looks good, Kallio said Robert told her, but he knew something different when he ended up in hospital and didn’t get out.
“’But this is what happens, is you end up alone in a hospital dying and none of those people are around,”’ she said Robert told her.
Kallio was one of the only people who would take Robert out of hospital, and when she did, Kallio took him to AIDS Saskatoon’s outreach program, the 601.
“He looked really sick and he knew he looked really sick, so he’d talk to people about being really sick,” she said.
He would talk to people at risk or newly diagnosed with HIV, in a quiet way, and they would get to know him, Kallio said. “And they would all of sudden come to my office and say, ‘I want to see a doctor. I want to talk about treatment.’ These were things they’d never talked about before,” she said.
But for Robert, it was already too late.
Kallio continued to visit Robert in hospital, but he had another visitor as well. Ashley (her name has been changed to protect her and her family) met Robert earlier in detox. He gave her advice and support when she learned she was HIV positive.
She said when she heard Robert was in hospital, and wouldn’t make it through the weekend, she went to visit that night. He lived another two weeks and she just kept visiting. “The main reason I went back was because he just kept saying, ‘come back,’ and he was dying there, so it was like, how could I not?”
During those two weeks, Ashley said she and Robert became friends, but it was difficult.
“I watched him die for two weeks ... that was a changing experience for me, just watching him die. I won’t use (injection drugs) again, after watching him die like that.”
Robert was diagnosed with HIV around the same age that Ashley was, but he continued to use.
Kallio she said people she knows couldn’t survive what her clients overcome.
“The majority of people that I work with did not grow up wanting to be this. Nobody does. Nobody wants to have HIV and be in jail, nobody does,” she said nothing that Robert was no different.
“People saw him as a former gang member and this and that. I got to know him as one of the most genuine, authentic, lovely, intelligent, funny people that I’ve ever known in my life.”
Robert wanted his legacy to be his story and his greatest gift was giving them permission to talk about him and his experience, Kallio said.
“That’s what he wanted to do. He wanted to tell people that this shouldn’t happen.”
Kallio had never seen a photo of Robert before he was sick. At the funeral she said she saw a photo of him with more than just skin covering his bones and he was a very handsome young man.
“And it broke me a little bit because that wasn’t the Robert I knew, but that was the Robert all the people at the funeral were thinking about. And it’s such a bloody waste, he was 27 years old,” she said.
“I was pretty broken for a few weeks after Robert died.” She wasn’t alone. Robert had an impact on many people, she said.
“We call it the Robert Effect, his doctors and nurses and outreach workers. We all work with people who have HIV every day, but Robert touched us all ... He made us better at what we do, better at listening to the people we are working with, so that we are working with them,” she said. He caused them to be more ferocious with their work, said Kallio said.