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Out from the 'Trenches'

By Jessica Carreras

There are some who believe that everyone needs a cause to devote themselves to; something to give their life meaning. Just ask Freda Wagman. When we try to phone the native Detroiter and author at her home just outside of Houston, she doesn't answer. More than 20 years after the height of the AIDS epidemic, Wagman is at the hospital, visiting a gay friend who has HIV.
The scene, for Wagman, is all too familiar – and one that she grapples with whenever she thinks of her son Gary, who died 13 years ago last month. Gary, too, was HIV positive.
Now, over a decade later, Wagman admits that she still can't believe her son, who lived in San Francisco, is gone. "There are so many times I start to call him," she admits. "Here it is 13 years later, and I'm in total disbelief."
But despite her pain, she has Gary to thank. While some women will celebrate giving a child life this Mother's Day weekend, Wagman will celebrate what her son gave to her: something to fight for – an end to HIV/AIDS. "That cause started in March of 1983," she says, "and it hasn't quit since."
It was the cause that took her to AIDS Foundation Houston, where she helped care for dozens of HIV-positive men and women throughout the '80s. And, in 2000, it took her to a computer where she sat down to write "Snippets from the Trenches: A Mother's AIDS Memoir." Currently, the first-person account of one mom's fight against the disease that would ultimately take her son is a finalist in Traverse City-based Foreword Magazine's 2007 Book of the Year contest in the gay and lesbian non-fiction category. Winners will be announced May 29.
The book details her experiences with the AIDS Foundation, where she met so many gay men whom she befriended, cared for and, ultimately, watched succumb to HIV and AIDS.
None of them, however, could prepare her for Gary's death. "All the time I was (volunteering), I did it to meet the enemy head on," Wagman recalls. "I was involved so I'd be prepared for Gary's death. Yet when it came, it was his first hospitalization in 13 years. I went there (to San Francisco) and it was so different.
"I was just kind of disconnected when it was happening. There I was saying, 'This is the day we've been waiting for.' But we weren't celebrating."
As for writing "Snippets," Wagman, a first-time author, insists that putting the book together was easy. It seems a daunting task, given that the people mentioned in her book are just a sampling of all those she met and helped through the AIDS Foundation. But to Wagman, each one was an important piece of her life and her AIDS work. "I knew it would be a timeline, because I knew what the story was," she explains. "I can still visualize every person and everything we did together."
Her depressing line of volunteer work wasn't so hard on her, either. To Wagman, it all came so fast that there seemed no choice but to continue helping one person after another who fell sick. "When I think about it now, I think, 'How did I do that?'" she says. "There's no way to even count the people who came and went."
She recalls, however, that going one step at a time alongside a slew of gay men who became her best friends made it seem as though volunteering was just an inextricable part of her life.
"Our family never expressed love," she says, "but gay men just poured it out."
The only difficult part of everything Wagman has done, she says, was writing down the events that eventually led up to her only son's death. "I was reliving every single experience when I wrote it," she says. "It was very painful. The only consolation is that it's organized in book form.
"But the pain is still there," she sighs, as though fighting it the moment the words come out of her mouth. "There's no catharsis. There's no closure."
Her only respite from the grief comes from knowing how many people she helped – and still helps today. Even her book, with a portion of the proceeds from each sold going to the American Foundation for AIDS Research, is a showcase of her willingness to give. Wagman lost her son, who she called "the light of my life," to HIV. But she gained friends, praise, love – and, most of all, a purpose.

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