Lauren Grover: On the Scene

The Victoria-style house on Bois d’Arc Avenue, known for 16 years as HIS house, doesn’t make a sound.

Its somber, 104-year-old frame knows stories far outnumbering the bricks of its foundation. And whether it would cry or shout them, it would certainly whisper, from the secrets of its walls, the name Shirley Chiesa.

Nine years after HIS house opened as a rudimentary hospice for dying AIDS patients, Shirley became the director in 1998 of Tyler AIDS Services, then $3,000 in debt.

She bandaged its financial wounds and learned for the first time about AIDS and the some 125 East Texas who died of it in HIS house.

Its hospice services began with a jolt in 1989 when a sick man with AIDS, refused by the county jail, was left at the house’s curb. One by one, it became a haven for the unwanted.

After years of prejudice from the medical community, AIDS patients were finally admitted to hospitals and hospice centers when Shirley came on board. She helped change the house’s role from a place to die to a place to live, welcoming all AIDS “clients” who needed residence.

A handful at a time called it home, some for months, others for years, under Shirley’s kind, watchful eye. As she administrated over Tyler AIDS Services, her heart lived with her clients at HIS house.

Treating AIDS in the late 90s was still an ugly, difficult thing. Clients suffered terrible vomiting, diarrhea and nausea, sometimes so severe they couldn’t leave their beds.

Shirley invested in adult diapers. She taught them to cook, answered their worried calls at 2 a.m., sat with them in the emergency room and acted as a mother many hadn’t had.

HIS house wasn’t often a calm place, but a battlefield where disease, drug addiction, depression and suicide were fought. Clients often downed 12 pills a day to manage their disease, Shirley said.

But she soon realized treating the sick wasn’t enough.

“Unless you want to build 10 more HIS houses, we need to start working with people in the Tyler community,” she recalled.

Shirley took her message of STD and HIV/AIDS education to schools, prisons and churches, often pleading with conservative officials to share forthright information with young people.

Her frustrations never rested. AIDS clients were dying in front of her regularly. “I attended a funeral every other month there for awhile,” she said.

And yet parents and educators in Smith County fought against her talks on safe sex. Many didn’t find them necessary, she said.

She witnessed the result of that ignorance: Once she met a girl who didn’t understand how she had become pregnant. She also learned of a 12-year-old boy who had died of AIDS in HIS house in the early 1990s, receiving the disease from his mother.

Shirley knew AIDS was worn on many lovely faces. Some were the prejudiced stereotype: gay men or needle-sharing druggies. But she’d seen white and black, straight, educated, church-going and health-conscious.

As the years wore on, heterosexual AIDS increased, and the numbers are still climbing today.

Shirley fought for Tyler to open its eyes to AIDS, and witnessed small breakthroughs: locals helping AIDS clients, donations arriving at HIS house that hadn’t come before, a few schools or churches opening their doors to her frank sex education talks.

Progress gave her hope. But it didn’t disrupt her love for her current AIDS clients despite their illness. She saw God work in them.

“If people don’t believe in God, all they had to do was spend a week with me in that place and see what God does,” she said.

Shirley threw Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners for dozens of clients and their families, hosted surprise birthday parties and took them on outings to Dallas and around East Texas.

As the stigma against AIDS softened and treatment vastly improved, Shirley helped close HIS house in 2005, as AIDS clients could live in the community and also suffered less debilitating side effects.

A year later, due to overwork and high stress, Shirley suffered a seizure that led doctors to believe she couldn’t work or drive. She retired from Tyler AIDS Services. Her sudden disability was devastating to her.

“Every time I thought about not being there for my clients, I just sat down and boo-hoo’d,” she said.

But her fears subsided when she noticed dozens of them kept in touch just as they always had.

Now, more than a year after her retirement, she receives weekly calls from clients who still need her love. They visit her, and she gets rides to visit them.

“They are still my babies,” she said.

This year, Tyler AIDS Services continues to serve 210 HIV-positive clients.

It’s a mere fraction of the 1,843 HIV-positive residents living in Smith County — officials estimate half don’t receive treatment.

Like Shirley, the East Texas community must continue to love and care for our own, especially our sick.

And, we must better promote sex education and protect one another from such a horrific disease.

Ignorance is no excuse. We now know how HIV is transmitted, along with a handful of other scarring diseases: Through the careless act of unprotected sex and promiscuity.

Parents must step up. A 2006 ABC News Poll of teenagers showed only 50 percent of teenagers in the U.S. had talked with their parents about sex, and fewer — 32 percent — received their information about sex from parents.

Abstinence education, promoted in most of our county’s schools, might not be enough. Data from the American Academy of Pediatrics shows 65 percent of 17-year-olds have had sex.

Like teaching them to cross a street safely, teach your children about sex, its dangers, its place in God’s eyes and its beauty in marriage.

Even if abstinence is your message, don’t forget to tell them about safe-sex methods. You might not wish for them to have sex, but don’t wish upon them a future of AIDS.

Updated Friday, June 20, 2008 at 10:56 a.m. CDT

Lauren Grover
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