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As he prepared to die, Richard Darch walked onto his third-floor balcony for a final cigarette.
It was just after 6 p.m., and, as was his habit, Darch closed the sliding door to prevent smoke from wafting into his apartment.
Inside, a doctor, nurse and anesthesiologist were readying to end his remarkable, difficult life.
At 67, Darch had come of age in a perilous era for gay men and had lived with HIV for more than three decades. He had defeated colorectal cancer. He had survived at least three suicide attempts.
Smoking, he always insisted, was not what would kill him.
“Besides, what’s the difference?” he’d demand in defence of his habit.
Darch lit a cigarette that night and surveyed his Centretown neighbourhood: his last place on Earth.
Beneath him, sitting in a truck parked on Lisgar Street, Darch’s three brothers watched him smoke. They were waiting for him to die, and they debated the meaning of his cigarette: Was having second thoughts?
“To me, it showed how calm he was,” says his younger brother, John.
The three brothers had not been invited to witness their sibling’s medically assisted death, because Darch was afraid they might make him emotional and cause him to abandon his carefully laid plans.
He was famously indecisive, but not about the end of his life.
“Richard was ill for a very long time,” says his older brother, Michael. “And it was very, very important to him that he die at home. He made it absolutely clear to everybody that he wasn’t going into hospital. … Certainly, for the last five years, that was almost a mantra.”
Richard Darch was an artist and hairdresser, a pioneer and a survivor, who endured long enough to see medical assistance in dying become legal in Canada.
“For somebody who fought for so long to live,” says Michael, “he deserved to die just the way he wanted to.”
Richard Darch was born into a military family on April 14, 1950. His father, Maynard, was a Second World War veteran and a warrant officer in the Canadian Armed Forces.
In those years, the Darch family lived on the upper floor of a Bronson Avenue duplex in Centretown. Richard had a happy childhood, which he spent largely in the company of his older brother.
“We didn’t have a lot of money, so a lot of our time was spent together, playing with whatever we could find,” says Michael.
They would often ride tricycles to visit their grandparents, who fed them chocolate. They played cops and robbers. They threw snowballs at the Bronson Avenue traffic.
Richard Darch’s early childhood was a happy one in Ottawa.
The family later moved to the Mann Avenue Apartments in Sandy Hill, and the boys would fish with their father in the nearby Rideau River. Richard liked to chase minnows.
Those sunlit days disappeared as Richard matured and confronted his sexuality. By early high school, he was obviously gay and defiantly flamboyant. Other students tormented and teased him.
Darch explored his sexuality in the gay bars of Gatineau but he was desperately unhappy. He inflicted cuts on his arms and legs and, on several occasions, overdosed in his bedroom.
“I didn’t feel I belonged in the world,” he once told an interviewer.
That world was mostly hostile to him. Not until 1969 would homosexual acts be decriminalized in Canada and, even then, discrimination remained part of the institutional order. In Ottawa, the civil service purged gay men from its ranks, newspapers published the names of men who used male prostitutes — one civil servant, Warren Zufelt, jumped from his balcony as a result — and the police famously raided the city’s gay bathhouse in May 1976.
Even at home, Darch wasn’t fully accepted: His father had a difficult time coming to terms with his nonconformist son. “It’s not you’d call an easy relationship,” recalls Michael.
Darch sought counselling to deal with his feelings of rejection and desolation, and carried on with life. He earned a hairdressing diploma at what’s now Algonquin College and worked in series of salons, including Emil of Switzerland in the Place d’Orleans Shopping Centre, where he developed a devoted clientele.
The success gave him the confidence to be himself: He wore jewelry, had much of his body tattooed, and brought friends and partners home to his parents’ house for dinner. Darch considered establishing his own salon.
But just as his universe was expanding — alongside the burgeoning gay rights movement — news began to spread about healthy young men in the community dying rapidly from unusual infections and a rare cancer.
The AIDS epidemic was about to change everything.
In early July 1981, Barry Deeprose stopped to read a New York Times article stuck to the door of the Gays of Ottawa Centre, where he worked as a help-line counsellor.
The article described a rare, often fatal form of cancer diagnosed in 41 homosexual men in New York and California. “The cancer often causes swollen lymph glands,” the newspaper said, “and then kills by spreading throughout the body.”
Deeprose, now 75, has a vivid memory of the moment. “This was the first announcement of the AIDS epidemic, but we didn’t have a name for it then,” he says.
It would be another year before the mystery disease would come to be described as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
With governments slow to respond to the crisis, Deeprose and a friend, Bob Read, founded the AIDS Committee of Ottawa in July 1985 to spearhead prevention efforts and assist the dying.
They were among the darkest hours of the epidemic: Researchers had yet to decode the T-cell-destroying disease; dying AIDS patients were often treated like lepers. In hospital, Deeprose says, food would be left outside the door because staff members were afraid to go inside.
“It was a crucible of fear, anger and grief,” he says of the time. Anyone in the gay community with a cold, a rash or diarrhea feared the onset of AIDS.
“It was a crucible of fear, anger and grief.”
In late 1985, the first commercial blood test for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the retrovirus that causes AIDS, became available in Canada. There ensued in the gay community a debate about whether to be tested.
Some believed it was better not to know since there was no effective treatment. What’s more, men who had sex without disclosing their HIV-positive status were being charged as criminals.
Richard Darch wanted to know. Although he was not symptomatic, his test revealed that he was HIV-positive. Doctors told him he had a year to live.
The news devastated Darch and those around him. One friend and lover shot himself. It’s not clear if he, too, was facing a diagnosis, but many AIDS patients were opting for suicide rather than travelling the grim path of the disease. One study found that those with AIDS were 36 times more likely to commit suicide than other men.
In March 1987, a glimmer of hope appeared when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved AZT, the first drug designed to treat HIV/AIDS. Darch enrolled in a Canadian clinical trial.
AZT was then prescribed in heavy doses and its side effects were punishing. Darch suffered nausea and debilitating muscle fatigue. The drug had to be taken every four hours, 24 hours a day, and many patients carried beepers to comply with the regimen.
“You’d be in the bar, and you’d hear these timers go off, and you knew it was time for everyone to take their medication,” remembers Kevin Hatt, 61, an Ottawa activist who has lived with HIV since March 1984.
Too sick to work, Darch smoked and painted and cared for his dog, Sable, a miniature collie. His paintings reflected his changeable moods: Some pieces were dark (an infant dragging a liquor bottle), others lewd, still others bright and playful. He painted landscapes, and reproduced old masters.
Richard Darch with one of his pieces of art.
He spent time with HIV/AIDS support groups, but dropped out after watching so many friends die of the disease. He gave up his motorcycle, and for a decade he was celibate. He became painfully thin.
“He was living in a bubble almost,” Michael says.
But in 1995, a revolutionary new treatment known as the AIDS cocktail was introduced: It combined three drugs that effectively transformed the disease from a death sentence to a chronic illness. With it, Darch’s health and life improved.
He engaged again with the gay community, spoke to student audiences about the importance of safe sex, and found a new partner in Daniel Guertin, an Ottawa gay rights activist.
But just as light returned to his life, there was another diagnosis — colorectal cancer — and still more tragedy: On April 12, 2003, Guertin was struck and killed by a drunk driver on Colonel By Drive.
Darch was again plunged into grief, and in January 2014, he decided to end his pain and anguish. He tattooed his body with morphine patches and went to bed, expecting to die in the night.
Instead, Darch woke up sick and alone.
“Nobody found me. I just woke up,” he told the Citizen in April 2005.
Harsh drug regimens and decades of illness had combined to corrode Darch’s quality of life. All of his teeth had been extracted after an infection, and his waking hours were muddled by morphine. He had given up painting, and needed help to manage his daily affairs. He slept 16 hours a day.
“Slowly but surely the different parts of his body were shutting down,” says his brother, Michael.
For years, Darch had followed the national debate about assisted death, and he was comforted when the legislation, Bill C-14, became law in June 2016. It gave to mentally competent Canadians the right to a medically assisted death when the end of life was “reasonably foreseeable.”
Richard Darch, in an undated photo provided by his family.
Last year, Darch applied to exercise that right. He was assessed, interviewed and ultimately approved by a medical team at The Ottawa Hospital.
In early March, Darch was given a date and time for his last medical appointment: He would die on Friday, March 16 between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m.
When he learned that a time had been set for his brother’s assisted death, Michael wrote to him. “Few people I know have the strength, tenacity and will that you have shown throughout your life,” he said to his brother. “I respect and love you.”
Darch told his three brothers that he didn’t want them at his bedside for fear of becoming overly emotional. Instead, he made individual appointments with each of them for an hour to say goodbye.
Michael met his brother on Wednesday morning and began by reassuring him that he understood and accepted the decision to end his life. “I wanted to make it clear that I thought he was strong to do it,” Michael said.
They talked about their shared childhood, and some of Darch’s misadventures: the time he was burned with firecrackers, and the day he was left behind by the family station wagon. They shared their memories of stealing pop and Christmas cookies from the cold storage where their mother hid them, and building things with Mechano and Minibrix.
“We talked about what it meant not only to be brothers, but very good friends,” says Michael.
Jamie Darch, 57, met his brother for an hour at 1 p.m. Wednesday. Jamie suggested it was eerie to know the date and time of his death. “Richard was matter-of-fact,” says Jamie. “He said, ‘I didn’t pick the date. It was sooner that I thought, but I’m ready.’”
So the two brothers talked about old friends and neighbours and the lives of Jamie’s children. As the hour drew to a close, Jamie felt awkward about leaving his brother for the last time, but Darch said he was tired and needed a smoke.
“See you on the other side,” Darch told Jamie as he departed.
John Darch, 60, was the last to visit his brother on Friday at noon hour. “I’m going to die today,” Richard told him.
John, the executor of his brother’s will, asked him if he was sure he wanted to go through with his plan. “He cut that off pretty quickly, and said, ‘Let’s talk about something else.’”
They talked about John’s children, their future plans and details of the will.
“He was in the best spirits,” John says. “He was always worried about everything. But that day, he wasn’t worried at all.“
Appointed with antique furniture, stained-glass lamps, plush carpets and marble-topped coffee tables, Darch’s apartment gave him comfort and joy. His paintings and ink drawings filled the walls.
When he finished his last cigarette, at 6:30 p.m., Darch walked back inside his apartment and climbed into bed. A doctor asked him if he wanted to proceed with his medically assisted death. Darch assented. He was then given a series of injections, which put him to sleep, sent him into a deep coma and, finally, stopped his breathing.
He died in his bed at 6:50 p.m., at which time his three brothers were told they could come up to pay their respects.
The siblings thanked the medical staff for their kindness, and for doing a job that others might shrink from; they stayed with Richard until his body was taken from the apartment.
Darch had donated his organs to medical science so that researchers could study the long-term effects of HIV and the drugs used to treat it.
Michael says he’s grateful that his brother had the opportunity to choose the time and place of his passing: “I think the important thing for myself, and my brothers, is that he managed to live long enough to die the way he wanted to: in his apartment. He had such a tough life and he fought so many battles that it wasn’t hard to say goodbye.”
Says John: “I hope that I’m lucky enough that I can feel as free he felt that day. I think the process was the most humane thing I’ve ever seen.”
Darch’s niece, Carol-lynn Darch, 45, remembers her uncle as an idealistic, uncommon and loving man who had the courage to be himself. She says he forced everyone in the family to confront their own biases, weaknesses and fears — right to the end.
“Sometimes the greatest form of activism is just being who you are. Richard influenced all of us to be more compassionate, empathetic and accepting.”
Michael Darch sits in his living room, weeks after the death of his brother.
A brief timeline of HIV/AIDS in the United States and Canada
July 3, 1981: The New York Times publishes its first story on a mysterious illness, “a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer” that was killing homosexual men in New York and California
1982: The first cases are reported in Canada
Aug. 20, 1982: More than 80 people attend a Gays of Ottawa public forum on “gay cancer”
August 1983: Ottawa-born Peter Evans, a costume designer, puts a face to the emerging crisis: He becomes the first person in Canada to speak openly about living with AIDS
Oct. 1, 1983: Evans takes part in Ottawa’s first AIDS walk-a-thon from Ottawa to Kingston. It raises more than $5,000
Jan. 4, 1984: Evans dies
March 1985: The first blood test for HIV is approved for use in the U.S.; it becomes available in Canada later in the year
July 1985: Hollywood star Rock Hudson announces that he’s suffering from AIDS; he dies three months later at the age of 59
August 1985: The AIDS Committee of Ottawa, co-founded by Barry Deeprose and Bob Read, holds its first meeting
March 1987: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.) approves AZT, the first drug designed to treat AIDS
1987: Investigative reporter and author Randy Shilts publishes, And the Band Played On, a landmark book on the AIDS epidemic
September 1988: Bruce House opens in Ottawa to offer emergency housing and hospice care for those with AIDS
November 1991: NBA star Magic Johnson announces that he’s HIV-positive
1994: AIDS becomes the leading cause of death in the U.S. for people between the ages of 25 and 44
1995: The F.D.A. approves the first protease inhibitor, which will form a key part of a new approach to AIDS treatment: combination drug therapy, sometimes known as the AIDS cocktail
1995: The number of annual AIDS deaths peaks in Canada as the disease claims 1,764 lives
July 1996: At an AIDS conference in Vancouver, researchers present evidence showing that the combination drug therapy is highly effective
1997: The number of Canadians dying from AIDS plummets for the second consecutive year as 626 people die of the disease
2015: There were 2,096 cases of HIV diagnosed in Canada, according to the latest data available
aduffy@postmedia.com
查看原文...
It was just after 6 p.m., and, as was his habit, Darch closed the sliding door to prevent smoke from wafting into his apartment.
Inside, a doctor, nurse and anesthesiologist were readying to end his remarkable, difficult life.
At 67, Darch had come of age in a perilous era for gay men and had lived with HIV for more than three decades. He had defeated colorectal cancer. He had survived at least three suicide attempts.
Smoking, he always insisted, was not what would kill him.
“Besides, what’s the difference?” he’d demand in defence of his habit.
Darch lit a cigarette that night and surveyed his Centretown neighbourhood: his last place on Earth.
Beneath him, sitting in a truck parked on Lisgar Street, Darch’s three brothers watched him smoke. They were waiting for him to die, and they debated the meaning of his cigarette: Was having second thoughts?
“To me, it showed how calm he was,” says his younger brother, John.
The three brothers had not been invited to witness their sibling’s medically assisted death, because Darch was afraid they might make him emotional and cause him to abandon his carefully laid plans.
He was famously indecisive, but not about the end of his life.
“Richard was ill for a very long time,” says his older brother, Michael. “And it was very, very important to him that he die at home. He made it absolutely clear to everybody that he wasn’t going into hospital. … Certainly, for the last five years, that was almost a mantra.”
Richard Darch was an artist and hairdresser, a pioneer and a survivor, who endured long enough to see medical assistance in dying become legal in Canada.
“For somebody who fought for so long to live,” says Michael, “he deserved to die just the way he wanted to.”
•
Richard Darch was born into a military family on April 14, 1950. His father, Maynard, was a Second World War veteran and a warrant officer in the Canadian Armed Forces.
In those years, the Darch family lived on the upper floor of a Bronson Avenue duplex in Centretown. Richard had a happy childhood, which he spent largely in the company of his older brother.
“We didn’t have a lot of money, so a lot of our time was spent together, playing with whatever we could find,” says Michael.
They would often ride tricycles to visit their grandparents, who fed them chocolate. They played cops and robbers. They threw snowballs at the Bronson Avenue traffic.
Richard Darch’s early childhood was a happy one in Ottawa.
The family later moved to the Mann Avenue Apartments in Sandy Hill, and the boys would fish with their father in the nearby Rideau River. Richard liked to chase minnows.
Those sunlit days disappeared as Richard matured and confronted his sexuality. By early high school, he was obviously gay and defiantly flamboyant. Other students tormented and teased him.
Darch explored his sexuality in the gay bars of Gatineau but he was desperately unhappy. He inflicted cuts on his arms and legs and, on several occasions, overdosed in his bedroom.
“I didn’t feel I belonged in the world,” he once told an interviewer.
That world was mostly hostile to him. Not until 1969 would homosexual acts be decriminalized in Canada and, even then, discrimination remained part of the institutional order. In Ottawa, the civil service purged gay men from its ranks, newspapers published the names of men who used male prostitutes — one civil servant, Warren Zufelt, jumped from his balcony as a result — and the police famously raided the city’s gay bathhouse in May 1976.
Even at home, Darch wasn’t fully accepted: His father had a difficult time coming to terms with his nonconformist son. “It’s not you’d call an easy relationship,” recalls Michael.
Darch sought counselling to deal with his feelings of rejection and desolation, and carried on with life. He earned a hairdressing diploma at what’s now Algonquin College and worked in series of salons, including Emil of Switzerland in the Place d’Orleans Shopping Centre, where he developed a devoted clientele.
The success gave him the confidence to be himself: He wore jewelry, had much of his body tattooed, and brought friends and partners home to his parents’ house for dinner. Darch considered establishing his own salon.
But just as his universe was expanding — alongside the burgeoning gay rights movement — news began to spread about healthy young men in the community dying rapidly from unusual infections and a rare cancer.
The AIDS epidemic was about to change everything.
•
In early July 1981, Barry Deeprose stopped to read a New York Times article stuck to the door of the Gays of Ottawa Centre, where he worked as a help-line counsellor.
The article described a rare, often fatal form of cancer diagnosed in 41 homosexual men in New York and California. “The cancer often causes swollen lymph glands,” the newspaper said, “and then kills by spreading throughout the body.”
Deeprose, now 75, has a vivid memory of the moment. “This was the first announcement of the AIDS epidemic, but we didn’t have a name for it then,” he says.
It would be another year before the mystery disease would come to be described as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
With governments slow to respond to the crisis, Deeprose and a friend, Bob Read, founded the AIDS Committee of Ottawa in July 1985 to spearhead prevention efforts and assist the dying.
They were among the darkest hours of the epidemic: Researchers had yet to decode the T-cell-destroying disease; dying AIDS patients were often treated like lepers. In hospital, Deeprose says, food would be left outside the door because staff members were afraid to go inside.
“It was a crucible of fear, anger and grief,” he says of the time. Anyone in the gay community with a cold, a rash or diarrhea feared the onset of AIDS.
“It was a crucible of fear, anger and grief.”
In late 1985, the first commercial blood test for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the retrovirus that causes AIDS, became available in Canada. There ensued in the gay community a debate about whether to be tested.
Some believed it was better not to know since there was no effective treatment. What’s more, men who had sex without disclosing their HIV-positive status were being charged as criminals.
Richard Darch wanted to know. Although he was not symptomatic, his test revealed that he was HIV-positive. Doctors told him he had a year to live.
The news devastated Darch and those around him. One friend and lover shot himself. It’s not clear if he, too, was facing a diagnosis, but many AIDS patients were opting for suicide rather than travelling the grim path of the disease. One study found that those with AIDS were 36 times more likely to commit suicide than other men.
In March 1987, a glimmer of hope appeared when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved AZT, the first drug designed to treat HIV/AIDS. Darch enrolled in a Canadian clinical trial.
AZT was then prescribed in heavy doses and its side effects were punishing. Darch suffered nausea and debilitating muscle fatigue. The drug had to be taken every four hours, 24 hours a day, and many patients carried beepers to comply with the regimen.
“You’d be in the bar, and you’d hear these timers go off, and you knew it was time for everyone to take their medication,” remembers Kevin Hatt, 61, an Ottawa activist who has lived with HIV since March 1984.
Too sick to work, Darch smoked and painted and cared for his dog, Sable, a miniature collie. His paintings reflected his changeable moods: Some pieces were dark (an infant dragging a liquor bottle), others lewd, still others bright and playful. He painted landscapes, and reproduced old masters.
Richard Darch with one of his pieces of art.
He spent time with HIV/AIDS support groups, but dropped out after watching so many friends die of the disease. He gave up his motorcycle, and for a decade he was celibate. He became painfully thin.
“He was living in a bubble almost,” Michael says.
But in 1995, a revolutionary new treatment known as the AIDS cocktail was introduced: It combined three drugs that effectively transformed the disease from a death sentence to a chronic illness. With it, Darch’s health and life improved.
He engaged again with the gay community, spoke to student audiences about the importance of safe sex, and found a new partner in Daniel Guertin, an Ottawa gay rights activist.
But just as light returned to his life, there was another diagnosis — colorectal cancer — and still more tragedy: On April 12, 2003, Guertin was struck and killed by a drunk driver on Colonel By Drive.
Darch was again plunged into grief, and in January 2014, he decided to end his pain and anguish. He tattooed his body with morphine patches and went to bed, expecting to die in the night.
Instead, Darch woke up sick and alone.
“Nobody found me. I just woke up,” he told the Citizen in April 2005.
•
Harsh drug regimens and decades of illness had combined to corrode Darch’s quality of life. All of his teeth had been extracted after an infection, and his waking hours were muddled by morphine. He had given up painting, and needed help to manage his daily affairs. He slept 16 hours a day.
“Slowly but surely the different parts of his body were shutting down,” says his brother, Michael.
For years, Darch had followed the national debate about assisted death, and he was comforted when the legislation, Bill C-14, became law in June 2016. It gave to mentally competent Canadians the right to a medically assisted death when the end of life was “reasonably foreseeable.”
Richard Darch, in an undated photo provided by his family.
Last year, Darch applied to exercise that right. He was assessed, interviewed and ultimately approved by a medical team at The Ottawa Hospital.
In early March, Darch was given a date and time for his last medical appointment: He would die on Friday, March 16 between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m.
When he learned that a time had been set for his brother’s assisted death, Michael wrote to him. “Few people I know have the strength, tenacity and will that you have shown throughout your life,” he said to his brother. “I respect and love you.”
Darch told his three brothers that he didn’t want them at his bedside for fear of becoming overly emotional. Instead, he made individual appointments with each of them for an hour to say goodbye.
Michael met his brother on Wednesday morning and began by reassuring him that he understood and accepted the decision to end his life. “I wanted to make it clear that I thought he was strong to do it,” Michael said.
They talked about their shared childhood, and some of Darch’s misadventures: the time he was burned with firecrackers, and the day he was left behind by the family station wagon. They shared their memories of stealing pop and Christmas cookies from the cold storage where their mother hid them, and building things with Mechano and Minibrix.
“We talked about what it meant not only to be brothers, but very good friends,” says Michael.
Jamie Darch, 57, met his brother for an hour at 1 p.m. Wednesday. Jamie suggested it was eerie to know the date and time of his death. “Richard was matter-of-fact,” says Jamie. “He said, ‘I didn’t pick the date. It was sooner that I thought, but I’m ready.’”
So the two brothers talked about old friends and neighbours and the lives of Jamie’s children. As the hour drew to a close, Jamie felt awkward about leaving his brother for the last time, but Darch said he was tired and needed a smoke.
“See you on the other side,” Darch told Jamie as he departed.
John Darch, 60, was the last to visit his brother on Friday at noon hour. “I’m going to die today,” Richard told him.
John, the executor of his brother’s will, asked him if he was sure he wanted to go through with his plan. “He cut that off pretty quickly, and said, ‘Let’s talk about something else.’”
They talked about John’s children, their future plans and details of the will.
“He was in the best spirits,” John says. “He was always worried about everything. But that day, he wasn’t worried at all.“
Appointed with antique furniture, stained-glass lamps, plush carpets and marble-topped coffee tables, Darch’s apartment gave him comfort and joy. His paintings and ink drawings filled the walls.
When he finished his last cigarette, at 6:30 p.m., Darch walked back inside his apartment and climbed into bed. A doctor asked him if he wanted to proceed with his medically assisted death. Darch assented. He was then given a series of injections, which put him to sleep, sent him into a deep coma and, finally, stopped his breathing.
He died in his bed at 6:50 p.m., at which time his three brothers were told they could come up to pay their respects.
The siblings thanked the medical staff for their kindness, and for doing a job that others might shrink from; they stayed with Richard until his body was taken from the apartment.
Darch had donated his organs to medical science so that researchers could study the long-term effects of HIV and the drugs used to treat it.
Michael says he’s grateful that his brother had the opportunity to choose the time and place of his passing: “I think the important thing for myself, and my brothers, is that he managed to live long enough to die the way he wanted to: in his apartment. He had such a tough life and he fought so many battles that it wasn’t hard to say goodbye.”
Says John: “I hope that I’m lucky enough that I can feel as free he felt that day. I think the process was the most humane thing I’ve ever seen.”
Darch’s niece, Carol-lynn Darch, 45, remembers her uncle as an idealistic, uncommon and loving man who had the courage to be himself. She says he forced everyone in the family to confront their own biases, weaknesses and fears — right to the end.
“Sometimes the greatest form of activism is just being who you are. Richard influenced all of us to be more compassionate, empathetic and accepting.”
Michael Darch sits in his living room, weeks after the death of his brother.
•
A brief timeline of HIV/AIDS in the United States and Canada
July 3, 1981: The New York Times publishes its first story on a mysterious illness, “a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer” that was killing homosexual men in New York and California
1982: The first cases are reported in Canada
Aug. 20, 1982: More than 80 people attend a Gays of Ottawa public forum on “gay cancer”
August 1983: Ottawa-born Peter Evans, a costume designer, puts a face to the emerging crisis: He becomes the first person in Canada to speak openly about living with AIDS
Oct. 1, 1983: Evans takes part in Ottawa’s first AIDS walk-a-thon from Ottawa to Kingston. It raises more than $5,000
Jan. 4, 1984: Evans dies
March 1985: The first blood test for HIV is approved for use in the U.S.; it becomes available in Canada later in the year
July 1985: Hollywood star Rock Hudson announces that he’s suffering from AIDS; he dies three months later at the age of 59
August 1985: The AIDS Committee of Ottawa, co-founded by Barry Deeprose and Bob Read, holds its first meeting
March 1987: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.) approves AZT, the first drug designed to treat AIDS
1987: Investigative reporter and author Randy Shilts publishes, And the Band Played On, a landmark book on the AIDS epidemic
September 1988: Bruce House opens in Ottawa to offer emergency housing and hospice care for those with AIDS
November 1991: NBA star Magic Johnson announces that he’s HIV-positive
1994: AIDS becomes the leading cause of death in the U.S. for people between the ages of 25 and 44
1995: The F.D.A. approves the first protease inhibitor, which will form a key part of a new approach to AIDS treatment: combination drug therapy, sometimes known as the AIDS cocktail
1995: The number of annual AIDS deaths peaks in Canada as the disease claims 1,764 lives
July 1996: At an AIDS conference in Vancouver, researchers present evidence showing that the combination drug therapy is highly effective
1997: The number of Canadians dying from AIDS plummets for the second consecutive year as 626 people die of the disease
2015: There were 2,096 cases of HIV diagnosed in Canada, according to the latest data available
aduffy@postmedia.com
查看原文...
