I miss my mother-in-law.

Most of you never got to know Frances Whitney. Here's her obituary, which, like all obituaries, is incomplete. She was so sharp and no-guff, so constitutionally opposed to quitting. Work is love made visible, as the saying goes, and she put so much love into her extended family and her community. Her testimony "On Being a Single Parent" starts: "Sister Lewis asked me to talk about being a successful single parent tonight and I've been quite flummoxed by her request, firstly because I don't feel particularly successful." But she survived the death of her husband and successfully fought illness and money struggles long enough to raise three children and see them all graduate from college, and she enjoyed teaching, gardening, reading, cooking, traveling, writing, filmgoing, and her church (Latter-Day Saints) till the very end.

Frances died of AIDS.

Dr. Amin said he presented my case at a conference for infectious disease specialists in San Francisco in December and the doctors there couldn't believe I'm still alive. But I still am. Viral load through the roof, and only one T-Cell, but I got out of bed this morning! (January 8, 2004)

I met her in the spring of 2001, just before she started blogging. This week I went back and started rereading her blog. I can appreciate it differently now -- for instance, right now, I'm going through a dead friend's correspondence to archive it, just as Frances did in 2003. And then there's stuff I'd forgotten, like how she vexed the home health service by consistently leaving her house.

The home health service thinks I should live my life lying around in bed at home, ready for their beck and call. I keep TRYING to educate them otherwise.....

It turns out the nurse was looking for me all morning, and they ended up calling Kim Cornett (my emergency contact), and Kim called Jill and Sara [because they have a key] so the Langleys could come over and see if I was dead in my bed with the cats eating me. I have told and told and told the agency that I work until noon. They don't believe it. (June 28, 2004)

Frances was mordant, liberal, angry about inequality. I reflect on her loves and woes that I also see in her son; she loved history and good fiction, well-made things, geology and paleontology, seeing the impact of her work, quiet contentment; she detested incompetence, waste, missed opportunities, boredom. She tried not to indulge in self-pity or Pollyannaism about the slings and arrows that had come her way. She was sensible, and she wanted us to be sensible too.

I should have driven to Utah today to attend Melea's funeral tomorrow. I'm still really sad about this. But my body has been doing that thing where my temperature shoots up and down, and I'm usually running a fever. Also the stomach has been acting up more than usual. Therefore, I thought if I made that drive it would be to MY funeral....

I should be in Utah. But like many things I would have liked to do in life, the HIV virus wins again. Don't anyone catch HIV. You WON'T win. The virus is always triumphant. (June 3, 2005)

Here is the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage about how you can prevent getting HIV. One recent advance: PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, a daily pill you take that "has been shown to reduce the risk of HIV infection in people who are at high risk by up to 92%" when taken consistently. I only heard about PrEP this month, and I thought I was pretty up-to-date on sexual health news. So maybe you didn't know about it either; take a look.

Frances died in 2006. I miss her. She was great.