FIFTEEN years ago Beate Lutz, then aged 31, and her then partner were diagnosed HIV positive.
Pae Green lived with it for some six years, until he killed himself. Whether it was through the guilt of “giving it to me” or just not coming to terms with it – he’s taken that to the grave and Lutz will never know. She’ll never really know how he got it, either.
“He could have had another life that I don’t know about – everyone’s got a past. They thought he might have got it overseas when he was in Singapore. We don’t really know.”
Lutz, who lives in Wellington with their daughter, describes what she heard as she walked down the hospital corridor on the day of his diagnosis.
“I could hear this terrible crying, like an animal getting hurt, this terrible shrieking. I got let into this room and it was Pae, sitting there, and he’d just been told he had HIV.
“Right from the day they told him he was just a hysterical mess. He’d more or less given up; from the very moment they said you’re going to deal with this...he just said I don’t want to know. I’d rather not know.”
Their life at that stage was pretty good. Green, as a chauffeur to the Governor-General, lived with Lutz at Government House. But after that, it was turned upside down.
“One minute our life was great and fine and the next minute it wasn’t. Our life just seemed so basically perfect. One trip to the doctor and, hello.”
The treatment regime from that diagnosis in 1995 included taking “handfuls” of tablets – up to 21 a day for Green and 15 for Lutz. It’s improved since then, down to about three a day.
And Lutz decided, right away, to cope. She deals with the stigma of having the disease by raising awareness by being what is termed a positive speaker for the New Zealand Aids Foundation.
“People just assume you’re a druggie, a prostitute...I don’t go up to people and say: ‘Hi, I’m Beate and I’ve got HIV’. Fear and stigma is a big thing and that’s why a lot of people don’t speak out. It’s a lot to deal with without people saying: ‘Oh, well, it’s probably your lifestyle,’” she says. “But they just don’t understand.”
But years ago, this slight, fit, and positive woman, who hasn’t had a partner since Green, decided she had one choice and one choice only: to deal with it.
“I said well, people live with all sorts of things, don’t they, really? Cancer, everything. You’ve really got to take each day as it comes, the good with the bad. Life’s too bloody short. You can go out tomorrow and get hit by a bus. You go to sleep and not wake up in the morning. You don’t really know when the clock of life’s going to stop, for anyone.”
World Aids Day, December 1.