As a spiritual person, nature for me has always been a healing place. Going back all the way to my childhood on the farm, the fields and forests were places of adventure and self-discovery. Animals were companions and friends, and the world moved at a slower, more rational pace than the bustling cities where I'd resided my adult life.

All of my peers died of AIDS, and I have no one to celebrate my past or my journey, or to help me pass down stories to the next generation. We lost an entire generation of storytellers with HIV.

At 60, the mind was sharp but the body complained. The legs were willing to make all the right moves but the muscles gave out too early.

I often laugh and say I should go down to the Department of the Interior and register as an endangered species. I'm a gay man over 60 and I'm alive.

Over the years, HIV/AIDS activists and their allies have been pioneers in creating new frontiers in the medical establishment. Through their efforts, the FDA drug approval procedures were reformed so promising new therapies could reach desperate patients quicker.

Sick people, particularly those with serious conditions, greatly prefer the company of their friends and family to residence in a hospital or nursing home.

Those of us who lived through the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s have a very special spot in our heart for home-based health care.