Miami Herald - July 22, 1999
Stephen Smith - Herald Health Writer

The letter conveying news of victory or defeat.

The phone call trumpeting tidings of great joy or unspeakable sorrow.

George Roberts has weathered more calls of sorrow than any three humans should have to endure.

Three times, the phone has clanged from Miami with the sound of pain at the other end. Three times, the agent of misery has been the same: AIDS. First, his younger brother was stricken. Then, a beloved uncle. Now, his sister.

George Roberts wants to catch a killer. And he plots that capture from one of the most powerful perches in the world: the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From a warren of offices in suburban Atlanta, Roberts cultivates strategies to stop the AIDS virus in communities of color.

In his community. In his hometown, Miami.

It is a battle at once totally professional and yet intensely personal. So when he comes home this week to participate in the South Florida HIV/AIDS Town Hall Meeting on Saturday, he comes not with the cool detachment of a social scientist. Instead, he arrives with the fervor of someone who has buried kin in their prime, life barely lived.

He has come to tell his story, the story of his own family.

"I made a conscious decision that I would talk about it, that I would use myself as an example, because when people see me, they don't think AIDS, they don't see the virulence of AIDS," says Roberts, 43, a man with the bearing of an introspective college professor, the kind of teacher everybody wants to have at least once.

"To those who are affected by the virus, it says that I understand. And to those who are not affected by it, it says I am talking to you about something that I know about personally, and I'm real serious about this, and I think it catches their attention in ways that they don't usually expect a federal employee to do.

"If that helps me to give something in memory of my brother and uncle and all the friends I've known, then I'm glad I've been chosen to do that. And I won't fail."

Across the nation, Roberts, a social psychologist, has put face and voice to the epidemic. He began sharing his story not long after he joined the CDC, even though he did not move formally into the AIDS branch until 16 months ago.

In March, Roberts came home, striding to a podium poised before hundreds of people in a hotel ballroom. Ruth Thompson, his mother, sat on the edge of her seat, a few rows from the front.

Expert intervention

She listened. She cried. And she was proud. Lord, how she was proud.

"How can a person help, really help, in an area if they have never been there?" Thompson says. "He knows what it's about. He knows what this disease can do to a family. If he can help somebody, one person, it's worth it all."

Thompson was the one who had called her son each time with the news.

It was near a Mother's Day 11 years ago when the first call came from Miami. Your brother Warren has AIDS, Thompson told her son George. Certainly, he'd heard of the disease, even been touched by it, if only peripherally. There was a good friend who died during graduate school days on Long Island. There would be other friends, too.

"So," he says, "it was something that was on my radar screen, but I certainly did not expect it to happen to one of my siblings."

Warren Roberts had a family, a wife, children.

"I used to say, `Warren, you live life like it might be your last day,' " Thompson says. "And he said, `Ma, you don't know. It might be.' "

Once a picture perfect family

Warren Roberts moved into his mother's house in Carol City, a house where the walls and bookshelves brimmed with the pictures of a family rooted in Florida and Georgia. Warren never bore the most obvious signs of the epidemic, the wasting syndrome that renders humans into specters.

In 1989, mother called son in New York, where George Roberts was living, to tell him that Warren had pneumonia and was going into the Veteran's Administration Medical Center in Miami. No need to worry, Thompson said. Still, Roberts was on the first flight the next morning.

It is a measure of how far we have come that much of the overt discrimination against people with AIDS -- in hospitals and clinics, at least -- has evaporated. But this was 1989. Hospital workers shunned Warren.

So his brother stayed up all night with him, indulging in that intense where-have-our-lives-gone patter that never happens often enough between siblings.

"I read the Bible to him. I rubbed his head. That seemed to make him feel better, because he was real irritable, not being able to breathe. He had a bald spot, and he would tell me to rub it like Mama rubbed his head."

Roberts cries at the memory of this, using government-issued tissues -- the low-grade, high-crinkle kind -- to smear off the tears.

The end came swiftly to Warren, 32, although a doctor prolonged his suffering when he refused to honor Warren's request that he not be kept alive with medical machinery, the family says. Monday marked the 10th anniversary of his death.

"It was," Roberts says, "the worst time of my life, because he was my baby brother. The first night after he died, I remember not being able to breathe and just having a pain in my chest that I had never known before."

Mission understood

It would take years for the family to heal. Thompson, a home-health nurse, found a mission in caring for older patients with AIDS.

"My supervisor said, `Ruth, if you don't want to do it, I'll understand,' " Thompson says. "I said, `I want to do it. I need to do it.' "

Roberts, by then a tenured professor at State University of New York at New Paltz, found purpose in caring for his brother's 15-year-old son, who moved for a year to New York.

It was seven years more before the next phone call came. By then, Roberts and his family had moved to Atlanta.

This time, it was Roberts' sister who'd become AIDS' prey.

His sister -- who does not want her identity disclosed -- is surviving with the virus, though not thriving, having been beset with repeated complications.

With the news about his sister still fresh, word arrived about Roberts' uncle, Tony Dukes, who lived in Coney Island. The family had no inkling Dukes had AIDS, let alone how dire his condition was.

"It wasn't until I walked in the hospital room and I laid my eyes on him that I knew what the whole story was," Thompson says. "He was a burly guy, and by then he was very thin and fragile, face sunken in. I said to George, `I can't believe it -- not another one!' And we cried."

Unlikely harbinger

Roberts wound up in Atlanta when his wife landed a prestigious professorship at the University of Georgia. He was considering a teaching position at Georgia State University when the CDC called. And even though his first job at the federal agency was in the office of minority health, he did not concentrate exclusively on AIDS at first.

His boss, Sam Dooley, wasn't aware of Roberts' personal experience with the epidemic when Roberts moved to the CDC's AIDS branch. He knows now.

"George brings a very strong personal commitment and investment that gives him a personal energy," Dooley says. "This is arduous work, draining work, and I think his life experiences have given him energy to do that and to put up with the frustrations and the drain that this is on a person's personal and family life."

True, Roberts concedes, it can be taxing, all those days on the road, including regular trips to Miami, where he is impressed with the work being done on the front line of the epidemic.

Roberts does it, he says, in memory of his brother and uncle. But then he turns and casts his eyes upon the two ebullient faces belonging to an 11-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter smiling back at him from pictures framed in his office bookcase.

"I tell my wife: I want to save the world, but I especially want to save my children."

e-mail: sfsmith@herald.com
990722
MH990701

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