A better way to say where Ed was from is to say, "Ed was from the country and he was a farmboy." His teenage years were in the "Boot Heel" of extreme SE Missouri, which had Arkansas to the West and South, with Tennessee on the East (Dennis Weaver grew up on SW Missouri and was from the Joplin Area).
From what we could figure out, Ed had contracted HIV in 1981 and he did not meet me until April 1984. But, "HIV" was sort of listed as a tertiary cause of his illness with "AIDS" as a secondary cause. But, according to the neurosurgeon who diagnosed him at the hospital, he actually died because of contracting a brain-related virus, PML, for short, when he was a young man or when he was a child. PML makes it look like a person has a stroke with paralysis on one side and makes one think the person has dementia. The PML virus (which is also blood related like HIV is) can remain dormant for a person's whole life as long as his immune system is not compromised.
When the PML started showing sypmtoms, Ed was under a lot of stress at work because he was the boss where he worked as a guard with those under him, all Filipinos who thought they had special rights as a minority (oh, one of them Solomon had become an an American citizen and he was not with the rest in attitude). Ed had also gotten dentures from a credit dentist whose 2nd Language was not even English and he could not eat right either.
Ed was bedfast for almost 5 months and after two months of taking care of him mostly by myself, his doctors at the clinic got us connected with the Visiting Nurses Association's in-home hospice program. They were the greatest people to both of us. Ed was paralyzed on the right side and he stopped talking a few weeks after he was officially diagnosed and had spent a couple of days in the hospital.
His mind was alert otherwise and he always knew what day of the week it was. We had a VCR and some of his favorite TV evening soap operas came on at 10:00 pm. During the day when those shows were to be on, he would use his left hand and motion toward the TV to remind me to set the VCR. I or the CNA would play the program for him the next day if he had fallen asleep when the program was on.
Ed had lots of grey hair when he was in his 30s. He did color his hair and "stache" a medium brown. And like Dennis Weaver, he improved with age.
Oh, when I was sorta in between jobs, Ed convinced his supervisor to hire me. I did shift work and Ed's regular working hours was the the 12 midnight to 8 am grave shift with his 5th work day ending on Friday morning. I worked days on week ends, Monday afternoon swing shift and the other two shifts were with Ed on his last two work days each week. I worked with him 2 years. Then I worked in other odd jobs.
No man has ever loved me in the very same way that Ed did. While no one can take his place in my heart, my heart has been enlarged to love again.
Oh, when Ed was guard of the month with the security company which had lots of locations, they took several pictures of him. I kept one and trimmed it down where he is pretending to write a citation and he has a mischievous twinkle in his eye and an "I'm up to somethin' smile." That pic was taken in the spring when I met him.
Oh, I heard other guys tell Ed that he looked like Dennis Weaver, too.
