STRANGER THAN FICTION: SAYING GOODBYE FOR THE LAST TIME

Anyone who works in the news media, or even anyone who watches it closely, will tell you the same thing.

After awhile, it takes a lot to make you cry.

Just when you think things can't get any worse, you find out about a mother who drowns her kids or an old woman who dies alone in a 160-degree apartment. You interview a father whose son was hit by a train and then take photos while rescue workers pry an injured woman out of her wrecked car.

Suddenly you have the oh-well-what-can-you-do attitude. The only problems that start to matter are your own.

And recently, I had a big problem. My friend Ted Fedler went into the VA hospital with AIDS-related pneumonia and was on life-support within days. After the two relatively healthy years I'd known him, his body was finally an easy target for any germ passing by. Its immune system was gone.

I think when you meet someone with AIDS, it affects your friendship. "How are you doing?" becomes more than a mindless phrase -- sometimes the answer is "I've got sores in my mouth" or "the doctors can't figure out what these spots are."

From the word go, you know your friend is going to die.

Oh-well-what-can-you-do?

But Ted cut through that attitude and made people give a damn. One of his friends said, "When you were with Ted, you were really WITH Ted." He cared about people's lives and their problems, listening patiently, using up the precious little time he had left on earth.

When The Other Half decided he wasn't going to marry me, I cried to Ted. When I was scared I might have HIV, Ted went with me to get the test results and said a prayer of thanks when they were negative. When I announced that The Other Half and I were getting married after all, Ted gave me his blessing instead of an incredulous look.

So two Saturdays ago my best friend, Melissa, and I went to the John Cochran VA Medical Center in St. Louis to see him, but he didn't see us. One machine breathed for him while another fed him while another dispensed medicine. Melissa left us alone.

"Sometimes they can hear you," a passing nurse said encouragingly.

Maybe so.

I told Ted I appreciated the way he opened my mind and let me see that you don't judge people for their ways of life, you try to understand them. I said I appreciated how he taught me to protect myself from HIV and let me close enough to see what happens when you don't.

Then I left.

He died the following Wednesday and I had to write a story about it. How do you sum up a friend's life in 12 inches? I wrote about how he started the AIDS Project of Southeast Missouri to educate people and help those infected and affected. I wrote about his prior career in law enforcement and security service. I called folks and asked them to comment about his life.

And on Monday, I went to his memorial service. It was a mixture of Native American and Catholic ritual, something Ted would have liked.

It's been over a week now, and I still can't cry. If anything, I'm mad.

If I could turn back time about three weeks and go back to the day I interviewed Ted about the Missouri Department of Health's HIV/AIDS statistics, I wouldn't have asked for facts and figures. I'd have said exactly what I said to him when he was comatose.

So now I'm driving all my friends nuts with these speeches that start "Ahem. Melissa, I just want you to know how I feel about you..." I'm scared that something will happen to one of them and they'll never know what they did for me.

Guess Ted's still educating people.

~Heidi Nieland is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.