Rae Lewis-Thornton used to work on Capitol Hill, where she was going to make a difference. But she has realized that change through politics requires more time than she can afford, so she has given up the political arena to deliver an urgent message about life to youths.
She usually begins: “I’m Rae Lewis-Thornton, and I’m dying of AIDS. I graduated magna cum laude, shop at Neiman Marcus and I’m still dying of AIDS.”
Where she goes from there depends on the younsters’ age and level of maturity, she says. She speaks to adolescents and college-age students.
“I talk to young girls about loving themselves more than they love a boy, or need a boy or want a boy. I’m not talking about condom use (although she strongly promotes it for those who are sexually active). I’m talking about not staying at home waiting on that boy to call them all night when they should be doing their homework. That’s emotional abuse. . . . I talk a lot about responsibility to the guy.”
Lewis-Thornton, 32, who tells students that no question is too personal, courageously divulges intimate details of her life.
Her personality effervesces; her appearance is fashionably chic. At size 6, Lewis-Thornton appears to be healthy, but AIDS is wreaking havoc on her body, causing fatigue, night sweats, sleeplessness and substantial losses in appetite and weight, and eventually it will cause her death.
Lewis-Thornton says that while her body is deteriorating from AIDS, she’s not about to allow it to claim her spirit.
She was diagnosed HIV positive in 1986, when she was 24. Never a drug user or blood transfusion recipient, she concludes that she contracted the virus through unprotected sex with a man she had dated.
When she began treatment for full-blown AIDS in 1992, she suffered from chronic depression for months. With the help of God, she says, she picked herself up out of her misery and made a resolution: She was going to figure out a way to live while she is dying with AIDS.
“There’s something about Rae Lewis-Thornton,” she says. “It’s like this little bitty birdie inside of my body that says. `You want to go on. You have to go on. Remember, you were the cookie that stayed in an incubator for a month. God had a reason for you to be here.’ “
Lewis-Thorton speaks candidly — through smiles, far-away looks and occasionally tears — about living with AIDS: Her 32 years have been bittersweet. An only child, she was born prematurely in 1962 to two heroin addicts. She was raised by her grandfather and step-grandmother. She maintained contact with her biological mother and credits her with “doing all she could with what she had,” but she recalls her childhood was one of dysfunction.
During her senior year at Evanston Township High School, she left home and moved in with friends on the South Side of Chicago. She held a job and commuted from the South Side to Evanston every day until she graduated. It was perhaps then that Lewis-Thornton gained the confidence and assuredness that keep her moving forward now.
“I left home when I was 17, and I didn’t miss a beat,” she said. “And I’m going to stop now? Because these things are inside my body? They are destroying my body, but they are not destroying my spirit.”
Lewis-Thornton graduated from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago with a degree in political science and pursued a career in politics for several years in Washington. She worked for various candidates and causes, including the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign.
“I was going to make a difference. I was making a difference. And that’s where I was diagnosed HIV (positive), in Washington,” she says, her voice diminished to almost a whisper.
Lewis-Thornton helped organize a blood drive through the American Red Cross. She also donated blood and learned three months later that it was infected with HIV.
Initially she was devastated. She immediately told her boyfriend, who left her house enraged and never communicated with her again, she says. From that point, she lived with the knowledge of being HIV positive by not giving much thought to it.
“I knew I was diagnosed with HIV but never really thought about it. And I never thought about how I felt.”
For seven years Lewis-Thornton continued to live a normal life for the most part. She told only a few close friends. She told the men she dated if she expected the relationship to lead to sex. Her being HIV positive was not a problem for most of them, she says.
She would visit her doctor every six months for checkups, and the doctor would monitor the count of her CD4+ T-lymphocytes (or T-cells), which protect the body against diseases.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, a healthy person has 1,000 to 1,500 T-cells. When the count falls below 200, the diagnosis changes from HIV-positive to AIDS. Lewis-Thornton’s T-cell count is 47.
“I believed that I was never going to get AIDS, for seven years, and one day I did. T-cells dropped and the doctor said, `You now have AIDS.’
“I was given all these new medications to take. And they made me very sick, and I became depressed. And the depression was deep, and I didn’t understand what was happening to me. And I didn’t understand what was happening to my body because I had never read an article on HIV or AIDS. And I became sadder and saddened, and I became clinically depressed. And somewhere in the spring I started reading about AIDS and HIV because then survival kicked in, and I needed to know what the hell was happening to my body and what this disease was.
“I became acutely aware that HIV and AIDS meant something new that I had never experienced, and I became sadder because I accepted at that point that my life would never be the same again. And I began to mourn the life that I knew I was going to lose. I began to mourn it.
“I went to work, and I cried at work. I did barely enough to get through the day. I came home, and I cried all night. And I woke up in the morning, and I cried. And I went to work, and I cried. And I came home, and I cried. And in the midst of the crying, my body was trying to adjust to the medicine and the diarrhea and everything that was happening to me, and I was a pretty sad cookie.”
Lewis-Thornton began intensive psychological therapy, and she began to tell more people that she was afflicted with AIDS.
“It was like tons and tons of bricks had been lifted off my shoulders, but I was still sad.”
She started to examine her relationship with God.
“I was so saddened, and I hated God. I had been a serious Christian all of my life, and I felt like I had done everything right,” she says, recounting the dreariest days of her life.
“But in the midst of my despair and in the midst of my pain, I woke up one day. I don’t even remember the day, but I know I woke up one day and said, `I’m tired of being sad. Is there something else? Is there a way to be happy with AIDS and HIV? Is there a way to coexist with this thing in my body?’ “
She says she found the answers when she surrendered her life to God. At the importuning of a Chicago public school teacher, she reluctantly agreed to speak to a group of students about AIDS.
Lewis-Thornton had a new job as a political consultant and no intentions of changing careers. But after her first experience with the youths, she never returned to politics.
“It was incredible,” she says of her first speaking engagement. “At the end (of the five workshops), the kids said to me, `Ms. Lewis, you’ve got to keep doing this because you have a message for young people.’ And they gave me some flowers, and I still have those flowers at home.
“I couldn’t shake my experience with those young people. I kept thinking about the tears and the kids who came more than one time to my workshops. . . . And the kids wrote me letters. And when I read their letters, I was so overwhelmed with emotion. And I couldn’t shake it.
“And so about three weeks later, I made a decision. Said, `I can’t shake this, this must be what God wants me to do with my life.’ “
As for politics, Lewis-Thornton has an attitude different from what she had on the campaign trail; her confidence is shaken. She speaks passionately about the lack of support for AIDS research and about how much-needed programs for AIDS patients are being jeopardized by politicians who “play politics” and “straddle the fence” on issues.
“We are no closer to a cure today than we were 13 years ago,” she says. “The political person in me says. `You aren’t doing enough.’ But I stay away from politics because my message is not for politicians. My message is for people.”
Lewis-Thornton rebukes the “new Republican right” for playing politics while scores of lives are being lost. They don’t get it, she says. And they probably won’t get it until “their daughters start dying from (AIDS).” She says she has decided to take her message directly to the people.
Since trading in her career as a political organizer to speak to younsters, Lewis-Thornton’s whirlwind speaking engagements have brought her together with roughly 200,000 young people in the Chicago area and out of state.
She has graced the cover of Essence, a popular woman’s magazine, and during March, she shared her life with CBS viewers in a special series of reports on WBBM-Channel 2. She is a contributing editor at the station.
Lewis-Thornton has found a way to coexist with AIDS and says that today she is “very happy” with her life, and especially with her new husband.
Last August, she married Kenneth Thornton, a medical professional who was fully aware of her health condition but says “something about her spirit” attracted him to her.
It’s not always therapeutic to be a public person because she has no private space anymore, she says, but adds: “But it is not about me. It is about how God uses me.
“And you know God uses us in ways not of our own understanding. I really believe that. And I believe that when you surrender your life, by being still and going within to hear the inner voices, find out what your mission in life is, but you have to go through something to get there. And I went through an enormous amount of pain. . . . And the pain never goes away. You just figure out a way to peacefully coexist with the pain so the pain doesn’t dominate your life.”
