Eulogy to Dr. Joseph Sonnabend
Please note this was edited on 29th June 2024 at the time of his CD release.
Anyone who knew Joe, was sure to hear him relate stories of his many friends in New York City, now departed.
He would vividly recount the narratives of their shortened lives, curtailed, by the tragedy of AIDS. They were his friends who he kept alive through his illuminations of them with much detail.
He humanised the dead, individuated each one from the millions who have died of AIDS, preserving their memory as an oral memorial of remembrance.
Joe cared hugely for his patients. “He was the only doctor who went to every funeral” it had been remarked.
He did not want anyone to be forgotten, their fates were to be preserved and kept alive.
Why?
So we would learn the lessons of history.
We as a world grow and move forward by taking the horrors of the past, as a guide, towards a better future for all of us.
We must never forget.
Living through such tumultuous times of course affected Joe. We spoke often of PTSD that many of us live with, we who survived the plague.
Sadly, part of the experience of living through trauma is to repeat again and again that which takes us to the root of the original angst and continuing the cycle. Joe would often repeat himself and sometimes go into rages.
When I asked Joe to become a patron of #AIDSMemoryUK, the Campaign to establish a London and a UK AIDS Memorial, he agreed immediately stressing that
“It is important to remember what happened
BUT,
any Memorial must raise money to end AIDS”.
He was anxious that we were forgetting our collective responsibility to fight on until no one, anywhere, dies of AIDS
To say Joe lived a productive life is an understatement. He excelled. He was an academic, a scientist, a physician, an activist and a classical music composer.
His music emoted and preserved, in memory and remembrance, so much loss. But it too relates his confused jig-jagged mind as we often hear in his compositions. It is as if Joe is having a mental and emotional battle within.His music is not commercial which makes it all the more important as it is so personal and portrays a era in all
of time and a life lived that was full of contradiction.
Joe’s teenage years were tormented by death. His mother, a physician who was a pioneer in STD medicine, died when he was 14. It caused a deep wound.
What made it more harrowing was it happened at exactly the same time stories of the horrors of the Holocaust were leaking out of Germany. It created a climate of shock for the Jewish refugees who found themselves in Bulawayo in the Colony of Southern Rhodesia, as it was known then.
The effect of all this influenced Joe’s life and career paths.He told me he was anti-apartheid. Yet when I asked about Ashkelon in Southern Israel where his father was Mayor, he was furious. Most the Palestinians were expelled in 1948 from the village of Majdal Ascalan creating modern day Gaza as refugees. Russian and Arab Jews replaced them and the village was renamed Ashkelon. New laws were passed so the expelled Palestinians could not return. It was almost unbearable for Joe to hold two opposing thoughts in his mind. His PTSD was easily triggered and especially so when answers were not simple and in fact contradictory. He, as he often did following an uncontrolled rage, later profusely apologised and admitted it was “a truth I find unbearable”.
Joe approached science and history in a characteristically similar way.
As a scientist he continuously asked to apply caution “in case we missed anything”, he told me, adding “it was better to work with fact, proven through studies or through observation, than make assumptions, based on unproven hypothetical assertions, until we were more certain”.
This led to utterly false and unfair allegations accusing him of AIDS denialism. It is not true. He was being a responsible scientist.
When it comes to documenting history, Joe understood it was necessary to honestly examine and to preserve the various narratives of the pandemic, good and bad.
I learnt from Joe the importance of documenting research thoroughly;
of being certain of facts;
of the need to remain open minded to new discoveries and surprises;
to be vigilant & scrupulous so to allow me to admit to myself, if necessary, when I no longer agreed with my own ideas.
It was this sound and learnt method which guided Joe at the beginning of the AIDS pandemic.
It gave him the imagination to bring leading scientists together as researchers and co-found the AIDS Medical Foundation, amfAR’s predecessor.
It allowed him the knowledge and the foresight to consider a prophylaxis against. PCP – the pneumonia that was an AIDS defining illness that killed so many.
It connected him to HIV activists Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz to map out the Safer Sex Campaign that changed gay sexual behaviour.
It ensured he remained objective enough to see the real failings of AZT when hardly anyone else could see.
Joe saved hundreds of thousands of lives, there is no doubt about that.
He was kind and generous, unique, talented, annoying, focused, angry, directed, argumentative, rude, troubled, precise, intellectual, musical and a good soul.
Joseph Sonnabend will be remembered kindly and fairly as one of the most influential people around in the time of HIV & AIDS
at the right time,
in the right place
with the necessary knowledge
possessing an inquisitive mind
in a moment of history
causing him PTSD made worse as he no doubt was neurodivergent. This could isolated him socially and triggered unfettered rages.
Yet at the same time it was all of this that enabled Joseph Sonnabend to change the course of HIV & AIDS worldwide and save countless lives.
Now that is a life well lived.
Sonnabend at the 2019 London AIDS Vigil at the chapel at Brompton Cemetery featured his music compositions. Curated by Ash Kotak.
The Fitzrovia Chapel Concerts 7th & 8th July 2018 curated by Ash Kotak (part or the London AIDS Histories and Cultures Festival).
