A profound and riveting journey through shame and grief, A Hard Silence is, quite simply, unforgettable.
With candor and vulnerability, Melanie opens her grief wounds and brings her reader inside her journey, twenty years after her father died, to finally understand the consequences of her family\'s silence, to interrogate the roots of stigma and discrimination responsible for the ongoing secret-keeping, and to show how she\'s now learned to be authentic..
A Hard Silence is an intimate glimpse into Melanie\'s memories of coping with the tragedy of her father\'s illness and enduring the loneliness and isolation of not being able to speak.
It became a way of life.
She carried the weight of the uncertain trajectory of her father\'s health and the heartbreaking anticipation of impending loss silently and alone.
And for ten years before his death in 1995, from the time she was thirteen until she was twenty-three, Melanie\'s family lived in the shadow of AIDS.
They did not know that her father would live past that first year, but he did.
A secret they\'d all have to keep.
Afraid of this stigma and wanting to protect his family, Melanie\'s father decided his illness would be a secret.
At a time when HIV/AIDS was widely misunderstood and public perception was shaped by fear, prejudice, and homophobia, victims of the disease faced ostracism and persecution.
Among them was Melanie Brooks\'s surgeon father who, after receiving a blood transfusion during open-heart surgery in 1985, learned he was HIV positive.
Catastrophic mismanagement of the country\'s blood supply allowed contaminated blood to be knowingly distributed nationwide, infecting close to two thousand Canadians with HIV.
Monica Wood, author of when We Were the Kennedys In the mid 1980s, Canada\'s worst public health disaster was unfolding.
A profound and riveting journey through shame and grief, A Hard Silence is, quite simply, unforgettable
