Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 30, 1994 TAG: 9405020162
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Aliff, of Roanoke, wanted to see their strength. She wanted assurance they could carry on a fight she was too weak to continue.
"She'd been hanging on for everybody else," said Dixie Schnell, an outreach worker for the Roanoke Health Department. "She'd touched so many people's lives we didn't want to let her go. We all had to talk to her and say, `It's OK. You've done all that you can do.'''
Aliff, who was profiled twice in the Roanoke Times & World-News, had AIDS. She died Thursday at the age of 38.
Since the day, five years ago, that a doctor phoned to tell her she had acquired immune deficiency syndrome, Aliff crusaded for AIDS awareness. She became a leading local AIDS educator, with a message that the disease does not pick and choose by gender or sexual orientation.
Aliff said she didn't know how she contracted AIDS. She'd had a blood transfusion. She'd had relationships with a bisexual man and an intravenous drug user.
But how she'd contracted AIDS didn't matter, Aliff said. What mattered was that it happened.
"She'd say that AIDS was not to fool around with, that if you think you can't get it, you're wrong," said the Rev. David A. Yingling, pastor at the Central Church of the Brethren, where Aliff worshiped. "I don't think she blamed anybody for her situation. Her thinking was, `It happened to me. I'm going to try to do something positive to affect somebody else's life.'''
Aliff took her message to high schools, to civic groups, to churches, to the medical community, to college campuses. Afterward, she'd ask for hugs from audience members. People would oblige, the curtain of fear lowered.
Aliff spoke to a group of Roanoke College students last fall. She delivered her message with a temperature of 102, said Robin Strosnider, a staff nurse in Student Health Services.
"She talked about how tough it was being in that situation, about being shunned by a lot of people," Strosnider said.
Students flocked to health services for HIV testing in the days after Aliff's presentation, she said.
"It wasn't that she scared them but she made them so much more aware," she said.
When Aliff joined a support group of people with HIV and AIDS several years ago, she was the only female member.
Over the years, other women joined her. And eventually, a support group for women only was formed.
Johna Moore-Jenkins, a Health Department social worker who works with women and children with HIV and AIDS, dreaded delivering the news of Aliff's death to those women.
"Marsha was someone whom they held up as an example," Moore-Jenkins said. "For many of them, she was their true example. We've lost the captain of our ship in a way."
The number of women in the Roanoke area with HIV has increased "tremendously," as has the number nationwide, Moore-Jenkins said.
"Our numbers are not as big," she said. "But percentage-wise, we've experienced an increase in the women we see in this area. One of Marsha's chief causes was educating women."
Aliff had always insisted that her funeral service be upbeat - a celebration of life. And at today's service, friends say they will try to comply with her request.
Aliff asked that at the service's end, each person attending release a balloon - purple balloons, her favorite color.
"We're supposed to all be able to say goodbye and let the balloons go and let our sorrow go and be happy," Schnell said. "It's going to be very difficult for all of us.
"But it's her wish."
by CNB