I wrote Losing Uncle Tim in the mid-1980s. AIDS was a new horror; we didn’t know what to say to ourselves, let alone to the kids.
The catalyst for my book — the first nationally published children’s book to address loss due to AIDS — was twofold. First came the privilege of being one of two hospice volunteers assigned to our first AIDS patient. Shortly afterward, my godmother suddenly died. Though I was an adult, the little girl in me was devastated.
Tim died about two months later. We were all adults at his funeral service, except for his nephew. When I saw that kid, about waist-high on the rest of us, wandering around looking lost, I had to reach out to him in some way, even if he never knew I was doing it. So I became both the author of Losing Uncle Tim and someone for whom the book written.
You should be able to find it on a used book site, such as alibris.com.
