How time flies.
He was such a brave little boy, and we owe much of our AIDS awareness to him and his mother.
From the People archives:
Candle in the Wind
By Bill Shaw
Here is the moving, untold story of the final hours of Ryan White, the boy whose battle with AIDS touched America's heart
Ryan White never surrendered?not to AIDS, not to despair, not to the fearful public passions that his illness once aroused. Diagnosed in 1984, he successfully challenged his school board in Kokomo, Ind., for the right to attend classes?and became a reluctant celebrity. Later he moved with his mother to nearby Cicero, Ind., in hopes of finding a more ordinary childhood. But Ryan White was not ordinary. With his smile and grace, he taught the world not to surrender to fear. This is the story of his final journey, told by the only reporter Ryan's family wanted to be there
The only sound in Room A-460 of the James Whitcomb Riley Hospital is the rhythmic thunk of a ventilator pumping air through a respirator. Ryan White is unconscious now. He is beyond pain and feeling, in that evanescent twilight between life and death. A heart monitor beeps quietly by his bedside, two nurses in face masks silently monitoring its luminous dials.
Beside the bed stands Jeanne White, 42, the divorced factory worker from Kokomo, Ind. Just a few days earlier, Jeanne, Ryan and his sister, Andrea, 16, were in Los Angeles for an Academy Awards night party. Ryan later complained of a sore throat and said he wanted to go home and see his physician, Dr. Martin Kleiman.
"That scared me," recalls Jeanne.
They flew all night, arriving in Indianapolis at 6 A.M. Thursday, March 29. They went directly to Riley Hospital at the huge Indiana University Medical Center. By Saturday, Ryan's condition had deteriorated alarmingly. The next day Kleiman told Jeanne that Ryan's chances of pulling out of this latest crisis were 10 percent?and that was optimistic.
"He's Ryan White," said Dr. Kleiman, "that's why I said 10 percent."
Now, at Ryan's bedside, Jeanne clings to the man beside her, the friend who has stood by her throughout both grim and good times. Singer Elton John was one of the first prominent people to offer support shortly after Ryan, a hemophiliac, had contracted AIDS from a tainted blood transfusion five years ago.
AIDS was a new and alien specter then, and when the public fear and early ignorance led frightened parents to ask that Ryan be kept out of school, Elton John had become a friend, writing, calling or visiting the boy every month. Now, standing in this hospital room, the singer looks ashen, his face a mask of anguish. He had flown all day from Los Angeles, slipped in a back door of the hospital to avoid the press and hurried to the bedside.
"Ryan, it's Elton," whispers Jeanne, leaning over to smooth her son's spiked hair. "We put some mousse on it earlier in the day, Elton. I wanted him to look good." She sags against her friend, sobbing quietly. Ryan seems so small and helpless, swallowed up in the Donald Duck and Dumbo sheets the hospital has provided. Although he's 18, AIDS has kept the ebullient boy from growing beyond 5 ft. and 90 lbs.
At first John is simply overcome, unable to speak. It was just last summer, at a concert in Detroit, that he had called Ryan to the stage, sat him down on the piano bench and sung "Candle in the Wind," his old song about Marilyn Monroe, another soul destined for a dark journey:
It seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in...