Some say life is but a whisper, life is but a mist.
Gone before you realize it’s true.
But there must be a reason that all things exist.
Some explanation that cannot be dismissed.
—“I HAVE A FIRE” BY KATHIE LEE GIFFORD FROM SCANDALOUS
In the milestones of our lives we discover who we are. If we’re blessed with the wisdom that comes with experience, we will also discover our purpose. And then our greater purpose.
Cody was born on March 22, 1990. He was eight pounds, fifteen ounces and delivered by emergency C-section. All babies are blessings, but for me, who had come to believe that I would probably never have a child of my own, he was also a miracle.
Frank already had three grown children when I met him. He was also already a grandfather and certainly didn’t want to go through the whole process again. Yet he thought it was completely unfair to deny me the gift of a child if it was something I truly wanted.
I had always loved children, but I was never one of those women who longed to be a mother more than anything else in life. By the time we were married I was thirty-three years old and starting to think my window of opportunity to have healthy babies was closing. I decided to let nature take its course and see where that led.
Honestly, I was so ecstatic to finally be in a loving, supportive, healthy, and sexy relationship that I truly wasn’t longing for anything more. Three years after we got married, Frank and I went on a cruise along the Amalfi coast in Italy—one of our favorite places in the world. It was a perfect vacation in every way. One we had looked forward to before the start of the football season and the inevitable time that we would be apart while Frank covered the games.
No one was more surprised than I when, weeks after we returned home, I began to feel a little funny. Not sick, just different. Then something happened that had never happened to me before in my life. I sat before a picnic table full of fresh Maryland blue crabs and couldn’t stomach the sight of them. They were and still are one of my favorite foods. I did some math. When was my last period? I couldn’t remember at first until I realized it had been right before our cruise.
No . . . could it be? How could it be? I was astonished at the possibility after so much time.
We bought a pregnancy test at the drug store and watched the little stick change to a resounding positive. I don’t remember being thrilled, and I know for sure that Frank wasn’t. But I did eventually rejoice, and so did he, knowing that God was going to bless us with a child.
This was not something we had prayed for, as so many couples do, but something that God had designed for a greater purpose than the fulfillment of our dreams. I had trusted that the Lord would bring it about if it was His will, and it obviously was.
Cody Newton Gifford is now thirty years old, six feet four, and more handsome than ever.
Three months after his birth I took him with me to a small townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for the dedication of a new facility for newborn babies suffering from HIV or full-blown AIDs. The Variety House for Children was sponsored by the Association to Benefit Children (a-b-c.org). I had been working with Variety, the Children’s Charity, for many years and had been particularly impressed by a woman named Gretchen Buchenholz, who had founded the advocacy organization (ABC) years before.
At the time, AIDs was a brand-new, terrifying, and largely misunderstood disease. Just as Diana, princess of Wales, bravely held babies in her arms who were dying from AIDs, so did Gretchen. I was deeply moved by their courage when the rest of the world seemed to be paralyzed by fear of even getting close to these children.
On that hot June day on East Ninety-First Street, I held my very first AIDs baby. He weighed less than two pounds. In my other arm I held my eleven-pound healthy son. One baby born into suffering and pain, the other born into health, prosperity, and hope.
The injustice of that one moment forever changed me. Frank and I both knew that we needed to do more to alleviate the suffering of these children and help Gretchen accomplish her mission.
At that time there was no hope for these babies. They all died. So, day after day, loving, caring volunteers came to the brownstone, now called the Cody House, to simply rock them—literally to love them to death.
That’s why Frank and I decided to sue the state of New York to unblind HIV testing so at-risk women could be told their results and given the drugs needed to combat the possibility of their children being born infected with HIV or AIDs. We had learned that if these drugs were administered in utero, the chance of a child being infected went from about 25 percent to less than 8 percent. We had to change the law because although the results of the HIV testing had been tracked, they were not informing the pregnant mothers due to privacy issues.
We were still embroiled in this reality when we received an invitation from my friend Claudia Cohen to attend a dinner at her oceanfront home in East Hampton in 1995. Claudia was aware of our work with the Association to Benefit Children and our ongoing lawsuit with the state of New York, so she purposefully seated me next to New York governor George Pataki.
I took the next two hours to explain to the governor why we were suing the state.
He listened attentively and respectfully and, at the end of our basically one-way conversation, said three things I have never heard a politician say: (1) “I didn’t know this,” (2) “We’re on the wrong side of this issue,” and (3) “I’m going to do something about it.”
I knew Governor Pataki to be a good, decent man, so I hoped he was sincere. But I also was painfully aware that he would be facing a politically unpopular decision.
At that time gay men were understandably concerned, wanting to keep their HIV status private. There was a terrible stigma surrounding the disease, and they feared for not only their lives but their livelihoods as well. I tried to explain to my many gay friends that this wasn’t about them. It was about the babies who had been conceived and had no voice in their own futures. On the other hand, we did have a voice and a responsibility.
Several months later Frank and I stood in the memorial garden of the Cody House and listened as Governor Pataki announced that all HIV testing was to be unblinded. I looked at the paintings of angels and flowers along with the names on the garden walls of children who had been lost to this unspeakable disease. Tears flowed down my cheeks even as I heard protestors chanting outside on the street, “Governor Pataki, we have rights too! Governor Pataki, we have rights too!”
We discovered later that they had been bused in by a political organization hoping to make it onto the evening news. They didn’t even understand what they were protesting. They just got paid to do it.
“Forgive them, Father,” I remember praying, “for they know not what they do.”
One year later the AIDs death rate went down in New York for the first time,1 which can be attributed to the fact that the AIDs birth rate went down. One year later the unblinding of HIV testing was mandated in every state in the nation.
Gretchen and Governor Pataki will forever be two of my all-time personal heroes. They did the right thing for the lives of innocent children, regardless of the social consequences to their own lives.
Soon after our successful lawsuit, Frank and I went to what we came to call “the world’s most expensive lunch” with Gretchen. We asked her a simple question: “What more can we do?”
She shared her plan to open a new facility to house the growing number of children, who by then were benefiting from the newly discovered cocktail of drugs that, if administered during their mothers’ pregnancies, would help them battle the disease. Frank and I pledged our help. We eventually purchased the Ronald McDonald House on East Eighty-Sixth Street. It had originally been part of an existing church.
For the next year and a half, we attempted to renovate it. But even when you’re trying to do a good thing, you come up against all the bureaucracy of any large city that stands in your way. We were denied the permits we needed due to all of the building codes that restricted any possibility of renovation. We had no choice but to tear it down and build from scratch. So we did.
Our daughter, Cassidy, had been born on August 2, 1993, completing our family of four. Gretchen named the new building Cassidy’s Place, and on October 24, 1996, we dedicated the four-story, state-of-the-art facility to house all of ABC and care for the growing number of babies living longer with the disease. Today, even as my children prepare to begin their new married lives and start families of their own, the Cody House and Cassidy’s Place are alive and well on the East Side of Manhattan.
Changing the world doesn’t have to be a large-scale thing—though sometimes small steps inspire major movements. You can impact your neighborhood, the school down the road, or where you work like no one else. It’s never too late to change the world, one child at a time.