With one act of infidelity he changed the course of her life forever. But even though her life partner of 18 years infected her with HIV, Rosemarie Stone stayed true to her wedding vows and loved him till death, keeping his secret for three years while her own health hung in the balance.

The saga began in 1992 when Rosemarie and her prominent husband, Professor Carl Stone, known in the academic community for his work as a political scientist and for pioneering the systematic study of voting behaviour in Jamaica were diagnosed with the disease.

“Immediately I went into cover-up mode,” she tells the Sunday Observer. “There was no one I knew of who I could tell; you couldn’t call the word, I just decided to cover it up, because at that time a lot of people were calling and asking what the diagnosis was.”

Not knowing what to do, she lied.

“For three years I lied,” admits Stone, adding that she asked her doctor how should she answer queries about her health. “She told me cancer of the lymphatic cells, and that was what I went with for years. I was trying to protect my children because they were young – nine and 13 at the time – and they were interacting with other people’s children and I don’t know how they would have reacted,” Stone says.

But even though she was betrayed and forced to live a lie that didn’t begin with her, Stone did what most women caught in her situation would never have done.

“I looked after him; some of my friends who came here at times and saw me looking after Carl thought I didn’t know about my diagnosis until after he died; because they can’t believe I wasn’t angry,” she tells the Sunday Observer.

“It’s very difficult, because you are in love with somebody who is ill, and he’s dying. Anybody that is dying and that is ill you would want to look after. And then you are torn because this person has been nice to you, you have had a good relationship and now he is dying, there was nothing else for me to do but to look after him, and apparently I did it well, because nobody thought I was sick,” Stone says.

She could have raged and exacted vengeance, but instead she chose to forgive. “Everybody was wondering where was the anger and how could I forgive Carl,” she says. “But the thing is, I don’t think there was any other way for me to survive, and I often say, if our relationship wasn’t as good as I thought it was, I couldn’t probably forgive,” she adds, her eyes now moist.

The worst part is, she says she never saw it coming, even though from time to time she suspected that he was not always honest with her.

“As a woman I thought we had this fabulous relationship, and we did have a good marriage, we were compatible and he didn’t complain, but in retrospect I had the feeling sometimes that there was probably something, but he had always denied it,” she says. “When we got married first, we used condoms as a contraceptive, so I didn’t think he was somebody that wouldn’t use condoms.

So even if your mind went there for a second – that he would be unfaithful – you wouldn’t think that would reach you.”

It was when he was required to “give a list” of the names of ladies with whom he had slept to the health authorities after his diagnosis that her suspicions were confirmed and, she says, “it was hell on earth”. But until today, Stone has not seen the list and she has no desire to.

“I spoke to him. He thought I was going to ask him about who the names were on the list, but I don’t know if I knew them at all. I asked him about who I thought and told him he would have to answer me either yes or no if he had slept with them and he did and that was hell on earth,” she laughs.

“That was the only way for me to stay; I had to find a place where there was at least some honesty.”

If there was an alternative to staying with him, she still is not sure what it would be.

“Probably, if I didn’t have two children who were young it would be different, probably if I were HIV negative it would be different,” says Stone. “Probably if when I asked Carl about the women he had said ‘I’m not discussing it’, I don’t know which way it would have gone, but all things work together so that I was here and looked after him until he died.”

When he died in 1993, she retreated into her own private world, pursued by her grief.

“Really and truly I had a hard time with grieving and missing him and all those things, like normal women go through, but at the same time this is the person who is responsible for every bad thing happening to you. It was terrible,” Stone tells the Sunday Observer.

“In 1997, I got ill and I was very ill because of an allergic reaction to medication I was taking. My face got swollen, my skin was dropping off, but the good thing about that for me is that I didn’t know what was happening, I was in another world in my head. I didn’t feel the physical discomfort,” she says.

The woman who was once an outgoing socialite became a recluse.

“From 1997 to 2000, while I tried to sort myself out, now that my friends, parents and children knew, I nearly became a hermit because I stayed at home. I didn’t feel like going out, and so I built a world inside my home here. It’s easy to do because I have a big family,” she shares.

Everything changed.

“I used to have a flat stomach, I had a nice figure, I didn’t have any fat, right now I have displacement of fat in my body. Over the years the whole body changed, at times I was size six, eight, 10, 12, four, I put on weight, then I lost it; the whole gamut, but I have to deal with how I look now,” says the 59-year-old woman. In addition, she was slighted by friends who just could not cope with her physical condition.

She was prepared to die, and wrote letters to her two children, her sister and her parents. When she showed those letters to the family’s counsellor, a Jesuit priest, he encouraged her to author her own book.

“People say to me, ‘why the book now?’, but I don’t know if I could have done it before, and even now it’s still not easy,” she shares. “The children are a little older and they are dealing with it a little better now, they had initial problems because it’s a very personal book, that’s why I named it No Stone Unturned. But at least I can do one thing for myself after living a great part of my life for Carl and them.”

While she is not sure if she wants to go into advocacy, Stone says she wants to be “useful” to others in the same situation, especially children.

During the interview, her grand-daughter walked into the room in search of her. At the sight of the youngster, Stone’s infectious smile grew brighter.

“I call her my infusion of happiness, she is just what I needed right now,” she shares.

Laughing openly now, she says she is on the road to recovery.

“I think I am going to start to live a little more instead of just surviving, and that is what the book has probably forced me to do,” she shares.

Noting that it has been 14 years since her husband died, Stone says while she is not sure if the length of her life can be attributed to “medicine, genetics, sheer luck, or her psychological makeup”, she is not prepared to let it run out before she has done all she needs to do.

“I want to do a lot of things before I leave here, I want to see my grand-daughter grow up, I want to travel more, and visit Broadway soon,” she says.

Mindful of the fact that there is still some amount of discrimination against persons with HIV, Stone says she intends to live, but with caution.

“I’m ok in spaces I can control because I don’t want to feel any of the things I felt earlier, because when you get this thing you feel dirty, you feel unclean, you feel less than human and I don’t want to ever get that way again or put myself in that position again,” she says.