Magic and Cookie Johnson have been married for 25 years. Cookie & Magic were only married for a month when he found out he had HIV and she shares her story on how Magic had to track down all the women he had been with to let them know they could be infected.
Cookie writes in her new memoir ‘Believing in Magic’ that going through that herself was like being in her own ‘personal hell’ – one marked by ‘silence and darkness, numbness’.
Johnson ‘locked himself in a room and called the long list of women with whom he’d been intimate’, Cookie writes.
Johnson’s doctors told him that he had three years to live. To deal with the stress he shifted into ‘warrior mode’ and buried himself in organization.
Cookie said that she stopped thinking about the past and the future and she found that the only way to survive was to ‘breathe your way through this moment. And the next. And then each one that follows’ .
I remember coming home from school when Magic made his public announcement it was a surreal day.
