The uneasiness about the significance of having AIDS from the perspective of the person who experiences the disease led the authors to undertake a research that would guide them to provide nursing care based on an approach to the patient in his/her existential dimension. Thus, using the steps of a phenomenologic investigation and based on the discourse of the persons about their living experience of being a person with AIDS, the authors were able to discover facets which form the essence of this experience and which affect the persons as historical beings. The critical moment of the revelation of the diagnosis, living with the disease and its symptoms, the perspective of the approaching end, the configuration of their existential horizon in the presence of what is happening to them were facets that emerged and that were analyzed. These results effectively contribute to a type of nursing care that will garantee to the patients the exercise of their primordial condition as human beings: - their existential dimension.