Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 19, 1993 TAG: 9301190124
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ANNE GEARAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: ANNANDALE LENGTH: Long
SON'S TRAGEDY BROUGHT AIDS HOME TO FAMILY
Kevin Pillow died on Thanksgiving Day amidst a makeshift infirmary in his parents' suburban living room - following his wife and son as the final victim of a family's private holocaust.From the moment five years ago that Pillow told his family he tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS, his parents struggled with the certainty their oldest son would die from a disease they never imagined could touch their lives.
"A whole family wiped out, just like that. Young, healthy kids - gone," said Kevin Pillow's mother, Barbara.
The Pillows are a middle-class family who had never met anyone with AIDS when their son called from Arizona with the news both he and his wife had tested positive. Kevin was 27 at the time, his wife 29.
Like many Americans, the Pillows had thought little about AIDS. None of their four children was homosexual or intravenous drug users, the two groups most at risk from the disease.
"And then, suddenly, there it was. We asked how this could happen to them, of all people," said Kevin's younger brother, Tom.
A decade into the AIDS epidemic in the United States, the disease is spreading among people once considered far removed from harm. As AIDS appears increasingly in offices, neighborhoods and schools, more Americans are confronting its consequences.
"It's still unimaginable to many people, but maybe it's a little less unimaginable than it used to be" said Scott Sanders, spokesman for the Whitman Walker Clinic, a Washington, D.C., AIDS testing and counseling center.
Although there are no statistics to measure the disease's spread among middle-class heterosexuals like the Pillows, the National Center for Health Statistics says that within a few years heterosexuals will make up half or more of all American AIDS patients.
"Are attitudes changing? Yes and no," said Judy Pollatsek, a Washington AIDS therapist. "There is still enormous fear of contagion, and people still ask the same questions they did five years ago - can they catch it from the water fountain or the toilet."
On the other hand, every year more people come into contact with AIDS patients, "and discover that they're not ogres," Pollatsek said. "The single greatest factor in changing people's opinions about AIDS is when someone they know gets it," she said.
An estimated 1 million Americans carry the HIV virus that causes AIDS and about 30,000 Americans died of AIDS last year.
Many of those victims died alienated from their families - ostracized by fears and prejudices the Pillows admit they once might have shared.
But during an interview in the Pillows' comfortable home, the family said they are glad for the experience of caring for Kevin and his wife, Cheryl, as they died.
"That's one thing about this disease, it moves slowly," Pillow said. "We had a lot of time to mend fences, to say the things we wanted to say before they left. I really feel for people who lose a child to something like a car accident, because they don't get that chance."
They had their first family portrait made last summer, even though Kevin was sick and gaunt. It hangs in the living room, above the pull-out couch where Richard and Barbara Pillow slept in the final months before Cheryl and Kevin died.
The couple moved in last spring, when it was apparent they couldn't look after themselves.
For months, the Pillows' dining room table was lined with medicines, and hospital cots crowded the living room. Several times a day, Richard or Barbara Pillow donned rubber gloves to administer shots or, when the time came, to help the dying with basic functions they could no longer manage.
"People have such fear of this disease," Tom Pillow said. "I want people to know I held my brother's hand a few minutes before he died. I was never afraid of my brother."
The Pillows had little contact with AIDS support groups or other AIDS patients and their families.
There are no established support groups expressly for families of heterosexual AIDS victims, Whitman Walker's Sanders said.
Many parents are forced to seek help because they and their children cannot afford the staggering health care costs associated with AIDS. Because Kevin and Cheryl Pillow were both in the military, their medical care was free.
Cheryl Pillow died in August, her athletic frame shrunk to 70 pounds and ravaged by painful sores. But two days before she died, she was cracking jokes across the darkened living room and Richard and Barbara Pillow, sleeping in shifts by then, laughed.
"I would not trade that for anything," Barbara Pillow said.
Since 1987, the Pillow family had watched as the disease advanced on Kevin and Cheryl. And they watched as their first grandson, Cloud William, fought AIDS for his four short months of life in 1989. Cloud William was the couple's only child.
The Pillows will never know for sure how the couple contracted the disease, although they suspect a dirty needle was used for one of Kevin's tattoos.
The infection was discovered when Cheryl Pillow went for a routine physical as part of her job with the Air Force. Kevin, a jet mechanic, was tested next.
The Air Force required both to leave the service immediately, but the couple were allowed to receive free care at military hospitals.
Kevin and Cheryl returned to the Northern Virginia suburb where Kevin grew up. Kevin got a job alongside his father and brother at a large regional mail-sorting center and the couple bought a house an hour away.
"They were living a normal life, at least on the outside, and they were very happy," Tom Pillow said.
Neighbors were told nothing, and no one at Kevin's new job knew he was ill. Even Kevin's closest friend was told Cloud William suffered crib death.
"That was a decision he made with my dad and me in mind," Tom Pillow said. "He didn't want to put us in a position where we would be criticized or ostracized."
The couple even chose not to tell much of Cheryl's family they were sick until shortly before she died.
The Pillows say they have received no ugly treatment since the couple died, although there were a few prying questions from Kevin's co-workers.
People the Pillows didn't know have sent cards, telling of their own losses.
"It's starting to change a little bit, I think," Tom Pillow said. "People are taking the first baby steps toward understanding this disease, but it's still a long way from walking."