For two years, Jennifer Torres kept her anger to herself. She went to school, tutored children part time and helped raise two younger sisters, never speaking of being unable to forgive her mother for dying of AIDS.
But sometime last year, the 17-year-old, as a member of a Lower East Side improvisational theater group, was asked to come up with a skit about a parent`s death. There, for the first time, the words and the tears came rushing out.
”AIDS didn`t have to happen to you,” Jennifer told her mother in a monologue that now stirs audiences in schools, shelters and other places where she performs. ”You didn`t have to die, but you preferred your friends, drugs, the streets, over me.”
Jennifer and many other children who have lost a parent to AIDS or face that prospect are not themselves infected with the virus that causes the disease. But often they are struggling with the rage, shame and isolation that the disease has left behind.
Experts say AIDS is creating a class of particularly troubled youths. While all children who lose a parent suffer, the trauma for those who lose a parent to AIDS is compounded by embarrassment and secrecy.
They also wrestle with the conflicting emotions of feeling sorry for the parent and of blaming them for their illness.
Although federal officials have no nationwide numbers for children orphaned by AIDS, in New York, which leads the country in reported AIDS cases, health officials estimate that about 20,000 children have lost their mothers to the disease since the beginning of the epidemic.
Experts say about half the children who have had parents die of AIDS are teenagers.
A new study in New York found that many such children showed clear signs of distress and did not adjust as well to the illness as younger siblings did. The Human Resources Administration, the city`s welfare agency, interviewed 40 families it serves in Brooklyn in which a parent had AIDS or had died from it and found that most of the teenagers had watched their grades drop in school, had not talked about the disease to even a best friend and had symptoms of clinical depression.
The researchers also found that seven adolescents, a quarter of the boys in the families, had been arrested for crimes ranging from picking pockets to assault. There were 61 children in the families, all black or Hispanic and between the ages of 10 and 19.
In many instances, the study found, parents denied or hid their condition. Frequently, they failed to make any arrangements for custody of the adolescents. And relatives, the study found, often want only the younger children.
Some teenagers, like Jennifer, manage to cope well despite the stigma and uncertainty that AIDS thrusts upon them, social workers who deal with some of the youths say.
Some even keep up with school work while caring for younger siblings and the sick parent.
But many of the teenagers are already in families hobbled by poverty, usually headed by a single mother, and on the average have lived through a divorce or the death or imprisonment of a loved one.
Sometimes, in addition to coping with the loss of a parent, they also face the impending death of a younger brother or sister born with the virus.
Many others become self-destructive, experts say. ”They`re the ones screwing up and getting in trouble; doing drugs or getting pregnant,” said Rori Shaffer, a social worker at Mt. Sinai Hospital`s Adolescent Health Center. Shaffer runs a bereavement group for teenagers whose parents are HIV- infected or have died from AIDS. ”A major issue is the breakup of the family. A lot of times they have to go to foster care.”
Erika B., who was 18 when her mother died of AIDS in 1990, said she remained strong through her mother`s illness because she was older and had already left home to live with her high school sweetheart, who is now her husband.
But a sister, now 16, tried to kill herself when her mother got sick, she said. The girl dropped out of school, went to live with friends and is now pregnant.
Erika has taken on the task of raising her youngest sister, who is 11, along with her own two boys. She has yet to tell the girl what killed both her mother and father, a heroin user who died from AIDS before her mother did.
”I want her to be ready for that,” says Erika B., who lives in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. ”I don`t want her to be so naive that she wouldn`t know what to think.”
Jennifer Torres said the sight of her mother`s gauntness-she went from 130 pounds to 86 during her illness-still haunts her.
Her mother was honest about the disease with her children, three girls and two grown sons, and tried to take them to a professional counselor ”to confront our feelings.” But Jennifer refused to talk with anyone.
There was one hopeful period before her mother died that ended up making her feel worse, Jennifer said. Even before her mother got sick, Jennifer and her younger sisters lived with their grandmother because of their mother`s drug addiction.
At one point her mother returned to live with them again and recovered some of her weight and health, only to go back to drugs.
She died a few months later, at 36.
”I had been upset with her because I felt she had abandoned us,”
Jennifer said. ”For her to go back to the addiction again, it was another disappointment.”
Jennifer says she has yet to make her peace with her mother.
”I would like to forgive her, to be free of the anger,” she said. ”I started going to church so I can be helped. I`ve tried and I`m trying, but it`s hard.”
Even if there is no anger, often there is shame.
A 17-year-old high school student from the Upper West Side said his father`s death from AIDS in August 1990 is a family secret he has kept from even his best friend and his girlfriend. His father, a computer science teacher at New York University who had separated from his mother, was gay.
The boy tells those who ask that his father died of a brain tumor.
”I just feel embarrassed saying my father was gay,” he said. ”Also, telling your peers, they might think you have it, especially your girlfriend. You don`t want to tell your girlfriend.”
The boy, who spoke on condition that his name not be used, said that when his mother first told him about his father`s illness, he cried for about an hour and then ”I blocked it out.”
But he began getting drunk, at least twice a week, and smoking marijuana in the mornings and during lunch breaks in school. His grades dropped from an 87 grade average to 79.
Now a junior in high school, he said he is coming to grips with a loss he simply calls ”something big,” and with his situation. A year and a half ago he joined the Mt. Sinai Hospital support group for adolescents.
He does not relate to many of the problems brought up by the other teenagers in the group, like parental drug use, he said, but the group helps. ”I don`t so much talk about the issues or the feelings,” he said. ”I just want to become friends with people I`m not holding back from.”
The study by the welfare agency indicated that adolescents who are personally touched by AIDS do not seem any more careful about avoiding infection through protected sex than other teenagers.
Out of nine adolescents who said they had been sexually active, four girls had been pregnant and one boy had fathered a child.
Researchers at the agency`s Division of AIDS Services, which conducted the study on the children`s mental health needs in the last six months of 1991 with $100,000 in federal and city money, said the findings show an urgent need for support groups and ”in-home” counseling to help families deal with AIDS and to create a stable home for the children.
The researchers, led by Barbara H. Draimin, the principal investigator, say there is also a need for advocates in the schools and the court system to help the children when they get into trouble.
Of the 20 families in the study where a parent had died, the children went to live with their grandmothers in nine instances, with aunts in seven and with fathers and uncles in two each. But in more than half of the 20 families where the parent was still alive, there was no custody plan for the adolescent.
Sometimes the relatives left behind are unprepared when they suddenly find themselves dealing with troubled teenagers.
At 31, Diana P. is now the head of a household that includes her mother, a daughter of her own and the 11-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter of a sister who battled the disease in silence until the very end.
”She asked me when she was on her deathbed if I would take the kids,”
said Diana P., an office clerk. ”She told me not to separate them.”
But Diana P. wishes she had known about the situation earlier. Maybe she could have done something to help her sister live longer, she says, or at least to have gotten ready for the task ahead.
Her sister`s children are not doing well in school, do not have any close friends and need counseling to deal with their mother`s death.
”I love them,” she said. ”They`re part of me, but sometimes I feel a little aggravated. Everything falls on me.”
Sometimes the parent with AIDS tells everyone but the children. Theresa J., 34, of Park Slope, Brooklyn, already has made a will and arranged for her mother to have custody of her 16-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son if she dies.
But she told her children that she had a throat infection when she was hospitalized for AIDS.
The woman says she knows she should be frank with the kids. Experts, who say it is better for the children to know about the disease early so they can learn how to deal with it, say children often figure out the truth anyway.
But she cannot bring herself to talk to them yet, she said.
”I think they`re better off not knowing,” said the woman, who was diagnosed with AIDS a year and a half ago and has traced her HIV infection to a lover. ”My son is too young. It`s hard for me so I know it`d be hard for my daughter. I know I worry about it, and I don`t want her to do the same.”
Jennifer Torres credits her work with the Loisaida Players Project in her Lower East Side neighborhood for helping her deal with her emotions.
When she graduates from high school later this year, she plans to attend the College of Staten Island and then she wants to become a lawyer
specializing in family law.
Her advice to other kids: ”Staying out late, drinking, they`re only hurting themselves and they can fall in the same trap their parents fell in.” ”You can get it all out by talking. AIDS doesn`t mean the end.”
