LAGUNA BEACH : Reaching Out to Those With AIDS

Mark Moloney understands the impulse that causes people to withdraw their touch from a person with AIDS. He also knows how comforting that touch can be.

Four years ago, Moloney was visiting the home of a man suffering from AIDS. The man’s face and arms were spotted with lesions and he was weak, but he gathered his strength to serve coffee to Moloney.

“I was scared to death,” Moloney said. “The man with AIDS handed me a coffee cup, and I was afraid to touch it, not knowing two years later I’d be in his shoes.”

After recounting that memory, Moloney, 38, stretched out on a massage table as a volunteer from the Laguna Beach AIDS support organization, Laguna Shanti, prepared to give him a massage.

As soothing music filled Moloney’s Laguna Beach home, volunteer Casey Kelso poured eucalyptus-scented oil into his palm and began his ministration.

It is a luxurious experience for Moloney, an accountant who had never had a massage until he learned two years ago that he had AIDS. But Laguna Shanti workers, who arrange such “buddy” connections for their clients, say the massage program was established to meet a basic need.

It’s a way of reaching out to people who feel betrayed by their bodies and may be angry, isolated and afraid, said Steve Peskind, who founded Laguna Shanti three years ago. Some people with the disease don’t even want to touch themselves, he said.

“When a volunteer who’s willing to listen and touch comes in, it can make a huge difference in how they live with AIDS,” Peskind said. “The basic gift that any volunteer is giving is simply being present for the person with AIDS.”

To participate, volunteers must enroll in a three-day, 18-hour session. They are taught the history of the disease, details about how it is contracted and safety precautions. They also are instructed in massage strokes and how to “approach AIDS clients with sensitivity and love,” said John Moore, a retired aerospace engineer and one of two certified massage therapists who conduct the sessions.

Finding volunteers, Peskind said, is a hard sell. The fear of “touching the untouchables” is hard to overcome, he said.

But the massage idea was woven into Laguna Shanti’s purpose from the very beginning, Peskind said. He founded the organization after a friend, a massage therapist, died of AIDS. The friend had a massage table with which he had traveled the world, massaging people with AIDS.

When the friend became ill, said Peskind, “he gave me the table and said, ‘Here, you’re going to be able to use this someday.’ That’s all he said. I accepted it as the generous gift it was, and that was that.”

Peskind said he also was influenced by the comment of a Buddhist monk who, in answering a rambling question about what to do with people who have AIDS, responded, “Just touch them.” The monk understood, Peskind said, that “for people who are made to feel like lepers, one of the most powerful and responsible gifts one can offer is simply loving human touch.”

Despite the difficulty of finding volunteers, Peskind said, the massage practice is growing. Graduates from the training sessions now work in hospices in Long Beach and Los Angeles.

Graduates are matched with “buddies,” whom they massage in the Laguna Shanti office or in the client’s home. So far, 140 people, almost all of whom have AIDS or ARC (AIDS-related complex), have received massages from Laguna Shanti workers, Peskind said. Occasionally, he added, a volunteer also will massage a client’s family member who just needs “good old-fashioned stress reduction.”

While massage volunteers must themselves learn to deal with stress and, often, death, they can also reap rewards. There are, Peskind said, lessons to be learned from the person lying on the table.

“It’s a two-way street,” he said. “It’s not just the powerful helping the powerless and the strong helping the weak. In a way, we’re setting up a situation where people with AIDS can teach us about living with life and death with courage and integrity.”