AIDS Group Grows From Mother’s Strength : Care-Giving: One who has lived with the disease counsels others, ‘Don’t throw your child away.’

In the three years since Mildred Pearson lost her 31-year-old son, her chosen mission has been to bring together other mothers of people afflicted with AIDS.

“Every mother’s story is different,” said the 59-year-old Brooklyn woman who has been nicknamed “Mother Pearson” for her efforts to inspire compassion in the epidemic.

Her story of how she helped her son, Bruce, cope with his illness, along with social ostracism and fear, became the basis of the support group she calls Mother’s Love.

From a small office in a Brooklyn church, Pearson counsels other mothers, some of whom she said can’t bring themselves to use the word AIDS . “There is so much denial,” Pearson said. “They just say, ‘My child is sick and I have no one to turn to.’ ”

Indeed, Pearson said, denial of the AIDS menace is to blame for many deaths in the minority communities she serves.

“We mothers are hurting,” Pearson said. “So many people get up and talk about funding and politics, but there is a human part to AIDS that no one talks about.”

She begins by describing Bruce Pearson as a “beautiful son.”

“At lunchtime he would call me on the phone and say, ‘Don’t cook tonight, Ma, ‘cause I got something special for you.’ ”

Bruce worked for a Manhattan advertising agency. He got the HIV virus through homosexual sex. Pearson said the disease took a toll on his body and mind from the start.

“I’m making mistakes on the job. Everyone’s on my back,” she recalled his saying.

“He started using diapers because he lost control of himself,” she said.

Bruce later sank into depression, bewilderment and dementia as the virus attacked his brain.

“I finally asked the doctor if Bruce had AIDS,” Pearson recalled. “Just getting the words out was very difficult.”

Bruce’s doctors called his problem AIDS-related complex and suggested he enter a hospital for terminally ill people. But Pearson replied: “I’m taking my baby home.”

“I learned how to put a diaper on a grown man the same way as when he was a baby,” she said. She inserted a catheter to keep him dry.

Pearson, married to her second husband, Rutledge, for 27 years, has 13 other children and stepchildren. She said that friends and many relatives stopped coming to her home in a Brooklyn housing project.

“Sometimes I had to do a little lying to help his state of mind,” she said, “but Bruce felt the abandonment. . . .

“I’ve been ostracized, hurt. I’ve been stepped on--but Bruce was my son,” she said. “I asked God for a miracle, and he granted me seven more months with him.”

She said that her son derived spiritual support from joining her prayer circle at Devoe Street Baptist Church, now home base to the support group she founded.

Bruce died Oct. 27, 1987, when his lungs failed.

“He didn’t leave me any babies, he didn’t leave me money, but he left me his strength,” she said.

Few know the impact of AIDS on American families as the Pearsons do. Since Bruce’s death, a stepson has come down with AIDS. He got the virus by sharing needles for intravenous drug use.

Timothy Sweeney, executive director of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, said Pearson is “an inspiration.”

“She has taken her own experience with AIDS and transformed that into an empowering experience, where she is helping not only herself, but many people in her community,” he said.

“She’s crossed boundaries that normally would divide people in society. She touches that common piece of humanity that we know should and must connect us in the midst of the epidemic,” Sweeney said.

Pearson found other mothers with similar experiences through the Brooklyn AIDS Task Force. She also joined AIDS Family Service in Manhattan, which has a support group for mothers--but which Pearson complained doesn’t do enough for the poor. Still, she credits that group with giving her the groundwork for her own brand of counseling.

To those who fear being near a person living with AIDS, she says: “You can’t get AIDS by loving, caring and sharing.” She also advises them to pray.

Mother’s Love now consists of half a dozen women, “an extended family” of senior citizens.

“We hug, we cry, we care,” she said. “We even laugh sometimes.”

One of the women is Olive Seales, mother of Franklyn Seales, who played Dexter Stuffins on the television comedy “Silver Spoons.”

Early last year, Seales, ravaged by the disease, flew home from Hollywood to be with his mother in Brooklyn. “He passed away on Mother’s Day,” Pearson said.

A Brooklyn “hot line” service offers support to other mothers on the AIDS battlefield. Those who ring Pearson’s number are encouraged not to despair.

“I can’t do like you did, Mildred,” they often say to her.

Then Pearson shares her story of love and courage. But she is careful not to provide false hope.

“Don’t throw your child away,” she counsels them.

“When it’s all over, you can say, ‘I hung in there until the end, and I’m better for it.”’