Journal of Despair : Wife’s Diary Chronicles Family’s Tragic Struggle With AIDS

Before Navy Lt. John Shaulis learned that his wife and son were infected, he believed only homosexuals contracted the deadly disease AIDS--and that they deserved it.

“I was wrong,” Shaulis said. “It is torture--slow death. No one should suffer as my wife suffered. No one.”

Shaulis, a Navy pilot based in Coronado, buried his wife, Linda, on Thursday, almost three years after the death of his 14-month-old son--both victims of AIDS. At her death, 32-year-old Linda Shaulis weighed 60 pounds and had gone blind.

“We are the perfect example of middle America,” said Shaulis, 37, who joined the Navy nine years ago. “If it happened to us, it can happen to you.”

Doctors believe Linda Shaulis became infected during a sexual encounter in her college days. As the AIDS epidemic slowly permeates society, increasing numbers of heterosexuals are stricken with the deadly disease.

Linda Shaulis, a kindergarten teacher, grew up on a farm in Olney, a small Texas town of 4,000, about 100 miles northwest of Dallas. Every Sunday, Linda attended church with her five brothers and sisters. The family was not close, though Linda and her sister Gail shared most of their secrets.

Linda Shaulis’ world was small. She had traveled no farther than Arkansas by the time she reached her 20s. She went to a zoo for the first time when she was a college sophomore. “She was a sweet, Southern belle,” said one friend.

Linda met the tall, lanky, blond pilot John Shaulis at church. He sang in the choir, and she attended every Sunday. Suddenly, her life expanded. When he proposed, she didn’t hesitate.

“The best thing that has ever happened to me is meeting John Shaulis,” she wrote in her diary.

The young couple married Dec. 22, 1984. Linda Shaulis, a 5-foot-2 brunette, joined her husband in the Philippines, where he was assigned as a pilot.

To many of the other Navy wives, it was a bleak outpost. But Linda Shaulis loved it. She organized lunches for the other American women, arranged shopping expeditions and taught the military children.

When Linda Shaulis gave birth March 21, 1987, it seemed to the young couple that they had started to live their dream. More than anything, Linda wanted children. She wanted to take them to the zoo, have picnics and go off on kite-flying and fishing expeditions.

For the first six months of his life, August Bradley Shaulis seemed to be a blissfully happy baby. He scarcely ever cried. He loved being held--whether by his parents or others.

“It was just right--another step in the right direction of what the perfect life would be. If there is a perfect baby, he seemed to be that,” John Shaulis recalled. “Him being a boy, it was a chance to carry on the family name. I was proud, so proud.”

But John and Linda soon realized that August had begun to lose weight, that he needed a smaller--rather than larger--diaper size. Something was very wrong.

For several months, doctors were baffled. Finally, one afternoon three doctors walked into the hospital room where Linda and John Shaulis sat with their son. As they sat down, John Shaulis quipped: “Either you are awfully tired or you have bad news.”

In March, 1988, the baby tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS. Several days later, Linda Shaulis learned that she, too, was infected. John Shaulis, however, was not.

“It was like the bottom dropped out of the elevator,” John Shaulis remembered. “There went our hopes, our dreams, because nobody beats it. It’s just a matter of how long you survive.”

One month later, August died.

Linda Shaulis began a diary. Originally, she bought the diary because she wanted to write about John’s life and hers, their childhoods, how they met, their hopes for the future. She wanted to pass it along to their children.

Instead, she wrote a journal about her death.

May 11, 1990, Ten till 5.

I am sitting on our couch in our rented one-room studio (before the couple moved to their own house). I arrived to Coronado, Calif. Sat. May 6 at 5:45. I was really beginning to think I would never make the trip. . . .

This state, county will be my home till I die. I’m not traveling any more. It tires me so, I also seem to get sick.

May 20, ’90

It’s the day after the second anniversary of August’s death. I prayed for him last night. . . . It’s hard to believe he would have been 3 years old. At times I wonder what he would look like, his mannerisms, etc. John would love to take August everywhere with him. The gym, biking, jogging, playground, everywhere.

June 27, ’90

I don’t know how to say or write down what needs to be said. Maybe I’m too scared to write the words. Maybe I’m afraid for anyone to know what really is happening to me. I really don’t know the answers. The truth is I’m slowly dying from AIDS. Yes, everyone is dying, but I know my death is within years not decades.

People are always asking how I feel about having AIDS, or they seem so surprised at my attitude or coping process. What choice do I have? I have to accept the fact and live with it. . . .

I do know I am not ready to leave this earth. I also know when it is time I will be very scared. . . .

John is always asking me what I want out of life. What do I want to do with my life, my goals. I always say I don’t know. The only thing I do know is I wanted a happy marriage, children. I wanted to share so much with my own family that I never had growing up. I still have my marriage to love and enjoy, but my chances of having children are gone.

I was blessed with August for a short time. I feel robbed by losing him, but I am the one to blame for his death. He died because of my foolish actions. He suffered because of me. I only hope he can forgive me. I hope John can forgive me. Because of me, John lost his son. As long as I am alive, John will never be a father, he will not have a child. I hope someday he will be given a second wife and have children. I know it pains him not to be sharing his life with offspring. A child would be the apple of his eye. He would not let anything ever hurt his child. . . .

I don’t feel anything, almost numb! I don’t feel hate toward the person who infected me. I’m not totally sure who it was. I don’t even know if he is still alive. What good does it do to wonder. The damage has already been done.

Linda Shaulis belongs to a small but growing number of women who contracted the virus through heterosexual activity.

In San Diego County, there are 2,625 cases of AIDS; of those, 124 are women. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome is a viral disorder that is spread through sexual contact, blood transfusions or the sharing of contaminated intravenous needles by drug users.

In the Navy community, Linda Shaulis is still an anomaly. The majority of the 900 infected patients at the Navy Hospital in Balboa Park are homosexual. And most are active-duty personnel--not their dependents. Among 30 couples where one spouse tested positive, the infected individual is usually the husband, said Dr. Charles Kennedy, acting director of the hospital’s human immunodeficiency virus unit.

Early in the AIDS epidemic, the disease struck the homosexual community. But, over the years, it has touched others, spilling into mainstream America.

At his wife’s request, Shaulis, an aircraft division officer who supervises 70 people at North Island Naval Air Station, kept her diagnosis a secret from most of his colleagues. Nor did Linda Shaulis want her relatives to know the nature of her illness. At her burial Thursday, all but one brother and sister believed that Linda had died of cancer.

John Shaulis came to The Times, wanting to discuss his wife’s death--hoping it might prevent further spread of the disease.

“I am 37, I’ve buried my wife, my son and I’ve got a headstone with my name--that’s a little too early,” said John Shaulis, who is not infected with the virus that causes AIDS. “This doesn’t just happen to drug users or inner-city people. People think this doesn’t happen in Coronado. But it does. It does happen to Joe Blow. It does happen to a girl from a small town in Texas.”

Oct. 11, ’90

I cried today. I cried as I stood in a bathtub of cold water trying to get my fever down. Even the faucet wouldn’t give me a break.

I prayed to God. I told him he can take me when he is ready. I will be ready but scared to go. My fever hit 105 degrees and hot. . . .

I am so tired of this illness. It has put so much stress on John and myself. I pain. I feel every day will be less painful than the next day. I don’t want pain. I want it, my life to end. I don’t want to be tubed up, bugged up or doped up. Once I get to the stage where I know I will only get worse, that’s when I want to stop everything.

I think of my funeral. I want to plan it completely. It’s almost like preparing one of our trips, all the planning from start to finish.

Seven months after this diary entry, Linda Lee Shaulis died in her Coronado home.

“You see a picture of a husband, wife, and child. One year later, it’s just husband and wife. One year later, it’s just husband,” said Karen Lange, a 26-year-old neighbor who visited Linda Shaulis several times a week during her illness.

Linda Shaulis had been angry--angry that she had not been tested for AIDS before she married, before she got pregnant. She was angry that she didn’t know until it was too late that she was infected and had unwittingly passed the virus to her baby. But that anger gave way to exhaustion.

The couple’s many friends rallied her spirits--calling from various Navy commands around the nation and visiting frequently. Yet in recent weeks, life had become an ordeal for Linda Shaulis. Blind and weak, she stumbled into furniture in her two-bedroom stucco house. Walking from the bedroom to the living room exhausted her. Chewing one M&M; would take several minutes. Sipping water tired her.

She hated being blind--a result of a viral disease that frequently attacks the optical nerve among AIDS patients. Her thighs had shriveled to the size of a normal adult’s forearm. Her ribs protruded. Her face shrank on her bones.

She thought of what she wished she had done with her life. She wished she had read more. John urged her to stay active in the house, to do laundry, listen to the television. But she just could not muster the energy. Instead, she spent her days sitting on the couch, waiting for him to come home from work. She sat in the dark.

John Shaulis kept flying, until the day before Linda’s death. It was his only release. He learned how to administer injections, adjust the blankets and buoy his wife’s moods. But he knew she had pneumonia and was dying.

On May 21, John Shaulis gave his wife some cough syrup at 1:30 a.m.

Linda Shaulis squeezed his hand. Her breathing had become labored and raspy. He fell asleep with one hand on her stomach. When John Shaulis awoke at 4:15 a.m., he realized that his hand was no longer rising and falling with her breathing. Linda Shaulis--her eyes and mouth open--was completely still.