Sharing the Heartbreak : Therapy: A group organized by the mothers of AIDS patients provides support and comfort for victims’ families.

Two years ago, when Dale Hardy called from Sacramento to tell his mother that he was coming home, she joyfully asked whether he was going to spend the summer with the family in Torrance.

“No, Mom,” he said. “I’m coming home to die.”

At a family gathering for his parents’ anniversary a decade earlier, Dale, then 16, had told the family that he was gay. Now, at the age of 26, he was revealing to his mother that he was dying of acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Devastated and not knowing where to turn, Joan Atkinson, 52, grabbed the telephone book and flipped to the listings under “A”--AIDS.

“I needed to know what this disease was. I needed to know what I was facing,” she said. “This wasn’t something I could turn to my friends and say, ‘I have a son with AIDS, can you help me?’ ”

After five hours of phone calls, Atkinson finally stumbled on to the group that she credits with saving her sanity: Mothers of AIDS Patients, or MAP.

At her son’s encouragement, Atkinson attended her first MAP meeting in 1990. A group of about 25 women welcomed Atkinson, comforted her and shared her pain--they were going through it too.

“I realized from my first meeting that he was going to die,” Atkinson said. “MAP helped me prepare myself.

As it turned out, Hardy never made it to his parents’ home. The former nursing home assistant was being treated for a skin cancer, hepatitis and a brain tumor that left him paralyzed and speechless, and he remained in Sacramento. So, for the final two months of his life, his mother flew north every weekend to care for her son.

Every Monday night, on her flight back to Torrance, Atkinson said, she “would cry on the plane because I wanted to get it out before I got home to my husband and kids.”

Hardy was the third of seven children and Atkinson’s oldest son. Although Hardy’s siblings were supportive, Atkinson said her husband had the most difficult time with Hardy’s illness because he did not want to confront his stepson’s impending death.

Hardy had joked with his mother that he would wait until Friday the 13th to die because she had such a hard time remembering dates.

At 12:10 a.m. on Friday, July 13, 1990, Atkinson cradled her 70-pound son as he died.

“I told him he could go,” Atkinson said, “that he didn’t have to wait around any longer.”

Atkinson, a preschool teacher at a Methodist church in Rolling Hills, has been attending MAP meetings ever since.

The MAP support group in Torrance was formed in 1986 by two mothers of children with AIDS--Barbara Cleaver of Torrance and Mary Jane Edwards of Rancho Palos Verdes, who patterned the group after a MAP group in San Diego.

“After my son died, I felt a burning need to talk about it and educate people about AIDS, but . . . all I really wanted was another mother to talk to,” said Cleaver, 54. “I kept feeling, ‘Where are they?’ ”

Today, what began as a handful of South Bay parents sharing concerns, advice and simply unloading their grief and frustrations in Cleaver’s living room has blossomed into an organization that has networked across the country. Nine MAP meeting groups have been formed in Southern California alone, from North Hollywood to Garden Grove.

Janet McMahon, a Torrance retiree who volunteers as the group’s financial officer, gets three to five calls daily and mails about 30 envelopes of AIDS information a week to HIV-positive and AIDS patients and parents from California to New York. Most of the time, patients and parents feel isolated, McMahon said. When they feel they can’t talk to anyone else about what they are going through, McMahon puts them in touch with others in their area.

“People need to know they’re not alone,” she said.

Sometimes, AIDS patients call McMahon for advice about how to tell their parents that they have tested HIV-positive or have received a diagnosis that they have AIDS. Their biggest fear is rejection, she said.

“If someone should call who has been rejected by their parents, we’d try to find someone who can offer them emotional support. I’d find a mother who can talk to him or her,” McMahon said.

In June, McMahon, 75, received a national award in Washington for her work with MAP.

She became involved with MAP in 1986 at the request of her son, Bruce. Four months before he died at the age of 35 from his fourth attack of AIDS-related pneumonia, Bruce asked his mother to attend MAP meetings to cope with her depression.

“I had always been the type to take care of myself, but this time I wasn’t doing too well,” she said.

At first, McMahon, an office manager at her husband’s optometry clinic, was afraid that the stigma of AIDS would hurt her husband’s business.

“I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. If I told the patients that my son was dying, I was afraid they would be afraid of me,” she said.

Bruce, the second of the McMahons’ three children and their only son, had worked as a United Airlines flight attendant based in San Francisco.

Almost six years after Bruce’s death in October, 1986, McMahon remains dedicated to the organization. She and local MAP President Nancy Bryson are co-chairwomen of the meetings once a month at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance. The meetings are restricted to individuals with a family member or a friend with AIDS. Eunice Gardner of Los Angeles has been attending MAP meetings every month for three years because they help her keep together despite the illness of her son, James Powers.

“At MAP, at least I know I’m not the only mother going through this,” she said.

Gardner, 53, was with her 37-year-old son in June, 1989, when he was told that he is HIV-positive. Immediately after his diagnosis, a hospital counselor gave her Janet McMahon’s phone number for MAP.

“I was sad, I was hurt and I was crying,” Gardner said, “and Janet let me cry. She was concerned and soothing.”

Before getting sick, Powers was a Jack-of-all-trades, his mother said, dabbling in everything from nursing to working as a security guard at Los Angeles International Airport. He now lives in a Lawndale hospice for AIDS patients.

He is gradually getting worse, and has been in and out of the hospital for fluid in his lungs and low blood counts and to receive blood transfusions, she said.

Powers said MAP has made a difference in his relationship with his mother.

“MAP has been good for me too,” he said. “Before, she had never accepted me being gay. . . . By her talking and letting things out, she is more concerned about me now than she’s ever been.”

MAP also helped Mary Martinez of Hawthorne work through her rage during her son’s illness and after he died in 1989.

Martinez, 60, who is an electronics assembler for Hughes Aircraft Co. in El Segundo, said that although she did not take her anger out on her son, she took it out on other family members and at her job.

“My family went through hell because I treated them so badly,” she said. “I was angry at God because my son was dying and there was nothing I could do, and I was mad at myself because I couldn’t heal my boy.”

Martinez sought MAP at her son’s request, and she said her first meeting in April, 1988, was the toughest.

“I couldn’t speak because I was scared. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I didn’t know what to reveal,” she said. “They let me vent my anger and let me know I wasn’t alone. People who didn’t know me from Adam gave me a hug.”

Today, three years after John’s death at 33, Martinez said she is trying to help other parents of AIDS patients break out of isolation.

“I’m there to hold their hand, talk to them and listen to them--just like they did for me,” she said.

Although long-term MAP supporters agree that AIDS awareness has increased significantly since the group formed six years ago, they realize that the topic can still be taboo in some circles.

Atkinson was at an AIDS/HIV information meeting recently at Suncrest Hospital of the South Bay, where a mother of a man with AIDS expressed her terror of the disease.

“The mother said she could not even walk into her son’s hospital room because she was afraid of getting the disease even though her son was motioning to her from his bed,” Atkinson said.

She said she was horrified by the woman’s reaction and talked to her after the meeting.

“I begged her to go in and hug her son,” Atkinson said. “I told her she couldn’t get AIDS by touching or hugging him--I know because I cared for my son. I’ve been tested and I’m not HIV-positive. And I told her to do it now because she may never have another chance. . . . She needed to hear it from another mom.”