AIDS Inflicts a Private Holocaust on Family : Epidemic: Kevin Pillow died on Thanksgiving Day, four months after his wife, and three years after his baby. His parents give thanks that they could care for the dying family--and could say goodby.

Kevin Pillow died on Thanksgiving Day amid a makeshift infirmary in his parents’ suburban living room--following his wife and son as the final victim of a family’s private holocaust.

Five years ago, Pillow told his family he and his wife had tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS. Two years later, his only child, Cloud William, fought the disease for his four short months of life.

His wife, Cheryl, died last summer. Kevin lingered four months longer.

“A whole family wiped out, just like that. Young, healthy kids--gone,” said Kevin Pillow’s mother, Barbara.

To some, this would be an unimaginable and oppressive horror--standing by as an eldest son and his family slip away. But Barbara and Richard Pillow say they are glad they had the opportunity to care for Kevin and Cheryl.

“That’s one thing about this disease, it moves slowly,” Barbara Pillow said. “We had a lot of time to mend fences, to say the things we wanted to say before they left. I really feel for people who lose a child to something like a car accident, because they don’t get that chance.”

The Pillows are a middle-class family who had never met anyone with AIDS when their son called from Arizona with the news that both he and his wife had tested positive. Kevin was 27 at the time, his wife 29.

Like many Americans, the Pillows had thought little about AIDS. None of their four children was a homosexual or intravenous drug user, the two groups most at risk from the disease.

“And then, suddenly, there it was. We asked how this could happen to them, of all people,” said Kevin’s younger brother, Tom.

A decade into the AIDS epidemic in the United States, the disease is spreading among people once considered far removed from harm. As AIDS appears increasingly in offices, neighborhoods and schools, more Americans are confronting its consequences.

“It’s still unimaginable to many people, but maybe it’s a little less unimaginable than it used to be,” said Scott Sanders, spokesman for the Whitman Walker Clinic, a Washington, D.C., AIDS testing and counseling center.

Although there are no statistics to measure the disease’s spread among middle-class heterosexuals like the Pillows, the National Center for Health Statistics says that within a few years heterosexuals will make up half or more of all American AIDS patients.

An estimated 1 million Americans carry the HIV virus that causes AIDS and about 30,000 Americans died of AIDS last year.

Many of those victims died alienated from their families--ostracized by fears and prejudices the Pillows admit they once might have shared.

“It’s starting to change a little bit, I think,” Tom Pillow said. “People are taking the first baby steps toward understanding this disease, but it’s still a long way from walking.”

The Pillows will never know for sure how the couple contracted AIDS, although they suspect that it was from a dirty needle used for one of Kevin’s tattoos.

The infection was discovered when Cheryl Pillow went for a routine physical as part of her job with the Air Force. Kevin, a jet mechanic, was tested next.

The Air Force required both to leave the service immediately, but the couple were allowed to receive free care at military hospitals.

Kevin and Cheryl returned to the northern Virginia suburb where Kevin grew up. Kevin got a job alongside his father and brother at a large regional mail-sorting center and the couple bought a house an hour away.

“They were living a normal life, at least on the outside, and they were very happy,” Tom Pillow said.

Neighbors were told nothing, and no one at Kevin’s new job knew that he was ill. Much of Cheryl’s family was not informed that the Pillows were sick until she was near death. Kevin’s closest friend was told that Cloud William was a victim of crib death.

“That was a decision he made with my dad and me in mind,” Tom Pillow said. “He didn’t want to put us in a position where we would be criticized or ostracized.”

The couple moved in with Kevin’s parents last spring, when it was apparent that they couldn’t look after themselves.

A portrait of Kevin and his siblings, taken last summer even though Kevin was sick and gaunt, hangs in the living room. Below it sits the pull-out couch where Richard and Barbara Pillow slept in the final months before their son and daughter-in-law died.

For months, medicines lined the Pillows’ dining room table and hospital cots crowded the living room. Several times a day, Richard or Barbara Pillow donned rubber gloves to administer shots or, when the time came, to help the dying with basic functions they could no longer manage.

Cheryl died in August, her athletic frame shrunk to 70 pounds and ravaged by painful sores. But two days before she died, she was cracking jokes across the darkened living room, and Richard and Barbara laughed.

“I would not trade that for anything,” Barbara Pillow said.

And then Kevin died, and it was over.

“People have such fear of this disease,” Tom Pillow said. “I want people to know I held my brother’s hand a few minutes before he died. I was never afraid of my brother.”