Hand-in-Hand in the Shadow of AIDS : Mother’s Day: Woman and daughter are partners in fight against the disease.

Jeaneen Lund will celebrate Mother’s Day--and her 18th birthday--at a family barbecue today. They’ll talk about old times and joke around. Several times during the day, Jeaneen will take her mother’s hand as she always does, giving it a reassuring squeeze, an unspoken “I love you.”

For Sharon Lund, those little assurances remind her of how lucky she really is, despite a future that is so uncertain. Lund, 43, has been living with the virus that causes AIDS since 1984, when she was infected by her then-husband.

Jeaneen is her mother’s No. 1 fan--the mainstay of her support network, her best friend, a partner in the war against AIDS. For most healthy people, AIDS is the story of slow and painful death, of gnawing desperation and helplessness. But most people have never met Sharon and Jeaneen Lund.

“Jeaneen and I don’t dwell on death,” Lund says of her only child. “We really focus on life. . . . We live each moment to the fullest.”

Their work to teach people about AIDS has taken them from the classrooms of Los Angeles to the streets of Moscow, where they traveled last year as part of an international contingent of educators.

In 1992, Lund made more than 200 AIDS presentations at high schools, colleges, businesses, hospitals and conferences, nearly all of them without compensation. Jeaneen participated in about 75 of those, giving her AIDS awareness pitch in the teenspeak of you knows and likes that tell her adolescent audiences she’s one of them.

The mother-daughter team delivers a powerful message, putting a human face on what for many people is still someone else’s problem. But the bond between the Lunds transcends the glare of auditorium lights, business seminars and crowded conference rooms.

“The virus has really had nothing to do with our closeness. We’ve always been close,” Lund says.

“Always,” says Jeaneen, who has her mother’s green eyes.

Jeaneen has been both companion and care-giver to her mother, watching her suffer the effects of HIV--night sweats, dementia, weight loss, memory loss, severe diarrhea and chronic fatigue. “At first I didn’t really know what was happening or what she was going through,” says Jeaneen, who has held her mother through many a long night. “A couple of times I thought she was going to die.”

It has been difficult for Lund to see her daughter forced into taking on such responsibilities. “When I was (first) sick she became the mother and I became the child. She was only 12 years old,” Lund says. “I don’t think that was fair. In a way it has forced her to grow up sooner. She sees life differently than most teen-agers do.”

Jeaneen started seeing a therapist about three months ago, after six of her mother’s friends, some of whom were also her friends, died in a five-week period.

“It’s hard to deal with,” says Jeaneen. “But the counselor is really cool. I can talk about things. It helps.”

But those things are not something Jeaneen shares willingly. She doesn’t talk much about her mother dying. “Someday everyone’s going to die,” she says. “Whether my mom will die from this or not, who knows?”

It was in 1986 that Lund’s world was turned upside-down, when she discovered she had been exposed to the human immunodeficiency virus during a brief marriage to her second husband, who was not Jeaneen’s father. Lund discovered the news in a manner as cruel as it was incredible.

Her parents had given her a videotape of a CBS-TV special about AIDS because Lund had been working as a counselor to HIV-infected patients, teaching them relaxation techniques to combat the virus. They thought their daughter might find the segment interesting. But within minutes her interest turned to horror.

Lund recognized one of the people with AIDS as her ex-husband, whom she identifies only as Bill. Her parents had met Bill only once and did not recognize him.

Lund phoned him in a rage. Bill denied that he was on the tape and that he had AIDS. Lund got tested anyway; the results were followed by intense anger. She told only her sister, boyfriend and minister that she had HIV. “Back then I just didn’t know there were any other women,” she says. “I felt so alone.”

A week before he died in 1989, Bill finally admitted to her that he had AIDS. Lund says her ex-husband never considered himself bisexual or at risk for the disease, even though he had unprotected sex with other men. He also infected his first wife. She, too, has died.

Today, Lund’s anger has been replaced by a belief that the battle to live is best fought with a smile and the warmth of Jeaneen’s hand in hers. Too often, when mothers and teen-age daughters speak, it is a hit-or-miss war of words, ending in hurt feelings and misunderstandings. Not so with Jeaneen and her mom, who know each other so well that they frequently finish each other’s sentences.

When Lund leaves town to give a speech, they talk on the phone every day. And Jeaneen worries.

“I don’t want her to overdo it with speaking engagements and all her meetings,” Jeaneen says. “She tries to do a lot all at one time. Sometimes she just needs to rest.”

Remarkably, Jeaneen is in many ways a typical teen-ager--frequently dyeing her hair a multitude of colors, forever on the phone, putting homework off until the last minute, going to parties with her boyfriend. A B-student at Fairfax High School, she will graduate June 30 and plans to study photography and possibly graphic arts at Santa Monica City College. Her father, whom Lund divorced when Jeaneen was 3, lives in Seattle.

Jeaneen and her mom rent a modest two-bedroom house on Rosewood Avenue in Los Angeles, where on many mornings chaos reigns. On one typical day, Jeaneen was running late for school, Sharon had 12 phone calls to return before 10 a.m. and the dog had just dumped her food on the dining room carpet again.

In the kitchen, Jeaneen grabbed a doughnut from her mother’s hand. “Mommmm,” she chided.

“Oh, she tries to take care of me,” Lund said, giving it up. “When I’m bad, she gets mad.”

Lund, who describes herself as HIV-symptomatic, meaning she is not sick with full-blown AIDS, has followed a holistic health-care regimen, which includes regulating her diet. Shunning traditional medicine, she has used meditation, herbs, vitamins, minerals, visualization and other natural methods to reduce stress and stimulate her body’s immune system. Both she and Jeaneen are vegetarians.

Told three times since 1986 that she had six months to live, Lund says her weapons against AIDS have been her faith--she is an ordained minister of metaphysics--the refusal to give up and the support of her parents, younger sister and, of course, her daughter.

“If I had made my doctor god, I would have been dead three times,” she says. “A lot of people buy into that death sentence.”

Fatigue forced her to quit her job as a secretary in 1990, causing her to lose her health benefits. She now has Medicare, which will not cover many treatments, including massage and acupuncture.

She and Jeaneen live on about $1,000 a month in Social Security benefits, but more than $300 of that will be lost today when Jeaneen turns 18. Lund says that she and Jeaneen could never make ends meet without her parents’ help and AIDS Project Los Angeles’ Necessity of Life Program, which provides them with food.

Jeaneen works part time for the AIDS and Cancer Research Foundation, answering a hot line and providing information about HIV. Most of what she knows about AIDS she learned from her mom and the Peer Education Program of L.A., an AIDS-education group for teen-agers.

The presentations she and her mother make at schools are frank, geared to youths whose sense of invincibility is nearly unshakable.

During a presentation to a group of 16- to 18-year-olds at the Odman Center, a special education school for youths with emotional problems, Jeaneen does not mince words. “The reality is it can happen to you,” she says, her retro-’70s flower-print dress and long purple hair indicating she’s one of them. “You can get AIDS and you can die. Protect yourself.”

Use condoms, she says, looking to her mother for reassurance. Lund smiles. Don’t shoot drugs, Jeaneen continues. If you shoot drugs, bleach your needles.

“Everybody here know what I mean by bleach your needles?” she asks. The students nod yes.

Lund, wearing a black blazer with a red AIDS ribbon, takes over, talking quietly about how she got the virus and how it is transmitted. Suddenly, she pounds her fist on the table, her voice quivering with anger. “When are you people going to wake up?” she shouts. “What is it going to take for you to realize that you have to take responsibility? This is not a pretty disease!”

The students sit silently, their eyes darting to one another in search of comfort. She has frightened them all, including Jeaneen, who knew the dramatic delivery was coming eventually, as it does in all her mother’s presentations.

Lund, tears in her eyes, sits down next to Jeaneen and puts her head on her daughter’s shoulder. If she can save just one kid’s life, just one, the long hours will be worth it.

As of March 31, 20,121 people in Los Angeles County had been diagnosed with AIDS and 13,231 of them have died, according to the county Department of Health Services. Of those who have been infected, 835 are women.

For Lund, the way she contracted HIV is important only because it illustrates to other heterosexual women that everyone is at risk. She resents being labeled “an innocent victim.”

“I’m no better or no different than anybody else, whether they got it through IV drugs, whether they’re a prostitute or they are gay, we are all human beings,” she said.

“And it is time we all be treated equally.”

She wants to finish writing four books that deal with alternative therapies and other health-related topics that she started writing years ago, and is hoping to find the money to fix her computer. But her primary focus will be enjoying quality time--by herself and with her daughter.

“I need to do things that I like doing,” Lund says. “I want to spend less time in meetings and more time with Sharon and with Jeaneen and (in) nature. I’m getting real picky now.”

Her daughter nods. “She was giving to everybody else,” Jeaneen says, “but not herself.”

Lund says her deepest fear is not that she will die, but that her family will see her suffer.

“I think the sad thing is that when somebody dies of AIDS there are different stages that they go through and their family and loved ones have to see it--that is really, really hard. I think that is what I would fear about Jeaneen and my family having to go through, if I ever died of this.”

The Lunds both have AIDS bracelets, steel bands that bear the names of people who have died from the disease. Lund says hers is the first to commemorate a woman; it reads “Clair S. Cowles, 30, 10-01-87.” Lund has worn it for two years, and has never taken it off.

Each bracelet comes with a biography about the person it honors. But Lund, glancing at the bracelet on her left wrist, says she has been unable to get information about the woman whose name she will never forget.

“It’s just real sad to think this was the first woman recognized,” Lund says. “But I wear it in memory of all people, not just one person who has died. I have to wear it.”

She is weeping now, her mind searching for a face she has never seen, maybe a mother who also knew a child’s love.

“She was a special lady, whoever she is,” Lund says as she wipes a tear from her cheek. Jeaneen reaches for her mother’s hand.