A Lesson From Love and AIDS : Couples: She was shy, he was outgoing. She was a doctor, and he was her patient struggling against a fatal illness. They got married, and the end of his life was the beginning of a new one for her.

Sonny Bartz first visited Dr. Susan Lawrence in November, 1988, just after learning he had full-blown AIDS. Lawrence’s primary specialty was cancer, but she was also one of the few physicians in the Antelope Valley who would treat AIDS patients.

For him, it was the beginning of the end. For both, it was the beginning of an unexpected love story.

“I’m a different person because of Sonny,” said the soft-spoken Lawrence, 38, who has two photographs of Bartz on her desk in her Lancaster office. One shows him standing in front of a jet at the Lockheed plant where he worked as a flight mechanic. The other is their wedding picture.

“I love talking about him,” she said, looking at the picture that shows them in Las Vegas, standing next to a limousine that took them from their hotel to a local wedding chapel. “But it’s a little difficult this time of year.”

Bartz died in July, a year and a half after they became the unlikeliest of couples.

Bartz, who had tattoos on his arms--and apparently got the AIDS virus using drugs--has been described even by his friends as being boisterous and a womanizer. Lawrence, on the other hand, was intensely private.

*

“I could never sit in a restaurant at a counter next to someone I didn’t know,” she said. “I thought they wanted to delve in here and get my deepest, darkest secrets.”

The relationship changed them both.

For Bartz, it provided, at the end of his life, a quality of love and care he had never experienced. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said in a videotape he and Lawrence made a few weeks before his death.

For Lawrence, it provided a view of AIDS she could have never had in her regular medical practice.

In the months since Bartz died, she has become the Antelope Valley’s most prominent AIDS activist.

She gives public lectures on AIDS prevention to school and community groups. She has almost entirely given up her cancer practice to concentrate on acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

And she founded the Catalyst Foundation for AIDS Awareness and Care, the first AIDS organization in the politically conservative area. The foundation’s first public action was a news conference last month in which Lawrence accused several local businesses of discriminating against people with AIDS.

Her message reached federal officials, who informed one target of her complaints--the owner of a prominent funeral home--that he could not refuse to handle bodies of people who died of AIDS-related diseases.

It was a major victory for a doctor who was once so shy that she could not make small talk.

“One of the lessons you can learn from AIDS is you have to take responsibility for your life,” she said. “You can stand up for what is right.

“You don’t have to sit back and be a victim.”

Lawrence came to Lancaster in 1985 after finishing her oncology fellowship at the University of Texas. She established a practice specializing in cancer and blood diseases.

She also had, in her first year, about five AIDS patients. They came to her by default, she said, because few other doctors in the area had AIDS expertise.

Ironically, her budding subspecialty kept some people with AIDS from coming to her.

“It was a matter of privacy,” Lawrence said. “This is a small town. There were people who felt if they were seen out in my waiting room, everyone would soon know.”

Still, local doctors and hospitals increasingly referred AIDS cases to her. “People would get handed a slip of paper when they were discharged from the hospital,” she said, “telling them to go see Dr. Lawrence.”

Bartz got one of those slips.

“I went and saw Susan because she was supposed to be the best expert in town,” he says on the videotape.

Bartz had begun using heroin and other intravenous drugs as a teen-ager. It was not until 1985 that he got clean and sober at a Palmdale clinic. He also had an HIV test at the time, which came out negative.

“I thought I had gotten away with it,” he says on the tape.

But in 1988 he came down with what he thought was a bad case of the flu. It was Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a lung condition contracted by people with AIDS.

“The (HIV) test was relatively new when he had it in the clinic,” Lawrence said, “and not as reliable as it is now.”

On the videotape, Bartz looks much older than his 47 years. His speech is halting and he loses the thread of his thoughts easily.

When he first saw Lawrence, the disease had not taken nearly as much of a toll. Bartz was able to return to work and few people knew he had AIDS. For a year and a half, they had a normal doctor-patient relationship.

But Lawrence saw behind his gruff exterior a great capacity for tenderness and compassion. She was also attracted by the ease with which he got along with people.

She invited Bartz to see a movie, “Fantasia,” and the romance began. “Finally, we realized we loved each other,” she said.

With their personal relationship evolving, they had to make hard choices about their professional relationship. Medical ethics frowns upon doctors caring for their own families. “It brings up questions about power and judgment,” Lawrence said.

They decided that she would continue as his AIDS doctor.

“We were very, very clear about this,” Lawrence said. “He had a regular family doctor he would see on a regular basis. We had the support of consultants we could see. We went into therapy, as a couple and individually.”

Another choice was not to have sex, even with protection of a condom. “That was our decision; we were not willing to tolerate any risk,” she said. “I’m not saying it’s the right decision for everyone in that situation.”

In March, 1992, they were married.

Knowing time was short, they took trips and tried to spend as many moments together as possible. And Lawrence started coming out of her shell.

*

“I remember once we were on a train, near Seattle, and we went to the dining car,” she said. “We sat with some people and Sonny could just talk to them so easily, make everyone feel comfortable.

“I started to learn by example. He would see me talk to people and say, ‘Good going!’ ”

But a few months after they were married, Bartz began exhibiting signs of AIDS dementia. “It was getting to the point where he was doing things dangerous to himself and others,” Lawrence said.

She had him hospitalized him in Los Angeles, against his will, and it was a disaster. At one point Bartz simply walked out and took a taxi back to Lancaster.

Lawrence eventually found a specialist who was familiar with AIDS dementia who put Bartz on medications that curbed the erratic behavior. He came home and found a live-in helper, Brian Maxey.

The match up of patient Bartz and care giver Maxey--who is gay and HIV-positive--did not seem ideal at first. “Sonny represented everything in a heterosexual male that I didn’t like,” Maxey, 24, said. “I think if we would have just met somewhere, we would have hated each other.”

But Maxey, like Lawrence, began to see behind the macho front.

“He knew he was going to die and he wanted to rid himself of everything that didn’t really matter,” Maxey said. “All the petty, small things.

“I think the biggest thing Sonny gave me was the ability to know that no matter whatever happens in the future, I don’t need to worry about it right now. I don’t need the strength today to deal with whatever I think might happen. That will come later.

“In the meantime, you’ve got to just go on living.”

As Bartz’s condition improved, Lawrence began to learn about AIDS discrimination. She tried to enroll him at a private physical therapy center, but was told the staff feared they might get AIDS.

A gym, which advertised that it specialized in workouts for the disabled, told her that having Bartz there would be bad for business.

“It’s very painful when someone you love is dying and they are told they are not wanted,” Lawrence recently told a health class at Palmdale High School. “All people are really asking for is compassion and respect.

“Maybe that is one of the lessons we can learn from AIDS.”

It was one of a series of talks she makes as the head of the Catalyst Foundation, which just received its nonprofit tax status. The foundation also sponsors a volunteer buddy program, discussion groups for people with AIDS and their care givers, and housecleaning and pet care services. Maxey is the only paid employee.

The foundation’s first training session for volunteers drew 46 people, mostly heterosexual women. “You would expect that more gay men would have volunteered, but up here so many of them are in the closet,” Maxey said.

Bartz died July 25, at home. Lawrence, Maxey and Lawrence’s medical assistant were at his side.

“We did it exactly the way he wanted,” Lawrence said. “He didn’t want an IV, he didn’t want us to keep him going when he reached that point.”

Her voice sometimes quivers when she talks about him. By the time they got married, both her parents had died. She has no siblings.

“He was my only family,” Lawrence said, gazing at the picture of the two them in Las Vegas.

In her public talks, Lawrence points out lessons she believes can be learned from AIDS concerning mortality, tolerance and compassion.

But for her, the most important lessons were deeply personal.

“It was Sonny who taught me how to live in the world.”