A Mother’s Saddest Goodby : Support: A dying mother’s dream is becoming a reality. Thanks to Tanya’s Children, a handful of women are finding homes for their kids.

In a brown and yellow room tucked beneath the staircase, Maria Arguello is losing her sight. She’s lost 33 pounds and the outlines of her bones are visible under the soft leggings she wears for warmth.

But she has found her voice, after years spent living with the secret of AIDS.

Leaning forward, eyes feverish and bright like bits of dark coal, she speaks while her 13-year-old daughter looks on shyly from another twin bed.

“I know we have to find a family for Lucy,” Arguello says as the girl ducks her head, staring into her lap, “but I don’t want to just give her up.”

It is a terrible thing to consider--giving away a child. Arguello, 32, talks about it now only because she knows there are other women like her: watching in silence as AIDS steals away their strength, their wills.

On good days, Arguello can’t imagine watching Maritza--whom she calls by the nickname, Lucy--go to another family. Other days, when she can’t get out of bed and worries for Maritza’s future, Arguello receives help from a woman who, like her, lived in a room of Rue’s House, a shelter for women and children with AIDS.

Arguello never met Tanya Shaw. But when Shaw lived at Rue’s House near USC two years ago, she looked around and knew there would be others like herself: single mothers with AIDS, dying and unwilling or unable to leave their children with family or the county system.

Before Shaw died last February, at age 26, she dedicated her strength to starting a new kind of AIDS care agency for single mothers and their children. Shaw told her story on national television and to local groups, including high school students. A small group of women rallied around her call and helped find an adoptive family for her two daughters--Destini, 8, and Chassidy, 3. Upon Shaw’s death, they created a fledgling nonprofit agency, Tanya’s Children, in her name.

From a small office on the second floor of the Carl Bean AIDS Care Center in South-Central, Tanya’s Children screens prospective families for Arguello and others. Volunteers arrange child care, and guide mothers through the maze of government and private foundations that offer money, meals and support. And Tanya’s Children provides legal aid and counseling through volunteer lawyers and therapists, even if the mother has already arranged for her children to be taken by family.

Volunteers say they’ve never had more than $400 in the agency bank account. Two fund-raising efforts brought in little and the group operates with small, individual donations. But two key organizers are also employed by the Carl Bean center, and they provide the consistency that AIDS-stricken families so desperately need.

“The first thing we offer women is a reprieve from their children,” says Sandy Scott, executive director of Tanya’s Children and chaplain at Carl Bean. “That’s what they need most, for the days when child care is just too exhausting.”

For women such as Arguello who seek adoptive families, the agency works as a referral service and keeps about 300 willing parents on file. From the moment a single mother asks for help finding an adoptive family, the delicate dance of providing for the future begins.

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Even in the best situations, transferring children from a dying mother to a new family is emotionally taxing.

Shaw found at least three “perfect” families before her girls were adopted by a family living near Apple Valley. One Los Angeles couple kept the girls for months and were planning to adopt when they abruptly returned Destini and Chassidy. Destini had tested positive for HIV, considered the precursor to AIDS. The test was incorrect and Destini has since tested negative, but the damage was done.

Jennifer Spindola and her 2-year-old son, James, were more fortunate. Spindola checked into Rue’s House and became a client of Tanya’s Children one year ago. She was introduced to LeViera Lee within weeks.

A nurse’s assistant at the Carl Bean AIDS Care Facility, Lee was well-versed in Spindola’s condition, and she bonded immediately with James and his mother, Scott says. As the young mother weakened, and the debilitating effects of AIDS dementia made it impossible for her to care for a toddler, Lee was there.

When Spindola died in September, James was living with Lee and visiting his mother on Sundays. This is exactly how Shaw envisioned the adoption process, with the new family acting as a bridge between the dying mother and a child’s new life. But it wasn’t easy for Spindola. She missed her son terribly. When Lee brought James to visit, the child was reluctant to hug his mother, Scott recalls.

And Scott, whose work is watching over these transitions, still cries--brief, painful tears--when she recalls Spindola’s death.

Since the inception of Tanya’s Children, there have been others: a mother of three boys whose income was tripled by agency volunteers who knew where to apply for aid. She is still seeking adoptive parents.

Another mother of two needed help desperately but abruptly dropped out of sight. And there’s Arguello, who knows that Maritza needs stability and plans to begin meeting new families in the coming weeks.

“All you can do is introduce the woman to families, step back and let them make a decision,” says Tamara Lunt, the volunteer coordinator for both Tanya’s Children and Carl Bean hospice.

Besides the three children already adopted, whom volunteers have vowed to watch over, the organization has just seven active clients with children. But county health officials estimate that more than 1,000 women in Los Angeles County have AIDS. It is unknown how many are single and have children.

The World Health Organization estimates that by the end of the 1990s, 10 million to 15 million children worldwide will be affected by the death of at least one parent from AIDS. As of Sept. 31, AIDS moved up the list of deadly diseases and now ranks fourth among leading causes of death for women ages 25 to 44, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scott and Lunt know that there will be a lot more mothers in need of Tanya’s Children. And Scott is haunted by the idea of women now scattered all over the city, dying in silence, and who, in confusion and fear, keep their HIV status a secret.

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Until last December, Arguello worked as a live-in cook, housekeeper and nanny for an Orange County couple. When she tested positive in 1988, she confronted her boyfriend, who crumpled up her test results and called it a lie, she says. She went to five clinics, trying to convince him, and each result said the same thing. He disappeared.

But he was the only one Arguello told. Her employers said AIDS was a disease that only gay men and lesbians got. When Arguello’s condition worsened, she told the family she had lived with for eight years that she had colon cancer.

Finally, too ill to work, she quit and moved to Rue’s House, taking her secret along. Arguello says she is now willing to talk publicly because she knows there are other women like her--especially women of color--who are struggling without help.

“I’m tired a lot, but I can do this,” she says, smiling. “I don’t like to give up on anything easily anymore.”

Thanks to Tanya’s Children, she won’t have to.