The Associated Press - 1 December 1995

"We love to eat out, go to Broadway shows, and shock people by revealing our liberal outlooks that hide under our conservative exteriors," Mrs. Burns wrote in 1987, when she was a 24-year-old university researcher married to a rising star in the financial community.

Then comes the kicker: "We spend $1,200 each month on prescription drugs, and we will never have children. ... We are HIV-positive."

Thus begins "Sarah's Song," Mrs. Burns' journal covering the years from 1987, when she and her husband were diagnosed with HIV, to 1994, when her husband died of AIDS at age 29.

The Warner Books publication -- named for the daughter Mrs. Burns desperately wanted -- is a painfully poignant rendering of death foretold, of a woman whose world turned into a numbers game: How many pills, how many T cells, how many hospitalizations, years, months, days, hours until the counting stops?

"There are still a lot of people who stereotype people with AIDS," said Mrs. Burns, now 32 with full-blown AIDS. She is partially deaf and blind in one eye, takes 40 pills a day and has been hospitalized four times since June.

"There are those who don't want someone like me to have AIDS because it means they or someone they love can be at risk," she said in an interview Wednesday, two days before today's commemoration of World AIDS Day.

More than 501,000 U.S. AIDS cases were diagnosed from 1981 through October 1995, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 311,000 of those people, or 62 percent, have died.

Most interesting to Mrs. Burns is that the number of cases attributed to heterosexual transmission increased from 3 percent during 1981-87 to 10 percent from 1993 to October 1995. Female cases increased from 4,035, or 8 percent of the total between 1981-87, to almost 18 percent -- 43,383 -- from 1993-October 1995.

"I see more and more women who look like myself in support groups," said Mrs. Burns, a middle-class Catholic from the New York City borough of the Bronx.

Her neat Yonkers apartment is filled with books, including a huge Bible on a stand in the living room, and is dominated by a nearly finished wooden Victorian dollhouse.

She started the dollhouse in 1992, before her husband died, and still plans to complete it. "I'll get to it one day," she said, the only time she speaks of the future during a 90-minute interview.

Mrs. Burns believes her husband was infected with the virus that causes AIDS during a brief homosexual affair when he was 18. She married him a few years later and they were diagnosed as HIV-positive shortly after their first wedding anniversary, in February 1987.

The couple became activists, founding advocacy groups and speaking on television shows and before high school groups, trying to tell the world that AIDS can strike anyone.

Mrs. Burns maintains that even if she had known William Burns was HIV-positive, she still would have married him.

"I had a love, despite AIDS," she wrote at the end of her book. "I could live off this love for the rest of my life. I think I will."

Copyright 1995/The Associated Press. Reproduced with permission. Reproduction of this article (other than one copy for personal reference) must be cleared through the Permissions Desk, The Associated Press, 50 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020.

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Copyright © 1995 - Associated Press. Reproduction of this article (other than one copy for personal reference) must be cleared through the AP Permissions Desk.

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