NEW YORK (Columbia News Service) - These were supposed to be Celia Benedith's golden years. But instead of relaxing and going out with her friends, the East Harlem woman spends her evenings helping her grandchildren do their homework, cooking them dinner and corralling them to bed. At 53, Benedith is doing motherhood all over again. But it's out of necessity, not choice.

It's not an easy life. Her daughter died of AIDS a year ago, leaving Benedith, who is diabetic, with three young children to raise on $800 a month in Social Security and disability checks. Sure, she has had to make sacrifices, she says, as she goes to help Yaumera, 9, and Jaime, 6, quiet down their 2-year-old sister, Barbara. "But I love my grandchildren. Of course I am going to take care of them."

Benedith is one of more than 12,000 grandparents, most of them women, in New York City who are raising their grandchildren because their own children died of AIDS. Not only are most of them past the age at which they can chase children around, but they are often on their own and poor, advocates say. New York has the highest number of so-called AIDS orphans in the country - about 35,000, or 50 percent of the national total. To compare, Washington, D.C., has 1,400, according to researchers at the Orphan Project, a research group that is part of the United Hospital Fund in New York.

It's nothing new for grandparents to raise children. But these women must deal with unique stresses - dealing with questions about death and AIDS and worrying if the kids have HIV themselves. That's on top of the usual difficulties that foster grandparents face, such as putting up three to four children in small apartments on a limited income, dealing with their own health concerns and facing the generation gap.

These grandparents "have taken on a heroic task," says Barbara Draimin, executive director of the Family Center, a nonprofit organization that helps women with terminal illnesses plan for their children's futures. "Often they put the welfare of the kids before their own. These women are juggling so many things in their lives and there aren't enough services to help them."

This AIDS grandparent phenomenon rides on an upswing the past few years in the numbers of women diagnosed as having HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Back in 1988, women constituted 16.6 percent of with HIV diagnoses in New York City. Over the next decade, that number almost doubled, to 30.6 percent, largely because of a resurgence of intravenous drug use, according to the city's Department of Health.

When it comes to choosing who will care for children after their mothers have died, grandparents are preferred over strangers. Aunts and other younger relatives often have their own children to handle. Fathers are often dead, in prison or only peripherally involved in their children's lives because of drug use, advocates say. Even though these men have legal rights to custody of their children, they are often not interested in taking care of siblings who have different fathers.

So the task falls into the laps of the grandmothers. It is not an easy one.

"It gets really rough" for the grandparents, says Mircia Sanchez, an AIDS counselor who worked with Benedith's daughter. "They're dealing with a lot of anger. A lot of these kids are all over the place. Their energy is different. There are cultural clashes and economic issues." The young ones don't understand why their mothers died and the older ones are aware of the stigma of AIDS and fear they'll get sick, too.

Julia Santana says her grandchildren were traumatized by the deaths of their mother and father from AIDS a decade ago. One granddaughter tried to slit her wrists to "join her mother" in death and later became pregnant. Another granddaughter became a drug addict and the grandson became so violent he was placed in foster care. "I'm exhausted," says Santana, 67, who attends one of 30 support groups in New York City that help grandparents who are raising their grandchildren. "At the beginning, when they were little, it was fine. Just when they became teen-agers it became difficult."

She got help from relatives, school counselors, and the support group in dealing with the children. She put the violent grandson in a foster home, and took him back after he straightened out. The drug-addicted granddaughter also cleaned up, with the help of counselors. The pregnant granddaughter has had a rougher time. She moved in with her boyfriend - but he sometimes abuses her, Santana says.

At one of their weekly meetings at an elementary school in upper Manhattan, a dozen Hispanic women debated such issues as how to get their Americanized grandchildren to respect their old-country values and whether absent fathers have legitimate custody rights. They talk about where to find benefits and how to maintain their own health while caring for their grandchildren's illnesses.

After Aida Marriott's daughter died of AIDS in 1993, she would often find herself staying up until 1 a.m. washing the two babies' dresses and preparing their food for the next day. "I had many problems," she says. "I was working full time at a nursing home and raising a 3- and a 4-year-old on my own," says Marriott, 70. She often passed up buying herself a new outfit or going out to dinner with a friend to be able to pay for her granddaughters' dance lessons or tutoring. "I wanted them to have everything," she says. "In life, there are always sacrifices. Because it was for them, I didn't feel it so much."

Most of these grandmothers are on the poverty line. What's more, their situation often puts them in a legal quandary. While the daughter is dying, the grandmother usually meets with a social service worker and a lawyer to go over her options. She can become a guardian, which means the mother maintains rights to the children while she's alive and the custody decision is ultimately in the hands of a judge. The grandmother can be named in the daughter's will as the caretaker of her children. She can also become a foster parent under the auspices of the Department of Social Services, which will provide her with financial assistance. Or she can adopt the children - the least popular option, because she loses financial aid.

After the daughter dies, the grandmother can no longer count on rent assistance and other benefits allotted to people with AIDS. If the grandmother's name isn't on her daughter's lease, she will have to accommodate the children in her own already-small apartment.

"There's nothing systematic about it," says Draimin. "There's no funding stream for them. Nitty gritty things do not occur without a lot of legal and social-work intervention."

As for Benedith, she says she's the right person to raise her grandchildren, whatever the cost. "When my daughter was alive, the children would visit on weekends and we'd bake cakes, fun things like that. They were more obedient to me than their own mother. I've always been like a parent to them."

Copyright 2000 Columbia News Service. All rights reserved.