A Devoted Son Upholds a Family Tradition of Care

Charlie Clifford pulls into the parking lot every morning in the orange 1972 AMC Hornet that his mother fell in love with on the showroom floor a quarter-century ago.

Then, for the next two hours or so, this pencil-thin man with the pencil-thin mustache does something most of us wouldn’t think of doing.

Oh, we might think of doing it. It’s just that Charlie does it.

It’s one thing to visit one’s own mother in a nursing home. It’s quite another to do what Charlie does after he gets there.

Now 74, Charlie comes to the Beverly Manor nursing home in Costa Mesa each morning, just as he has done virtually every day since Lucile Clifford, now 102, broke her hip and entered the nursing home in 1990.

Visiting his mother, though, is but a fraction of Charlie’s two-hour routine. There’s the crossword puzzle he cuts out of the newspaper for the lady in her 80s. “She’s a crossword addict,” Charlie confides. There’s the medical news he cuts out for one of the nursing home officials. There’s the Lawrence Welk program he tapes for his mother and the blind woman down the hall.

Most important, though, is the stream of people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond who Charlie pushes up and down the hall in their wheelchairs, day after day, first into the TV room and then the adjacent dining room. He figures he moves 20 to 25 people a day.

As one of the officials says of Charlie, “He’s a life-saver.”

That Charlie volunteers his time doesn’t seem to faze him. “I first came to visit Mother in May of 1990, and [the staff] saw me as a volunteer and they grabbed me,” he says with a wry grin. “I’ve been here every day since, except for when I’m sick. You feel like you ought to come see your mother. My sister lives 400 miles away in the East Bay and she can’t help, so I’m elected.”

Charlie says he misses a handful of days a year. Not surprisingly, Charlie more or less has the run of the place.

“He’s really quite unique,” says Beverly Manor nursing supervisor Karen Diaz. “We have one woman in her 80s who comes once a week, but no one comes as often as he has. What began as him taking care of his mother evolved into him taking care of other residents. This is his job, like you and I might go to five days a week. It’s just that he goes seven days a week.”

Nursing home volunteerism is the kind of work even the best of people do sporadically. The 79-bed home is a long-term facility, and many residents are dependent on wheelchairs for mobility and on the kindness and expertise of the staff for their personal care.

I ask Charlie if he gets depressed, seeing so much infirmity. “I guess I sort of let it go by me,” he says. “Several of the patients are very depressed. They keep saying, ‘I want to go home, I want to go home,’ but you sort of let it go by. There’s too much work to do to worry about it.”

He realizes most people aren’t as attentive to their parents as he, but it doesn’t strike him as unpleasant duty. Why do this much, I ask, when no one would fault you for doing half as much?

“It’s just sort of tradition in the family,” he says. “When my father was ill, Mother and I would be over there [at the hospital] every day. Even when he was in bad shape, we stayed afterward until they kicked us out. It’s just a tradition that family keeps together.”

Born in Akron, Ohio, Charlie and family moved to Southern California to better handle respiratory problems he had as an infant. “This is just normal course of events,” Charlie says of visiting for his mother. “My parents were good to me, so I’ll be good to them.”

Diaz thinks otherwise, but Charlie doubts he’ll keep coming to the nursing home after his mother dies. But one thing a son can do, like no staffer would have the time to do, is soothe his mother in her final days, months or years.

“When Mother was living at home,” he says, “she used to listen to Lawrence Welk on TV and ‘Washington Week in Review.’ When she came over here, I continued to record the audio for her, but a year or two ago ‘Washington Week’ faded in her mind, so we stopped that, but I still do the audio for Lawrence Welk. You don’t need to concentrate too much for that, you just hear the music.”

He also reads to her and is now well into “The Circus Kings,” a book about the Ringling circus family that once wintered in the same small Wisconsin town where his mother was born. It’s the kind of book at Christmas that, if she understands what he’s reading, will comfort her and perhaps take her back to a happier time.

It’s all a son can do. Knowing the answer, I ask Charlie about his Christmas plans.

“Oh,” he says, “I’ll just be over here with her.”

Merry Christmas, Charlie.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com