Parents Turn Pain of Loss Into Living Legacies : Charity: The death of a child has prompted some mothers and fathers to establish fund-raisers and foundations in memory of youngsters.

Alisa Ann Ruch never got a chance to make a difference in this world. The 8-year-old Van Nuys girl died June 28, 1970, from burns she received in a back-yard barbecue accident.

But thanks to her mother, Diane Host, Alisa Ann’s memory has made a difference to children throughout the state. A year after the child’s death, Host started the Alisa Ann Ruch Burn Foundation to educate children about fire safety and first-aid procedures and to provide financial assistance to families of burn victims. Today, the foundation is the largest of its kind and is credited with teaching children to stop, drop and roll if their clothing catches fire.

“It was devastating losing Alisa Ann,” Host said recently. “After she was gone, something pushed me to do this, to make this foundation a reality. It was like somewhere, somehow Alisa Ann was pushing me on.”

Host is one of a few San Fernando Valley parents who have experienced a child’s death and gone on to help others in their child’s memory.

“Because of the paralyzing effects of grief, it is not common for grieving parents to create a living memorial for children who have died,” said Maria Iacobo, a public information officer for Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles. “Those who do have managed to use the child’s memory as a driving force.”

Michael Carrier of Sun Valley and Warren and Mary Campbell of Northridge say they, too, were spurred on to create memorials in memory of children they loved and watched die. Carrier is the driving force behind the Alexis Macfarlane Memorial Tennis Tournament, which raises money to find a cure for leukemia, and the Campbells hold annual fund-raisers that benefit various charities.

Host never thought about burn treatment or education before Alisa Ann’s accident.

“Now, I don’t want her to have died for nothing,” said Host, who is no longer married to Alisa Ann’s father. “I want every child and adult to know what to do if they are involved in a burn accident.”

In late May, 1970, the Ruch family got together for a barbecue at their Van Nuys home to welcome the summer. Sometime after noon, Alisa Ann’s father doused the charcoal with lighter fluid and put the can several feet away on the family’s picnic table.

The children--Ethan, 10; Alisa Ann, 8, and David, 5--gathered near the table, eager for the barbecuing to begin. Their father lit the coals--and in an instant, the flame puffed out toward the lighter fluid can, causing it to explode and spew flaming liquid at the children and their father.

David’s clothes caught fire and Ethan, who had miraculously been untouched by the explosion, immediately turned to his brother and put out the flames--probably saving his life, doctors said.

But Alisa Ann, who had been closest to the can before it exploded, was covered in flames. In that moment of panic, rather than run to her father--whose hands and arms had been burned but who was only a few feet away--Alisa Ann turned and ran 20 yards toward the house where her mother had been preparing the food.

“I looked out and saw her running toward me all aflame,” said Host, who was four months pregnant. “I grabbed a tablecloth and rolled her in it.”

Host immediately drove her family to a hospital and from there David and Alisa Ann were transferred to the Sherman Oaks Burn Center. Despite David’s severe burns, which covered 23% of his body, he was judged to have a good chance of recovering.

But Alisa Ann, the blond girl with big blue eyes and rosy cheeks, was seriously burned over her entire body and doctors said she had only a 1% chance of survival.

For the next four weeks, Alisa Ann was conscious and alert as a team of specialists led by Dr. A. Richard Grossman worked to save her life.

“We had parties and lesson time and lots of socializing in Alisa Ann’s room during that time,” Host said. “Through it all, she had such an incredible spirit, such a positive outlook about the whole thing.”

But in the end there was nothing anyone could do. Alisa Ann died at the Sherman Oaks Burn Center. Four months later, on Nov. 28, 1970, Host gave birth to a girl and named her Frani Alisa Ruch.

“I was determined, despite her name, that I wouldn’t force this little girl to take Alisa Ann’s place,” Host said. “And so I began dreaming about creating a foundation to keep her memory alive.”

Host’s dream became a reality in 1971 when her uncle, attorney Zola Siegal, and his wife, Muriel, offered to take care of the paperwork that would get the foundation started. Money to begin the foundation arrived in letters and cards sent to the family, and annual fund raising keeps it going.

Today, the foundation raises several hundred thousand dollars and gives financial assistance each year to more than 300 families of burn victims. It has also provided classroom curricula regarding burn prevention and treatment to schools throughout the state. The foundation offers a free summer camp for young burn victims, support groups, a back-to-school program and a back-to-work program to help integrate burn victims back into society. There are six chapters throughout the state staffed by dozens of volunteers.

Michael Carrier, 31, hopes that someday the Alexis Macfarlane Memorial Tennis Tournament will be equally successful in raising money to help children.

Three years ago, when his daughter, Jessica, was 3, she couldn’t seem to shake a bad cold. About the same time, he noticed that she was bruising more easily than usual. Blood tests showed that Jessica had leukemia.

Immediately, doctors began chemotherapy and Jessica was admitted to Childrens Hospital, where she shared a room with 11-year-old Alexis Macfarlane, also suffering from leukemia.

Alexis formed a bond with Jessica that hospital attendants said is unusual among young cancer patients.

“Childhood cancer is very, very painful, and most of the time the kids are in too much pain to walk down to the playroom or even sit up in bed,” Carrier said. “But Alexis had a way of forgetting her own pain and comforting Jessica instead.”

If Jessica was going in for a special chemotherapy treatment, Alexis would tell Carrier what Jessica could expect. And when Jessica would come out of treatment, Alexis would tell her that everything was going to be OK, that the pain would go away soon.

“Alexis did so much for all of us that she became like my own daughter,” said Carrier, who is divorced from Jessica’s mother, Paulette Elkins. “It was a very frightening, lonely time in my life as I watched my little girl suffer and Alexis was a single ray of light. She helped all of us to go on.”

But in October, 1987, it became evident that Alexis was not going to survive. Her final request was a trip to Hawaii with her parents and it was there, later that month, that Alexis died.

“I don’t know if Jessica understood that Alexis wasn’t ever going to come back,” Carrier said. “Lots of her friends at the hospital had died, but with Alexis, I think somehow Jessica wanted to believe she was still alive, still making someone smile.”

And so, to keep Alexis’ memory alive, Carrier began the memorial tennis tournament that in September, in its second year, raised more than $13,000 for the Hematology-Oncology Department at Childrens Hospital.

Alexis loved to play tennis and had dreamed of living long enough to play on a tennis team; Michael Carrier owns a tennis shop in West Hollywood.

“A tennis tournament seemed like an obvious way to help other children who have cancer, children like my daughter,” Carrier said. ‘And at the same time, it seemed like the perfect way to keep Alexis’ memory alive.”

Alexis’ parents live out of state but support Carrier’s efforts, he said. Although they plan to attend the tournament eventually, neither parent has participated in the first two because they are still dealing with their daughter’s death.

In the recent tournament, Carrier attracted enough locally prominent tennis players that Century Cable televised several matches. L’Ermitage Foundation and the city of West Hollywood sponsored the tournament, which was held at Plummer Park in West Hollywood.

“I’m looking to make this even bigger next year,” Carrier said. “She was such a special little girl that I want this tournament to really make a difference in her memory.”

Meanwhile, Jessica has been in remission for several months, but doctors say she must go as long as eight years before she can be considered free of cancer.

“In a sense, Alexis is still helping Jessica even now, just like she did when she was here with us,” Carrier said. “It takes money to research a cure for leukemia and each year as the tennis tournament grows, so will the funds that someday will find that cure. Knowing that makes it easy to keep this up.”

Mary and Warren Campbell agree that the tedious and sometimes frustrating aspects of fund raising pale when they think of the people they are helping in their daughter’s memory.

Lynn Campbell was 23 when she had a dermatologist check out an irregular mole on her back. It was diagnosed as melanoma, a form of skin cancer. Doctors removed a large area surrounding the mole, including lymph nodes near the incision, and a biopsy showed that all the cancer had been removed.

For the next several years, Lynn continued full time the activities she had been involved with most of her adult life--fund raising. She volunteered to raise money for the United Farm Workers and then for several women’s groups.

But four years later, in 1983, Lynn noticed a lump under her skin, and doctors found that the cancer had spread throughout her body. On April 21, 1984, five years to the day after receiving the initial diagnosis of melanoma, Lynn died of cancer.

Mary Campbell remembers spending long hours with the youngest of her three daughters before she died.

“I asked her what I could do to carry on the work she’d been doing,” Campbell said. “She couldn’t answer me because she was too sick. But I knew before she died that I had to continue her fund raising.”

And so the Campbells created the Lynn Campbell Memorial Fund and set about thinking up ways to raise money for the kinds of charitable organizations that Lynn might have wanted to help if she were alive.

Campbell has owned Magic Years Nursery School in Reseda for 26 years and decided to involve her students’ parents in a fund-raising dinner that would commemorate the one-year anniversary of Lynn’s death. Her husband, Warren, a political science professor at Cal State Northridge, helped pull it off and the dinner, prepared by the parents and hosted free of charge at Temple Judea in Tarzana, took place just as Mary Campbell had planned.

Because there was no overhead, all $14,000 raised that evening went to the Valley Shelter for the Homeless in Van Nuys.

Since then, the Campbells have held several smaller fund-raisers in their daughter’s memory. They also make jam and jelly, which they sell to parents of the preschool children, and encourage the parents to bring their recyclable items to the school, where the Campbells keep a trailer to collect the items. Once a week, Warren Campbell takes a trailer carrying newspaper, glass and aluminum to be recycled and turns the funds over to the Lynn Campbell Memorial Fund.

“I can’t be Lynn or do just what she would have done,” Mary Campbell said. “But I wanted to carry on her memory in some way.”

Campbell, Carrier and Host say that in many ways, their fund-raising and memorial efforts have helped them deal with the grief involved in losing a child of their own or one close to them.

“But not everyone would choose to deal with their loss this way,” Campbell said. “It’s hard work, and it’s very emotional. I still can’t look at some of the pictures of Lynn as a little girl that we show people who help us with the fund raising. But each time I do something in her memory, I deal with another piece of the grief.”

Childrens Hospital spokeswoman Iacobo said that the hospital is used to dealing with parents who have suffered through the death of a child and that they often want to turn their grief into something positive to help someone else.

“But typically they are so exhausted, emotionally and physically, because of their loss that they are unable to launch a living memorial,” she said. “It is remarkable how any of these parents do this at all.”