Family No Longer Stranger to Kindness

Lupe Roman mumbles a request for morphine and her son, Eddie Garcia, obliges, bending over her bed and gently inserting a dropper in her mouth, as you would for a sick bird.

In this season of good cheer, Lupe is dying. She has been drinking heavily most of her 42 years, and her liver is shot. She will leave behind six kids and a pile of bills.

She drifts in and out of a twilight. Suddenly she startles; her eyes fly open, and she asks me in a hoarse whisper, “Sir, is there anything more that I can do for my children? Anything?”

As she cries, Eddie holds her. At 25, he’s the man of the family and knows just what to say.

“It’ll be all right,” he says. “Everything will be all right.”

If only that were so.

Six-year-old Lupita, the youngest, has Down syndrome. Simple conversation is a frustrating task for her. Until recently, Lupita’s only clothes were two shirts and a pair of shorts.

A 16-year-old son has been in trouble with the law and was sent to a group home.

Nineteen-year-old Eric can’t read or write well. Friends have urged Lupe to have him tested for a developmental disability.

The kids all have different last names. There never has been one man around the house for very long. The place is falling apart. Sheets cover the windows and a piece of cardboard is tacked across a broken pane in the front door. Tax bills have gone unpaid for several years. In the past, the water has been shut off for as long as a week.

Lupe’s drinking has put her in the hospital more than once. The last time, vessels in her stomach had burst and she was vomiting blood all over the house. After more than a week, she demanded to go home where, frail and moaning and curled up in a hospital bed that takes up half the tiny living room, she asks what more she can do for her children.

She has not been the best of parents. Rich or poor, nobody drowning in booze can be.

But in this season of good cheer, that’s not the point, is it?

Whatever her shortcomings, Lupe Roman has been showered with kindness by strangers who as easily could have chosen to ignore this flawed woman and her self-inflicted agony.

Last week, a medical social worker named Karen Borczon dropped by Lupe’s Oxnard home. Employed by a home hospice group called Pro Care Home Health, she immediately saw the urgency.

“It was terrible,” she said. “There was no hot water. Our aides were having to boil water on top of the stove to bathe this poor woman. And the stove--it had no oven door, just four burners on the top. It may also have been leaking gas--it was very scary.”

Seeking a hot-water heater, Borczon got nowhere with social service agencies. Appliance-repair places also turned her down. On a last-chance whim, she called Home Depot in Oxnard.

“It was phenomenal,” she said. “They said: ‘No problem!’ The manager said he had six or eight men he wanted to be part of this process. I’m sure it must have been a nightmare connecting it, because everything in the house is so old and corroded.”

The next day, a Home Depot crew installed a new water heater, free of charge. They also threw in a stove. And new faucets. Plumbers from Habitat for Humanity are to check out the pipes.

Meanwhile, boxes of groceries are piling up in the living room, thanks to Catholic service groups alerted by Borczon. Families have volunteered to bring gift baskets.

A Christmas tree is on the way. Borczon herself brought a bag of her daughters’ hand-me-downs for Lupita.

Pro Care hospice nurses have chipped in on the utility bills. (If you want to help, call Pro Care at 988-1173).

All this is a first for the family.

“They’ve never plugged into a number of social service programs that could have been helping them,” Borczon said. “I don’t know why. They’ve never received food stamps, or gotten into some other programs: It makes you wonder how many people out there aren’t accessing these things? How are children surviving in those circumstances?”

Lupe and her family--at any time, two or three of the kids have lived with her--have scraped along on $500 in monthly disability payments for Lupita. Eddie, an unemployed graphic artist, and his sister Angelica, a department-store sales clerk, have pitched in as they could. Angelica is also in the process of adopting Lupita.

Lupe knows this Christmas will almost certainly be her last. In this final season, she is surprised only by good cheer.

“These great people . . . “ she said softly. “I thought people like this had vanished away. I thought they never even looked back. You’re darn right, I appreciate it. I appreciate it all. . . . “

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.