Ritual They’ve Learned by Heart

For 10 years now, the trees have come like clockwork every December to UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center--3-foot tall paper Christmas trees, fashioned from handprints of children a thousand miles away.

They are due to arrive again this week, to deck the halls as they do each year, delivering a much-needed dose of holiday cheer to a hospital ward where smiles are often in short supply.

The nurses call them “Hands of Love” trees, and not just because children’s loving hands create them.

They are the legacy of a mother’s love for her son, a symbol of her determination that he not pass his final Christmas on earth shut out of the holiday rituals he loved.

*

Bob Robbins was 28 when he was diagnosed with leukemia in February 1986. An outdoorsman who loved camping and fishing, his only clues were flu-like symptoms he couldn’t shake.

His doctor sent him from Phoenix to UCLA Medical Center, where nine months of chemotherapy forced the disease into remission. A bone marrow transplant followed six months later.

His prognosis was good, his doctors said. He returned to Phoenix that summer. In October, he got married. In December, his leukemia returned. He wound up back at UCLA, in the cancer ward.

His mother, Lou Jirovec, left her teaching job in tiny Hermiston, Ore., and moved to Los Angeles to be near her son. “I kept thinking, Christmas in the hospital . . . How could that be?,” she recalls today.

“I remember wandering aimlessly for hours through the stores in Westwood, trying to find a way he could celebrate Christmas.”

A living tree was out. Bob was in isolation, his hospital room had to be kept sterile.

Then, she remembered the paper Christmas trees she’d taught her first- and second-grade students to make. The children would trace their hands and decorate the handprints with glitter, pictures, personal notes. Then they’d glue them on a giant piece of paper, cut in the shape of a Christmas tree.

“So I went out and bought some really pretty paper,” she said, “and whenever anybody came into Bob’s room--doctors, nurses, family friends--I’d have them trace their handprint and sign it. Then I glued them together in the shape of a tree,”

Bob loved the idea, she said. “I don’t think he fully understood until then how many people were involved in loving and caring for him.

“And I know in my heart that our Christmas at the hospital was the one my son and I cherished more than any other. Nothing--not his illness, not the isolation--could dispel the precious spirit of Christmas that reigned in that hospital room.”

*

Bob Robbins died three months later, on the first day of spring, 1988.

But the tradition that began with his mother’s simple gesture endures today, brightening the holiday season for thousands of cancer patients across the nation.

When she returned to Oregon after her son’s death, Jirovec asked fellow teachers to get their classes to make paper trees for UCLA’s cancer patients. Thirty-five trees were sent to the hospital the next Christmas.

Another school joined the effort, then another. Now, all six of Hermiston’s elementary and middle schools participate and the tradition has spread to nearby towns.

Over the past 10 years, children from 15 cities in Oregon have sent handprint trees to five hospitals around the country, including St. Jude’s in Memphis, Tenn., and the Children’s Hospital in Seattle. UCLA receives more than 100 trees from Hermiston each year.

“The patients enjoy them tremendously,” said Kathryn West, a nurse who is director of the hospital’s oncology unit. “Many of them are in protective isolation, so they can’t have flowers or live trees. They hear about the trees and they can’t wait for them to arrive.

“We put them all over, in every room, on every door, in the children’s playroom. . . . It transforms the ward into something really beautiful.”

The Oregon children personalize their handprints, she said, with photographs, keepsakes, handwritten messages. “It’s so touching,” West said. “I cry every year I open that box.”

And every year, the children of Hermiston receive thank-you letters such as this, written by a man whose wife died at UCLA six days after Christmas 1991:

“As sad as it is, I want you to know how much it meant to me each time I went through her door to see your beautiful Christmas tree. It brought cheer and comfort. . . . Thanks for helping make her last days easier, and mine more joyful.”

And if her tree project has softened the blow of hospitalization for cancer patients over the years, it also has eased Jirovec through the loss of her son.

“It gives me something to look forward to at Christmas,” she said. “You know, when you lose a loved one, there’s always some sadness around the holidays.

“But at Christmastime, when I know we’re going to be making the trees and sending them out, my mind is on all the patients we’ll be cheering up, and what that would have meant to Bob. That’s what makes me want to go on.”

*

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.