Her Real Job Is Helping Others

We newspaper types usually are too hard-bitten for things like National Volunteer Week, which rolls around on Sunday. We know people do good things, but does it really translate to the printed page?

I don’t know if what Kathy Harris of Santa Ana has been doing for the last 13 1/2 years translates or not, but when a businesswoman like her is still volunteering time doing the grunt work of scrubbing floors, doing laundry and cleaning toilets ... you figure there must be a story behind it.

There is, and it starts in 1966 when Harris, then Kathy Lynch and a high school senior in Los Angeles, learned that her 14-year-old sister, Jane, had a brain tumor instead of the flu, as everyone first thought. In that darkness of long ago, Harris was as helpless as the rest of her large Catholic family as it coped with Jane’s illness and death in early 1967.

It was a spiritually challenging time for Harris, and the age-old questions surfaced after her sister’s death. Why someone so young? Why so much pain? What was the point?

Harris made peace, and life moved on. And then, in 1989, a married mother of two, she learned that a Ronald McDonald House was opening in Orange. The house, like others around the country, provides temporary housing for parents and relatives of children in the terminal or critical throes of cancer treatment.

Harris remembers opening day as a sunshiny autumn day with hundreds of people in a festive mood. The area around Batavia Street was closed off. Contributors had been so generous that the McDonald’s officials ceremoniously burned the mortgage papers outside the house.

Harris, already occupied with a family business, went to work. She pledged to stay six months. She stayed 13 1/2 years, still putting in four hours a week. “It’s whatever it takes to run a home, but on a huger scale,” she says of her work at the house, which can accommodate 21 families. “The families still have to eat and sleep and bathe and take care of business while going through this horrendous problem. What I tell them is: If you take care of the kids, we’ll take care of you.”

The idea is simple yet profound: Do the unpleasant tasks so the parents of the sick children don’t have to.

Now 53, Harris is among a small group from Day One that still volunteers. Sheepish about attention for herself, she knows that in a way she speaks for all volunteers who let their actions speak for them.

“The house became my passion,” she says. “In my whole life, I’d never felt as good as I did about my work there.” She decided early on she just wouldn’t be someone who “scrubbed floors and never lifted my head as people walked by.”

Instead, she talked to anguished but resilient family members of the children. If she gave solace to them, they also inspired her. “When you sign on, you’re on a journey with them,” she says, “a journey with ups and downs, and I’ve held many of them in my arms as they cried.”

Always, in a corner of her mind, is the memory of sister Jane. Is her work a memorial to her sister? “Oh, I’d say that’s probably true,” Harris says. “Nobody could help my family at the time, but maybe I can help some other people. Jane was a young girl who had everything in front of her and in six months it was wiped out; it was gone.”

Harris has learned to handle the families’ grief. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t spent nights “crying into my pillow” over someone -- such as teenage girls who remind her of her sister -- but she says her time at the house has been more joyous than sad.

She has a feeling that, on her day of reckoning, she’ll look back on her volunteer time as “my best time, my best hour.” Or, in a sentiment that captures what all volunteers can tell themselves: “I did something decent in my life. I did something with the time I had.”

*

Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com.