Florence Clifford: Faith, family & a life well lived

My great aunt, Florence Clifford, died peacefully Nov. 24, 2013, at age 99. She was the last of an entire generation and a true original. I’ve written a few columns about her over the years, and I had the privilege to say a few words about her remarkable life at her Memorial Mass at Holy Trinity Catholic Church on Jan. 18, 2014:

We are here today for the woman we all know as Aunt Florence, the last surviving member of a generation, the last surviving spouse of the five surviving children of Thomas and Mary Clifford.

John and Bert. Ed and Margaret. Bill and Helen. Rich and Leona. Hughie and Florence. Joe and Connie.

All gone now, yet all the reasons why we’re here today.

It’s our family: One big, crazy, over-achieving, slightly dysfunctional, fighting Irish Catholic family, and Florence, who married into this family and had no children of her own, loved every last one of us.

I am humbled to be speaking here today because I didn’t know her nearly as well as my aunt, Peggy Foley, or my cousin Judy Meyer or any of you nieces and nephews, or even my brother Mike Gibson, who I think most reminded her of Hughie. But since I know Mike and Peggy pretty well, I’ve gleamed onto stories over the years and there are some real facts we know about a life well-lived.

You can look up a lot on the Internet. One night recently, with a class of wine and a month-long subscription to Ancestry.com, I read two vastly different census records that shaped Florence in ways none of us probably ever knew.

In 1920, she is a 5-year-old living on Partridge Ave. with her father Thomas Carey, a 37-year-old pressman for a printing company; her mother Margaret, 33; Sisters Julia, 10, and Ellen 8; and younger brothers Thomas, 3 and James, an infant. A family. An intact nuclear family of whom a young Florence undoubtedly had fond memories.

By 1930, her address is Emerson Ave., living with nearly 140 other “inmates” at the St. Mary’s Female Orphan Asylum in Walnut Park, run by the Sisters of Charity.

Her mother died suddenly, you see, and her father could not care for five children so the girls were sent to one institution, the boys another. How hard that must have been for a young child to lose not only her mother, but have her family unit ripped apart. A reminder that life could be cruel, but truly God has a hand in everything.

Documents don’t lie, and that 1930 Census entry for Florence Carey is four pages long, listing her age, 15 at the time, her status as an inmate and name after name after name of girls with whom she shared residence in a building that still stands in Walnut Park. Names such as Margaret Breheny, Helen Wisnewski, and Mary Aliperti. All girls around her same age. All girls she was probably very close to. All girls who endured hardships like Florence.

The document ends abruptly with these words: Here ends the enumeration of St. Mary’s Female Orphan Asylum.

That seemed harsh to me, but Florence lived a sobering reality, and one in which none of us have come close to experiencing. I think perhaps, though, God might have had a special interest in a childhood like that.

St. Mary’s was a place where Florence learned skills she would use the rest of her life: cooking, sewing, bookkeeping, and more importantly, perseverance, good humor and emotional strength.

When the time came for Florence to leave the home, she entered the convent for a year or so but discerned the religious life wasn’t her vocation, so she went to work a factory as a teenager. It’s those moments and years that we don’t really know about, those daily drudgeries and challenges of the 1930s Depression in St. Louis, Mo., that had to be difficult. But there’s a common thread: Perseverance.

And we know this: At some point in the late 1930s, Florence Carey would meet the love of her life, Hughie Clifford, the second youngest brother of five Irish boys of Benton Street.

Hughie, by the way, would be 102 today. January 18 is his birthday.

Florence continued to work, the two of them saving enough money so they could buy their own roof. That was extremely important to her – to have a place and a home she could call her own. They married in 1941, just in time for the start of another monumental challenge.

Put yourself in Florence’s place for a moment on Dec. 7, 1941.

A newlywed, looking forward to a first Christmas together, having surviving the childhood you did, working as hard as you had to get some security, finally finding happiness and love and then one December morning your world is shattered again. I can’t imagine what it was like to listen to news reports knowing that your 29-year-old husband was likely to be going off to war.

That’s exactly what happened.

Hughie was drafted and served with George Patton’s Third Army. The last thing he said to her before he went overseas: “Whatever happens, don’t lose the house.”

She didn’t. Florence became a real-life Rosie the Riveter, working a shift in a munitions factory and then going to work at the Downtown Famous-Bar  later that day. When she got home each night, no matter how late it was, she’d write Hughie a letter, even though months would pass without word of his whereabouts. Letters were important – if she couldn’t get to him, the U.S. Mail would.

Hughie returned home in 1945 with every one of Florence’s letters. Imagine if we could read those letters today. Every last one of them would be a treasure.

They made a life together for the next 43 years, first in St. Louis, then in the Daytona Beach-area town of Port Orange, Fla., grounded in faith, bolstered by family. You know we all had an open invitation to visit anytime we wanted, and many of us did.

Hughie died in 1988. Florence went on, because that’s what she did. She persevered. She traveled, attended daily Mass, and organized things like food pantries and clothing drives for the poor at Epiphany Catholic Church, just a block away from their home and a place that became as important to her as her family.

There’s one last story I want to tell that I can remember vividly listening to, sitting at Judy’s kitchen table on what was likely one of her last visits back to St. Louis about 11-12 years ago.

My son, Matt, who’s now 19 and a sophomore at Marquette University, was about to make his First Communion, and Florence was extremely interested in the details of that event. It was an important Sacrament to her, the most important one of all, she said.

She told me how she remembered the priest instructing her class in preparation back at St. Mary’s, telling the children that on that particular day in which you first receive the Body of Christ, it is the one day of your mortal life in which you are closest to God.

So you should be prepared, Father told them, to pray for anything that day because it only happens once. Nuns, being nuns of course, went around afterward and suggested to each child what they should pray for and they told Florence that she should pray that her brother and sisters always stay together, always stay in touch.

They did. And then she married into another extended family, and we’re all still here, too.

There are so many more stories about this remarkable like of survival and perseverance, of looking at any situation with gentleness and humor and knowing that no matter what life throws at you, it’s going to be OK.

Faith and family. That’s really what one of the last surviving residents of the St. Mary’s Female Orphan Asylum was all about.

So if there are takeways from a life well lived for 99 years, it’s practice your faith and keep your family — your crazy, over-achieving, slightly dysfunctional, extended fighting Irish Catholic family, as close as you can.