A phone call you never want to get
Jan. 31st, 2009 09:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
loracsStacy, stonebender's long time attendant and our friend, is in the hospital. Her niece called and said if we want to see her to go soon. They don't know how long she will live. The pancreatic cancer, misdiagnosed for so long, has spread all over.
I sit here as a non-believer wishing I could pray. Stacy is very devoutly Christian. She's very involved with her church, sometimes spending all day Sunday in prayer and worship. Every Christmas and Thanksgiving she worked serving meals. She collected clothes for "my homeless" as she called them. There was always some in the trunk of her car and if she saw someone on the street that looked like they needed something she had, she'd stop and ask them. She gave as much as she could to support her church and their homeless project. In Dec. 2007 she collected money from her family and friends because she wanted to directly help someone. She didn't know who, but she knew she'd find someone. One day at the laundromat, she met a young woman with two children. The woman was a single mom living nearby. She had very little money or family support, but she managed to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. Stacy offered to give the woman and her children a ride home. Stacy told me the next day that she'd found her family to help. A few days later she knocked on this woman's door and offered her a shopping spree. Shoes, pants, tops, underwear and socks for everyone, groceries for a week and a couple of toys for the children.
Stacy never had a lot of money and she worked very hard for what she did have, but she knew she was graced with a large supportive family and her belief in god. These two things got her through a lot of hard times and when we met her in 2000, she'd become one of the pillars of support for her family. She and her mother raised her nephew from the day he left the hospital, neither her brother or the baby's mother could take care of him. Pooh (not his real name, of course, but the only name I heard him called for at least a year) is now 16 years old and plans to go to college. When she first found out how sick she was she didn't want to tell Pooh because she said "he's never been very good with death, when his gold fish died he was upset for a week."
Stacy saw her mom through more than a year of hospitalization and nursing home stays. She is diabetic and eventually loss one of her legs. Stacy has been her mom's primary caregiver. When it came time for her mother to get a prosthetic leg and insurance wouldn't cover it, Stacy collected money from her family and they brought her one.
Now I'm just rambling and procrastinating getting stonebender up. I have had to wake him up with awful news way to many times, but it's not like I can just wait until he reads this entry while he drinks his coffee.
One last thing about Stacy - she LOVED our Gilly girl. She was scared of her when she first started, but eventually she became one of Gilly's people. One day I realized I was almost out of cans of tuna fish. I thought I had a little stock pile. As Gilly aged and went through her own illness, Stacy would sometimes give her a can of tuna to make sure she ate in the morning. And more than one piece of bacon was slipped into her bowl too. She missed Gilly as much as we did.
Now I will be missing both of them.
I sit here as a non-believer wishing I could pray. Stacy is very devoutly Christian. She's very involved with her church, sometimes spending all day Sunday in prayer and worship. Every Christmas and Thanksgiving she worked serving meals. She collected clothes for "my homeless" as she called them. There was always some in the trunk of her car and if she saw someone on the street that looked like they needed something she had, she'd stop and ask them. She gave as much as she could to support her church and their homeless project. In Dec. 2007 she collected money from her family and friends because she wanted to directly help someone. She didn't know who, but she knew she'd find someone. One day at the laundromat, she met a young woman with two children. The woman was a single mom living nearby. She had very little money or family support, but she managed to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. Stacy offered to give the woman and her children a ride home. Stacy told me the next day that she'd found her family to help. A few days later she knocked on this woman's door and offered her a shopping spree. Shoes, pants, tops, underwear and socks for everyone, groceries for a week and a couple of toys for the children.
Stacy never had a lot of money and she worked very hard for what she did have, but she knew she was graced with a large supportive family and her belief in god. These two things got her through a lot of hard times and when we met her in 2000, she'd become one of the pillars of support for her family. She and her mother raised her nephew from the day he left the hospital, neither her brother or the baby's mother could take care of him. Pooh (not his real name, of course, but the only name I heard him called for at least a year) is now 16 years old and plans to go to college. When she first found out how sick she was she didn't want to tell Pooh because she said "he's never been very good with death, when his gold fish died he was upset for a week."
Stacy saw her mom through more than a year of hospitalization and nursing home stays. She is diabetic and eventually loss one of her legs. Stacy has been her mom's primary caregiver. When it came time for her mother to get a prosthetic leg and insurance wouldn't cover it, Stacy collected money from her family and they brought her one.
Now I'm just rambling and procrastinating getting stonebender up. I have had to wake him up with awful news way to many times, but it's not like I can just wait until he reads this entry while he drinks his coffee.
One last thing about Stacy - she LOVED our Gilly girl. She was scared of her when she first started, but eventually she became one of Gilly's people. One day I realized I was almost out of cans of tuna fish. I thought I had a little stock pile. As Gilly aged and went through her own illness, Stacy would sometimes give her a can of tuna to make sure she ate in the morning. And more than one piece of bacon was slipped into her bowl too. She missed Gilly as much as we did.
Now I will be missing both of them.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 07:47 pm (UTC)No surprise, but still... CRAP!
no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 09:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 08:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 12:18 am (UTC)you (all 3 of you) will be forever more changed for having known her, having loved her and having been touched by her. and that will always be in your hearts.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 09:34 am (UTC)*hugs*
no subject
Date: 2009-02-02 07:14 pm (UTC)