Bassmama
05-14-04, 07:52PM
I first saw her when I was in Jr. High & joined the Youth Fellowship at church. Debbie was two years older than me & ahead of me in school, and she & her sister (my age) were also in YF, so I kind of got to know them through there. I never really got to know her well at all, because I was too insecure to be friendly with hardly anyone back then, and they were both the quiet, "goody two shoes" types as far as I was concerned, & I wanted to be invisable & just get through school. I stayed by myself a lot.
When I was a sophomore & my brother was a senior, he started dating Debbie. They went together throughout the next summer & my brother went to college the next year, then came back & they got engaged a year or so later, then got married. I, not knowing her very much at all, wasn't too impressed, but figured whatever made him happy was his business, not mine. I was about 18, she was about 20, & my brother about 21.
My Grandma Myrtle passed away about a year later, and my brother inherited the house & farm and they moved into it and eventually started a farm stand out of the little old tenament house between their house & my parents' house, and put up greenhouses for annuals & hanging baskets and rented another farmstand in a nearby town. They worked very hard and the businesses started to prosper.
They had a white VW van that they used to carry plants, veggies, & materials back & forth. On Father's Day of the year she was 27, she was driving up a nearby road with the van filled with supplies and got to where another road crossed when a woman ran the stop sign and hit her broadside, pushing the van about 100-150 feet into a fuel tank next to an irrigation motor in a field & moving the tank a ways before they stopped moving. The ambulance came & took her to the nearby hospital, where she was diagnosed as having a severe spinal cord injury. After being in the hosp. for months, then being in a rehab facility for a year after that, she came home- paraplegic, but with limited use of her hands- more of a semi-quadraplegic.
For the last 28 years of her life, she has lived out of a wheelchair. Every day, her mother has gone to her house & gotten her prepared for her day- which takes up most of the morning- and then Debbie and her mother have gone out to the greenhouses (5 of them) to plant, transplant, and ready everything for sale when they open the stand in spring. The days the farm stand has been open, Debbie has almost always been there- waiting on customers, joking around with people, and pretty much running the business. My brother does the running around & getting refills of plants that have been sold & getting veggies that are needed, and they have had help there as well, but Debbie has been there, even when the weather was nasty & cold. The only times she has missed work was when she was too sick to be there. She has also kept house & cooked and done other chores.
I have slowly gotten to know her better, and have seen a hard working, honest, gentle person determined to not merely exist, but to live every minute of life that she has had. She has been the strongest person I have ever known. To my knowledge, she has only felt sorry for herself on one occaision in all of those years, and I understand that it was an occaision deserving of frustration on her part. Otherwise, she has been a cheerful, determined woman that has taken the "lemons" that she has been given and made an awesome batch of lemonade. If I was asked to name the one person in my life that I admire the most, it would be her. I told this to my mom last Oct. when I was visiting, and she told me that she'd repeated the conversation to Debbie. I was slightly annoyed in a way back then, but the more I thought about it, the gladder I was that Mom told her, especially since Mom told me that Debbie has "something wrong with her blood" and had been getting treatments from an oncologist. (cancer doctor) The treatments helped for a while, then she'd have to go back for another treatment, and they eventually got to be every week. In the last year, she's been in the hospital with pneumonia a few times, too.
Last week I was home for a few days & stopped by the stand to see Debbie on Monday. Mom had told me that Debbie had a cold, but the weather wasn't too cool, so she was there. She seemed weak, but otherwise, OK. On Tuesday, I drove back home ( a 4 hour drive) & called Mom about 3 PM to tell her I was here. About 5:30 she called back & said that my brother had just left after telling her that Debbie had fallen out of bed somehow the night before and the ambulance had taken her to the hospital. She was in a semi- coma & had pneumonia. This morning, Mom called and told me that my brother came over & told her that Debbie is not expected to live. Now we just wait with heavy hearts.
Out of EVERYONE I have known in my 53 years of being on this earth, my sister in law Debbie is the strongest, purest, kindest person I've ever known, and if I were in charge of it, she would be made a saint. She has had more dignity than anyone I've ever known & I admire her more than words could ever say.
When I was a sophomore & my brother was a senior, he started dating Debbie. They went together throughout the next summer & my brother went to college the next year, then came back & they got engaged a year or so later, then got married. I, not knowing her very much at all, wasn't too impressed, but figured whatever made him happy was his business, not mine. I was about 18, she was about 20, & my brother about 21.
My Grandma Myrtle passed away about a year later, and my brother inherited the house & farm and they moved into it and eventually started a farm stand out of the little old tenament house between their house & my parents' house, and put up greenhouses for annuals & hanging baskets and rented another farmstand in a nearby town. They worked very hard and the businesses started to prosper.
They had a white VW van that they used to carry plants, veggies, & materials back & forth. On Father's Day of the year she was 27, she was driving up a nearby road with the van filled with supplies and got to where another road crossed when a woman ran the stop sign and hit her broadside, pushing the van about 100-150 feet into a fuel tank next to an irrigation motor in a field & moving the tank a ways before they stopped moving. The ambulance came & took her to the nearby hospital, where she was diagnosed as having a severe spinal cord injury. After being in the hosp. for months, then being in a rehab facility for a year after that, she came home- paraplegic, but with limited use of her hands- more of a semi-quadraplegic.
For the last 28 years of her life, she has lived out of a wheelchair. Every day, her mother has gone to her house & gotten her prepared for her day- which takes up most of the morning- and then Debbie and her mother have gone out to the greenhouses (5 of them) to plant, transplant, and ready everything for sale when they open the stand in spring. The days the farm stand has been open, Debbie has almost always been there- waiting on customers, joking around with people, and pretty much running the business. My brother does the running around & getting refills of plants that have been sold & getting veggies that are needed, and they have had help there as well, but Debbie has been there, even when the weather was nasty & cold. The only times she has missed work was when she was too sick to be there. She has also kept house & cooked and done other chores.
I have slowly gotten to know her better, and have seen a hard working, honest, gentle person determined to not merely exist, but to live every minute of life that she has had. She has been the strongest person I have ever known. To my knowledge, she has only felt sorry for herself on one occaision in all of those years, and I understand that it was an occaision deserving of frustration on her part. Otherwise, she has been a cheerful, determined woman that has taken the "lemons" that she has been given and made an awesome batch of lemonade. If I was asked to name the one person in my life that I admire the most, it would be her. I told this to my mom last Oct. when I was visiting, and she told me that she'd repeated the conversation to Debbie. I was slightly annoyed in a way back then, but the more I thought about it, the gladder I was that Mom told her, especially since Mom told me that Debbie has "something wrong with her blood" and had been getting treatments from an oncologist. (cancer doctor) The treatments helped for a while, then she'd have to go back for another treatment, and they eventually got to be every week. In the last year, she's been in the hospital with pneumonia a few times, too.
Last week I was home for a few days & stopped by the stand to see Debbie on Monday. Mom had told me that Debbie had a cold, but the weather wasn't too cool, so she was there. She seemed weak, but otherwise, OK. On Tuesday, I drove back home ( a 4 hour drive) & called Mom about 3 PM to tell her I was here. About 5:30 she called back & said that my brother had just left after telling her that Debbie had fallen out of bed somehow the night before and the ambulance had taken her to the hospital. She was in a semi- coma & had pneumonia. This morning, Mom called and told me that my brother came over & told her that Debbie is not expected to live. Now we just wait with heavy hearts.
Out of EVERYONE I have known in my 53 years of being on this earth, my sister in law Debbie is the strongest, purest, kindest person I've ever known, and if I were in charge of it, she would be made a saint. She has had more dignity than anyone I've ever known & I admire her more than words could ever say.