For the Love of Lisa: Help Support Memorial Costs

Hello, my name is Bronwyn Pearson, and I am the daughter of Lisa Carswell, who passed away after a relapse of acute myeloid leukemia on September 17, 2023. While I don't want to say my family and I were blindsided by our devastating loss, we didn't have anywhere close to the time we thought we would.

My mother was diagnosed with AML in late June of 2022. After induction therapy failed, she would receive four rounds of intensive chemotherapy before entering remission in December. It was the best Christmas present anyone in our family could ask for. Our joy was short-lived, however. Her blood count numbers continued to stay low, sparking concern from her medical team; by June, her bone marrow biopsy showed the cancer was back. The doctors gave her 12 to 18 months of treatment but were optimistic about her achieving remission again. However, it didn't take long to see that things were not going well.

But before that, I want to tell you a bit more about my mom.

My mother attended Georgia College and State University, majoring in English with a focus on Creative Writing. When she was accepted to Notre Dame to work on her Master's, I had to stay behind with my grandmother her first year. As a single parent not receiving child support, my mom often had to work full-time in addition to her coursework, sometimes even taking another part-time job to make ends meet. She wanted to make sure that she could provide for both of us. In her second year, I moved up to Indiana with her until she finished her degree. We both missed our family, our home, our friends. Looking back, I think I was the one who was the homesick one; she made the sacrifice of putting her Doctorate on hold and moving back to Georgia. She returned to GC&SU, but this time as an employee, where she worked at the college library and as a professor in the English Department.

She discovered that she loved teaching; she loved the freedom it gave her. She loved looking at things from a different angle and would find out-of-the-box ways to teach. She found hidden gems in lesser-known stories or even other types of publications. I mean, come on, what would you think about a professor who pulled an assignment from Neil Gaiman comics? Or who encouraged you to watch modern movies that put a new spin on Shakespeare's plays? The only thing she didn't love was college politics, so she left teaching behind.

That was until she became G-ma. My mom felt she was too young to be a grandmother, much less called one, and her nickname was born with my first daughter. Now, the only thing my mom loved more than teaching was her family and when I had children of my own, I think they were the only things she loved more than me. She became a substitute teacher, eventually being hired at the Early Learning Center as a para-pro. She found the job of her dreams there.

When she was first diagnosed with cancer, she had to stay in the hospital for almost three months without a break. When she was able to leave but needed to continue treatment, she would have to go in for two weeks and then have two weeks out. In those two weeks out, she had to be extremely cautious of her immune system and the possibility of injury. As much as she wanted to return to the classroom, it was too big of a risk to her health. The Family Medical Leave Act was just enough to get her through until remission. She decided to work in the summer program, mostly because she just wanted to be there but also to rebuild funds. As the 2023/2024 school year approached, she was excited. She looked forward to setting up the classroom and meeting her new students.

She was re-diagnosed during the teacher planning period, less than a week before classes were set to start. It was important to her that any treatment option she started would allow her to continue working as much as she could and be home with her family. She went with an outpatient chemotherapy infusion for five days a month and a daily targeted immunotherapy pill. It should have allowed her to continue with her life as normal, with about a fifty percent chance of bringing her into remission. After her first treatment round, we would know how she responded to the treatment when we got the results from her bone marrow biopsy. Because of the extensive testing, it would take about four to six weeks.

Unfortunately, that brings us back to where I left off. We would never get those results back in time. After her first treatment, a 28-day cycle, problems started to arise. Her numbers were too low to take the daily medication that was supposed to help boost the infusion. At the start of the second cycle, she was only able to take the infusion for 2 days instead of the whole 5, because her numbers were so low. They switched her to coming in daily to get a shot designed to jumpstart her cells into rebuilding quickly so she could restart the infusions. Going to the doctor only to find out she needed transfusions of blood cells and platelets became part of the normal routine, up to 2 or 3 days a week. At one of her transfusion sessions, they discovered she had developed pneumonia.

She was in the hospital a few days before telling the staff that, for her mental health, she needed to be home so Family Hospice was called in. When we first met with them, even the nurses seemed fairly optimistic. More than likely, she had picked up the pneumonia from just having to go back and forth between the doctors and hospitals so much. It was going to be a case where she would get the medical treatment, transfusions, and monitoring at home. One even said how she had leukemia patients "graduate" from home care to back under a doctor's care until remission. For now, the important thing was getting the pneumonia under control and giving the antibiotics time to do their job. That was on a Wednesday.

By Friday, she was having trouble breathing and was retaining fluids and we were told to have family close just in case. A hospital bed was brought in to keep her sitting up and she was put on oxygen. Saturday, it became clear that there just wasn't enough time we could buy her. She could barely stay awake; when she was, her moments of lucidity were interrupted by talks of her classroom, and family members were mistaken for other teachers and even students. She decided to stop all monitoring and stop all medication except those for comfort.

Still, she didn't let it get her down when she was present. She donned her "My favorite people call me Ms. Carswell" shirt from Teacher Appreciation Week and grabbed a throw blanket with family photos on it. She talked to far-away friends, and loves of long past, made jokes, had a spa day with her two granddaughters, and she and I had a Tolkien movie marathon sleepover where we started with the 1977 cartoon film. When I started crying, she wrapped her arm around me and started to hum for a few seconds. It was enough for me to pick up the tune of a lullaby and for the first time in my life, I sang it to her, snuggling up beside her in the hospital bed while she slept. Finally, she looked peaceful and I had made it about halfway through Peter Jackson's first Hobbit movie before I fell asleep.

I woke up less than 2 hours later to my mom being in a comatose state; I called the nurse because I wasn't sure what else to do. In a strange series of events, the sheets I grabbed from my Grandmother's closet were the sheets that belonged to my mother in her youth. The family piled into her room and had their moments. When I returned, I held her hand, kissed her forehead, and told her it would be okay, that I would be okay and I would make everyone else was, and that I would do my best to carry out the few wishes she had. With that, she drew her last breath.

My mother and I both thought that we had longer than we did. We were in the process of getting her financial matters in order. She was applying for another round of FMLA leave to cover the sick days she had to take out at the beginning of the school year, disability to supplement the lack of income from almost a year of not being able to work, writing down names and numbers of who to call about a retirement refund since she hadn't worked at the ELC long enough to get benefits, tracking down life insurance and unclaimed funds, figuring out taking over payments or paying off her dream car, picking out her cremation items, setting funds aside, etc. Still, she never had all that much.

There just wasn't enough time and now I'm asking for your help. I have managed to get the funds from her bank account, a little over $4,000 combined from checking and savings. Her retirement refund and life insurance will take time to come in. I don't know if she will be getting another check from the Board of Education or not since she wasn't able to work and the FMLA wasn't processed before she passed. Even then, I don't know how much that will bring in. She was living in a home my grandmother owned as a way to help my grandmother, who has retired and on a fixed income, with household chores and the daily grind. She still had a loan for her car and two dogs to take care of until we could rehome them. I do plan on selling some of her belongings, mostly books, to help recover expenses but that will take a while to do.

Any money donated will first go to the direct expenses of the cremation, the funeral home services, her Wake arrangements, and the urn as they are the more immediate expenses. Although truth be told, she wanted a talking Tasmanian Devil cookie jar for an urn.

Any funds after that will be used to purchase the Spirit Pieces, glasswork pieces infused with her ashes, that she picked out so family members will have something they can keep with them. Depending on how much is raised, I would also like to have a more traditional cremation memorial bench for the family plot in the cemetery.

Finally, my Grandmother is going to pay off the full amount of the car loan since she co-signed with her but I would very much like to pay her back since she's on a fixed income and not in the best health herself. After all, I'm the one who wants to keep the car. Since my mom always wanted a cherry red convertible, it doesn't feel right to me to sell it off to someone who doesn't know the meaning of it, just to keep expenses down. But that is only if more funds than necessary are donated.

In the case of a miracle, my mother also wanted some of her ashes scattered in Ireland. As much as I would like to do this myself, it will be done through mail if I can arrange it with someone else.

In the case of extra money left after the car, or if funds that come in later exceed the costs, will be split between two charities: Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and St. Jude's Children's Hospital.

Any amount you are willing to contribute is greatly appreciated. If you aren't able to contribute money at this time, sharing your time to help out with going through things and setting up online listings or yard sales would come as a huge relief. Maybe you have a skill or contact that could be useful during this time? Even if you can only share this with your friends and family, it means the world to me.

You are sharing a story, her story: the story of a life cut short, the story of an amazingly strong woman who left this world on as much her terms as those dictated by her disease, raising awareness for leukemia and other cancers, alerting others who may be going through something similar that no amount of time is promised and that every hour is precious. Most importantly, you are sharing the lesson to make memories with special little moments that you can cherish instead of choosing to wrap yourself up in all the negative. For that alone, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.