Honoring Jessica Dawn Smith: Celebration of Life

My name is Kathryn Elizabeth Smith-Hunington. I'm 27 years old and a resident of Jackson, TN. On Friday, November 1st, 2024, my mother, Jessica Dawn Smith (2/2/1979 - 11/01/2024), 45 years old, was tragically and unexpectedly taken from us. She was hit by a car on Hwy 22 in Henderson. She leaves behind 5 children: Kathryn Elizabeth Smith-Hunington, 27 (River, Hayze, 6, and Willow, 1), Robert Eugene Smith III, 19 (Lacy and Weston, 5 months), Morgan Cheyenne Miller, 14, Makayla Marie Smith, 12, and Waylon Luke Melton, 6. And so many more that loved her beautiful soul!! This is a devastation and a travesty, to say it lightly; there are no words!

Jessa Dawn will be greatly missed by so many! She was a beautiful person inside and out who had a hard life, and she had faced many adversities, but nevertheless, she never stopped trying to reset, refocus, and continue on her mission of restoring her family and children all back together! It pains me to know that because of the tragic accident, she will never get to finish out her mission, but I'm also at peace knowing that my mother never has to go a day without any of her children ever again!

We are a modest family with a modest income. We do not have any insurance policies or things like that to fall back on. This was a shock, unexpected; we were definitely not prepared, not that anyone ever is.

We are making this GoFundMe to fund a celebration of life services to come after her cremation and also to cover the expenses of keepsakes for all of her children and grandchildren of her ashes. Any final business affairs that need to be attended to under her name, and I would also like for whatever is left to be used to get all of her children together and do something special!! It would've meant so much to my mom!! My mom used to always say that even though we were not rich in things or money, we were more rich than anyone else in the world because we knew God's love, and we had her love, and we loved each other, and that was all the richness any person would need! I prayed to pass these things on to my children, to not measure their life in materials or the number of breaths you take, but the moments that take your breath away!!

It's very important to me to have a nice memorial celebration of life services for her. I don't feel like my mother ever truly received the recognition she deserved here on Earth, and it is only right as her firstborn oldest child that I should send her off into the next with a worthy event. She deserves so much more than this world ever offered her, and I want to do this right. If you can find it in your heart at all or feel led or called to donate to our fund, please do. This will be helping her babies, and she didn't care about anything in the world more than she cared about her children!! Money will not take our pain away, and it will not bring our mom back, but it will make things a little bit easier during this time without having to stress about how we're going to pay for everything when we do good to make it through our everyday life as it is. She wouldn't have wanted us to have to stress about that!!!