October 15, 2008

The Kari and Julia Story

2008 1529 page22 caphe phone call changed everything. The familiar voice of Jeff’s office assistant on the other end of the line—at first a welcomed interruption to his and his wife’s trip to Cyprus—conveyed news that altered the couple’s lives forever.
 
Their 20-year-old daughter, Kari, had been in a car accident. A sophomore at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan, Kari was visiting her boyfriend and his family in North Carolina when her car hit a wet, slippery section of road, skidded across the center yellow line, and hit an oncoming pickup truck. The driver of the truck was uninjured, but a person who witnessed the accident and stopped to help noticed Kari wasn’t breathing. Her efforts to resuscitate her were successful, and Kari was now in the hospital hooked up to a ventilator. The doctors, however, offered her parents—Jeff and Sharon Wilson—little hope.
 
“When we got to the hospital, after extensive additional consultation with specialists, we made the extremely tough decision of taking her off life support,” Sharon explains.
 
That was on Sabbath, June 29, 2002. Kari died the next day.
 
2008 1529 page22“I was in a state of shock,” Sharon says. “I couldn’t believe it. My beautiful daughter¯who loved writing, reading, music—was no longer here. I didn’t know how I was going to face life without her.”
 
Sharon, a nurse, turned to God for the help and the strength she needed to face each morning following the loss of her daughter. She and her husband spent many hours in prayer as well as reading the Bible and Spirit of Prophecy books. The couple added exercise to their daily routine, walking two miles together every morning. They also became involved in various outreach activities such as helping in soup kitchens to feed the homeless.
 
“Anything to take the emphasis off of me,” Sharon explains.
 
Sharon also had the support, among others, of her sister Darlene Repp, who lives in Bryan, Ohio, several states away from Sharon and Jeff’s home in Beltsville, Maryland. The Wilsons had moved to Beltsville from Berrien Springs, Michigan, in June 2000, when Jeff was asked to serve as director of the General Conference Trust Services Department. But the physical distance between the two sisters didn’t hamper their emotional closeness.
 
“Darlene was there for me from day one,” Sharon notes. “She knows when to talk, when to listen, and always says the right things.”
 
Sharon adds, “I feel that with the Lord’s help I have finally come to terms with Kari’s death, but some days things happen that stir up memories and emotions that you’ve put up on a shelf, and you have to bring them down and examine them again. Some of that has been hard. But the Lord gives me the strength I need to make it through one day at a time.”
 
More Shocking News
Six years after Kari’s death the unthinkable happened again. Darlene called her sister, sobbing. Darlene and Don’s 16-year-old daughter, Julia, had been diagnosed with a rare and potentially fatal form of cancer—clear cell adenocarcinoma. Her doctors were citing genetics as the likely cause.
 
It was Christmas break 2004, Julia’s sophomore year at Great Lakes Adventist Academy in Cedar Lake, Michigan, when test results confirmed what everyone feared—Julia had cancer. Darlene and Don were numb with shock. They couldn’t believe this was happening to their vibrant, exuberant daughter.
 
“When I told Julia about the test results, I said to her, ‘Julia, it’s cancer—but we’re going to get through this together,’” Darlene explains. “We both just cried.”
 
Dealing With Reality
Doctors found a number of malignant tumors in Julia’s uterus, and that the cancer had spread to the lymph nodes. The prognosis wasn’t good.
 
Praying for the right words to say, Darlene told her daughter, “Julia, you didn’t do anything to deserve this. And you don’t have any control over it. But you do have control over how you respond to it. You can either choose to be angry and bitter with God and with the situation, or you can choose to remember that God loves you and is in control, and that somehow, ultimately, good can happen from this. You can trust Him.”
 
Darlene says she “wasn’t promising that Julia wouldn’t die from this, but that she could trust God to take care of her no matter what.” She adds, “At the time, I wasn’t sure whether I had said the right thing.”
 
2008 1529 page22Numerous treatments of chemotherapy and radiation were recommended, and many people assumed Julia would leave school and stay at home while she battled the disease. But that wasn’t on Julia’s agenda.
 
“I’m not going to drop out of school,” Julia told her parents. “I have cancer now, but I am the same person I was before, and I don’t want anyone treating me any differently.”
 
To keep her daughter in school but not miss her treatments, Darlene reorganized her life, including flexing her work schedule at the county health department. On Mondays and Tuesdays she would take Julia to the Alma hospital, the one closest to the school, for chemo and radiation treatments. Darlene explains that although Julia was very ill following the treatments, she would say, “‘OK, I’m done now. I’m ready to go.’ And we’d go off to school.”
 
Although Julia worked hard to keep up with her homework, her first love was physical education. She was on the school’s gymnastics team, the Aerokhanas—Aeros, for short—and she didn’t let her illness keep her down when it came to gymnastics practice either.

“Julia would try to stretch out for the [gymnastics] routines, but many times she would be in pain,” Aeros coach Tedd Webster says. “Tears would be streaming down her face, but she would say, ‘I’m all right. I’m fine. I’m getting back out there.’”
 
Hilda Reichert, Aeros team sponsor and assistant to the school’s principal, came to know both Julia and her parents well.
 
“With Julia, I saw this person who loved life even during this terrible situation,” Reichert says.
 
“To have this faith in God, to have this energy for life, regardless of what she was going through, was just amazing. . . .
 
“As a mother, I don’t think I would have let my daughter stay here under those circumstances. I would have been jealous of the time. . . . That was a huge gift her parents gave her, to let her live her life doing what she wanted to do—to be a normal teenager.”
 
Following another surgery in January 2005, doctors instructed Julia not to walk up or down stairs. To make it less difficult for her to come and go from the dormitory, girls’ dean Robin Berlin invited Julia to stay with her in her apartment, attached to the dorm.
 
“Julia was very selfless. Very fun. Very close to her dad,” Berlin says. “And she had many, many friends. Everything she did was so full of life and so fun. And if she thought somebody was hurting, she was there to help. . . .
 
“When Julia first came her freshman year she was this shy, quiet little girl. When she left, she was this outgoing young woman who could hold her own no matter what,” Berlin notes.
 
Witnessing to Her Peers
A large part of being on the Aerokhanas team involves witnessing to others, particularly the students’ peers. Along with gymnastics performances, the young adults lead out in a Week of Prayer event at a sister academy—not an easy feat for most. But Webster says spiritual growth and witnessing are what Aeros is all about.
 
“The coaches who came before me here changed the Aerokhanas from a gymnastics team that did some spiritual things on the side to an outreach witnessing team that does gymnastics on the side. . . . Getting in front of others and talking about what God is doing in their life on a personal level—that is tough.”
 
But they do it, and they see results. At the end of the 2007-2008 school year, seven members of Aeros were baptized.
 
Julia shared her personal testimony during her senior year when Aeros did a Week of Prayer at Ozark Academy. “It was incredibly difficult for her,” Webster notes. “But when she stood in front of her peers¯and I knew she was trusting only in what she believed God could provide,¯that was really cool.”
 
Julia’s testimony provided an unexpected blessing for her mom, as well. When Darlene later viewed the DVD of the program, she heard Julia say words very similar to those she had said to Julia soon after they learned that Julia had cancer: that she could choose to be bitter and angry with God or accept that ultimately He would somehow bring good out of her experience. Julia assured her listeners that she had chosen to trust God.
 
“Darlene wanted to be sure that Julia was doing OK spiritually—a concern any Christian parent would have—and she told me she wished the Lord would just send her a fax telling her that everything was all right,” her sister Sharon explains. “But after we watched that DVD, I told Darlene, ‘The Lord didn’t send you a fax; He sent you a DVD.’ It was obvious in Julia’s testimony that her commitment to the Lord was strong. It came through very clearly.”
 
The Inevitable Happens
Julia graduated from Great Lakes Adventist Academy in May 2007. She lost her battle with cancer on May 4, 2008. Julia was 19—a year younger than her cousin Kari when she lost her life in a car accident.
 
2008 1529 page22How do those who loved Kari and Julia deal with their loss? Sharon and Darlene credit God, their family, and their friends. Darlene particularly includes the staff and students at GLAA.

“I don’t think Great Lakes knows what a blessing it’s been,” Darlene says. “Two busloads of students from the school came [to Julia’s funeral], but there were also more than 200 people from the community who attended as well, and most of them were not Adventist. What a witness those Great Lakes kids were to our community!”
 
Darlene explains that often people she works with would ask her, “How can you send your kids [Julia and her older brother, Doug] away to school? I don’t know how you can do that.” But Julia’s funeral changed their perspective.
 
“After the funeral, one of my coworkers came up to me. ‘Now I know why you sent your children away to school,’ she said. ‘After watching and listening to the staff and the students, I think all of our kids should be going to that school.’”
 
Another woman told Darlene, “I came here and saw all of these kids at this funeral without their parents, and I thought, They need their parents. Where are their parents? But I watched them, and some of them were crying and having a really hard time, but they were just so supportive of each other. I thought they did a better job of supporting each other than I could have.”
 
Sharon notes, “It was a wonderful witness. The people there saw what Adventists are really like.”
 
Darlene says the staff and students at GLAA provided the emotional and spiritual support they needed while Julia was a student there, as well as after she graduated, because of their continuing phone calls, visits, and prayers.
 
One of the people who knew Julia best, Nathan Drumm, her boyfriend of five years, says he too was grateful for the way the school’s faculty and staff were there for Julia. “They really cared,” he says. “And she had good friends. They were always there to help her.”
 
Even though he came to realize there would be no long-term future for Julia and him, Drumm hasn’t given in to discouragement. “I know I’ll see her again someday,” he says. “And God promises not to give us anything we can’t handle and that He’ll always be with us. I don’t know how anybody can get through something like this without God.”
 
The Right Decision
Darlene explains that she wanted to keep her daughter at home rather than send her away to school, but “Julia wanted to be there, and she got a lot of support there,” she says. “It was the right decision.”
 
Ray Davis, GLAA’s principal of 19 years, agrees that staying in school was the right choice for Julia.
 
“She was able to complete things that were important to her,” he notes. “She got to be a normal teen.”
 
He adds, “I think in a boarding school it’s easier to form friendships—ones that can last a lifetime. We build a sense of community among our staff and our students. We are a family. . . .
 
“We take our roles of service to these students awfully seriously,” Davis says. “We don’t do it perfectly. Sometimes we mess up. But I like to believe that with God’s help we do a lot of things very well too. . . . We focus on what we’re really about as a school, which is leading youth to a saving relationship with Jesus. Of course, we’re about rules and academics and all those things a school is about. But we’re also about growing our relationship with the Lord. . . .
 
“Julia was all teen. Was she perfect? Probably not. But she was a young lady who devoted her life to God, and that was very clear.” 
 
 ___________     
Sandra Blackmer is an assistant editor for the Adventist Review.
 
 
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