Round Table Fundraiser for the Lymphoma Society in Stephen’s name tomorrow (12/16).

From Bobby Churchill:

Hi everybody,The manager (Debbie) of the Round Table Pizza (2234 Sunrise Blvd, Rancho Cordova, CA click here for a map:http://bit.ly/7l8GH0) where Stephen, Rose & I ate lunch at most mondays for several years offered to setup a fundraiser for the lymphoma society. 20% of all their sales for the whole day (11am to 8 pm) on Wednesday the 16th, Debbie is going to give to Rosemary to donate to the Lymphoma Society in Stephen’s honor.

Debbie’s son was going through cancer treatments for a brain tumor at the same time Stephen was receiving his own treatments.

Thankfully her son is in remission. After she was told of Stephen’s passing she called and asked if she could set this up. So, please come & hang out anytime on the 16th & have some pizza or a beer or both. It will be good to get to see many of you too.

-RJC
Link for the event on facebook: http://bit.ly/7vkVkl

It breaks your heart…

One of my favorite passages of writing comes from the mind of A. Bartlett Giamatti. Many people remember him as the commissioner of baseball that banned Pete Rose, but to me he’ll always be a thoughtful man that had a way with words, much like Stephen.

I first heard this piece during the 1989 World Series, a series that many remember for the interruption caused by the Loma Prieta earthquake but that Stephen and I prefer to remember as the series won by the Oakland A’s. As I sit here on this Saturday morning, in a state of suspended disbelief, I thought back to the first time I heard James Earl Jones reciting this passage:

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.”

Every year when the A’s ended their season I would think back to this passage, but never before has it felt more appropriate than now.

One of the things we’d like to try and get together for the family is a scrap book of people’s memories, recollections and pictures of Stephen. We’d love for you all to take a moment and, either in the comments section of this thread or you can email them to eric@savingstephen.com, spend some time jotting down your thoughts, memories and recollections of Stephen.

Thank you.

Memorial Service

A memorial service will be held Friday November 20th at 1:00pm at Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church for Stephen Shirley. Please come to help us celebrate Stephen’s life, which has touched and impacted all of our own in an amazing way. We all love and miss him dearly, but rejoice that he is now with the Father and is free of the burdens he has born for the past 3 years.

Sad News…

Dear friends of Stephen,

I hoped I would never have to write this post.

I prayed that I would never have to write this post.

But sometimes, the Lord makes other plans.

It is my sad duty to let you know that our dear friend Stephen went home to the Lord last night. Please keep Rosemary, his family and all of his friends in your prayers as we mourn the passing of a good man.

I regret I have no other information at this time, but I’m sure there will be some in the following days.

Regretfully,
Karen Churchill Garcia

A slightly different Stephen Story- Humor and Hope.

Hey everyone,

This Stephen Story is a little different.  It’s mine.

There are a lot of Stephen Stories I could tell, but I decided to give more of a testimony rather than a singular story.  It just seemed more appropriate and after reading it, I hope you can see why.

My sense of humor often gets me into trouble. I like the inappropriate joke. I enjoy them mostly because I enjoy watching people’s reactions to them. If you can knock people just a little off their game, force them to react to something that they aren’t quite prepared for, then it opens up a whole world of insight into who they are that they try their hardest to not let you see. I enjoy those moments because they are often more honest and real than most of the moments we experience in life.

The other thing I like about joking about the things you don’t joke about is that it denies that very thing power in your life. I remember reading an interview with Mel Brooks where he was asked about making jokes about Hitler in The Producers. They asked him how he could take such a tragic event and turn it into a punch line. He responded by saying that if he didn’t then he let the Nazis, Hitler and the Holocaust have a power over him that he just wasn’t willing to let them have. When you can look something horrible in the eye and crack a joke, that speaks volumes. It means there’s hope.

Stephen’s cancer has been like the goose that laid the golden egg in terms of inappropriate jokes for me. It’s the gift that just keeps on giving. It’s been a gold mine. When the prospect of radiation treatment were first mentioned, Stephen was telling us about the 6 tattooed dots he was going to have to get put on his chest so they’d know where to line up the machine. We immediately thought of how to best turn him in to a human die. Obviously a single dot would have to go on his back and rolling him might be a bit tough, but the prospect of tossing him down a hill and shouting “Six!” while jumping up and down when he lands face up is just too good of a mental image to pass up. And how can you not give him grief for using the Sweat-n-lo in his drink and that it might give him more cancer? Stephen, liking off color humor as much as his friends do, usually said it didn’t matter since he was already on the treatment for it, so he had the liberty to use as much of the pink stuff as he liked.

That is, it was until a few months ago. After over two years it just reached a point where I didn’t feel like joking about it anymore. I was talking about it with a friend and there was something in the conversation, which involved a lot of sighs and long periods of silence, that went unspoken. We had hit a point where we had run out of hope. No hope, no humor. We had given Stephen’s cancer an incredible amount of power in our lives.

Early on in Stephen’s treatment it was easy to not be TOO concerned with the fact he had Hodgkin’s. There have been several professional athletes that have had Hodgkin’s, shut it down for the year, undergo treatment and then are good to go by the next season. If someone was going to have a lymphoma, Hodgkin’s is the one to have. It’s treatable, very treatable. So the humor was easy to come by. That and there were just so many opportunities for good humor. When they removed part of his rib to biopsy the mass in his chest, it was a time when the Genesis jokes flew fast and furious. What kind of a girl was he going to get? Or was this just payment for the one he already had? It was worth every penny of the five dollars I paid him to ask the surgeon that removed the part of his rib, just as they were about to put him under and start the surgery, if he could put in a request for a girl that didn’t like fruit. It was also easy to do things like this because I had an unwavering faith that God wasn’t finished with Stephen and his story just yet. Even with the setbacks and the second round of treatment, I never lost faith. Maybe it was naïveté on my part.

With the news of the results of the two PET scans (for those not familiar with a PET scan it’s like a CAT scan but more general) in January reality set in. This wasn’t how it was supposed to play out. Except for the fact that apparently it was how it was supposed to play out. Looking back I feel a little foolish in loosing faith. God still wasn’t done with Stephen yet. To see what He’s done over the last 2 months has been incredible. One of the advantages I’ve had being one of the more public faces for helping to raise money for The Stephen Shirley Medical Fund is being able to see all these stories play out. Seeing people offer their thoughts and insights into who Stephen is with the Stephen Stories we’ve been posting on the web site has been reaffirming. Hearing that The Gathering Place had taken an offering for this person that they didn’t know and raised $16,000 spoke volumes. Watching Lakeside Orangevale come together to help their worship leader means so much too so many different people. Lakeside has truly been a blessing and an answer to prayer. Not many people know that when Stephen and I left the last church we were ministering at that we had discussed starting our own church. We explored several opportunities and nothing seemed to fit. He and Rose went to Lakeside one Saturday and he called me shortly after that and said I needed to check them out. A few months after that they announced they wanted to start a campus in Orangevale. I remember Stephen telling me he was talking to Brian Chandler (be sure to click on the link and explore Brian’s website and find out how you can support him as he goes off to fulfill God’s calling for him in working with the Ethos Church in San Diego) about leading worship for the new campus and Brian telling him to pray about it. Brian didn’t realize at the time that this opportunity WAS the result of over a year of prayer.

There are a lot of stories I’m forgetting and a few I can’t tell you, but trust me when I say you can see God’s provision in them. The last two months have brought the hope back. And with it comes the laughter, because I’m just not willing to give cancer that kind of power over my life again.

-eric

A Poetic Interlude – John Rybicki

A Stephen Story – Rebecca Gardner

My good friend and baseball buddy, Eric Nelson, has a very good friend named Stephen Shirley who is currently battling a very nasty form of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.  Similar to the often fatal Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (which my father has remarkably beat three times now — go dad!!), Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is typically a much more beatable form of the disease causing patients to generally undergo one round of chemo and then enjoy a remarkable remission rate in the 90th percentile (like my colleage Dawn Cole — yay Dawn!)

Unfortunately, however, Stephen has not been so lucky with his form of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.  He is a young man yet has been battling Hodgkins lymphoma for over two years.  Stephen’s doctors (including my dad’s oncologist Dr. Quadro) have treated Stephen with several different forms of chemotherapy, and he is currently undergoing a stem cell transplant that will be followed by radiation and a second stem cell transplant.  Unfortunately, none of these treatments have yet eradicated the cancer that is in Stephens’s body.

Stephen is trying to get into M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.  A hospital on the cutting edge of cancer treatment, M.D. Anderson is having amazing results with cancer patients with difficult cases like Stephen’s.  The treatments at M.D. Anderson are extremely expensive.  Stephen will need $40,000 just to start treatment and the total bill for treatment will be much, much higher.

Stephen’s friends are pulling together to try to raise the money for Stephen’s treatments and I’m writing to ask for your consideration of a donation to the cause.  I know that times are economically difficult for a lot of people, but any size donation in this case really will help Stephen.

If you are able to help, there is a Trust Fund called “The Stephen Shirley Medical Fund” at Wells Fargo Bank and the trustee for the account is Rosemary Shirley and Bob Kariya.  If you can, please consider depositing a check at Wells Fargo to this account or sending it to my friend Eric at 9286 Madison Ave in Orangevale, CA 95662, or visit www.savingstephen.com for more information or to make a donation on line.

Thank you for taking time to read this and to consider helping a young man in need.

Sincerely,

Rebecca

 

A Fund update: Over $34,000

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to give everyone an update on where we stand with raising the initial $41,500 that Stephen needs for treatment in Houston at MD Anderson.

As of Friday there had been over $32,000 in donations made, both online and to the Wells Fargo trust account.

Tonight, with a HUGE thanks to the Beach Hut Deli @ Midtown (24th and J st…if you’re in that neck of the woods swing by, grab a sandwich and say thank you) we were able to add $1,327 to that total.

So, that brings the total amount raised to over $34,000.

It’s been amazing seeing this all play out.  A few short weeks ago$41,500 seemed like an almost impossible total.  Now that goal is in sight and it’s been made possible by a lot of people having a strong desire to take part in Stephen’s story.

Simply saying thank you doesn’t seem like enough, but at the moment it’s all I can think to say.

Thank you.

An In-laws Impression

Below is a contribution Stephen’s In-Laws Bob & Mary Kariya.

Who is this young man? Rosemary, where did you find him? How did you meet him? What does he do? Is he a Christian? Why does he have an earring? He’s a musician??? A thousand questions from protective parents? AND HE DRIVES A LOUD CAR; RAN OUT OF GAS; WAS PULLED OVER BY THE ROCKLIN PD AFTER VISITING OUR DAUGHTER. Who is this young man!? His name is Stephen, Daddy. WOW ROSEMARY, HE PUT AWAY 10 TACOS TONIGHT; He was hungry.

Our first impression filled with many questions, but each placed to rest as we have come to love Stephen as our son. Rosemary, Grandma Bachan wants to know why is his hair standing up?

I think Rosemary must really love Stephen. Stephen, what did you say? You are asking me for my daughter’s hand in marriage? When? Where? What are your plans? How are you guys going to make ends meet? You’re going to Capital Christian and then on a Band Tour? What are you going to do for money? Sleep in the car? Rosemary is not going!

What do you mean your car broke down and you were stopped by the Shasta County Deputy. Where? When? Why?

Oh No! This is it, my last daughter is getting married. I’m walking down this wooded path to the altar to give my daughter’s hand in marriage. Daddy don’t cry. You better not cry! But Rosemary, I’m putting the trust, care and nurture of my last most precious gift that God gave, to this young man. I’m loosing my daughter,……… but gaining a son-in-law. (Trust in the Lord with all your heart …………………..Pr: 3;5)

Golf? I have not golfed in 30 + years. Golf lessons? You want to go play golf? You bought me golf shoes? When? Where? Why?

You want to go where to play Golf? Where? When? Why? HAWAII??????? My score is over 3 digits and I leave divots everywhere I go; even on the putting green. So what? What do you mean just to have fun. Take our clubs too!?

What do you mean cancer? Where? When? Why?

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will set your path straight” Pr: 3; 5-6

Stephen, we have come to respect you and am honored to be called your Father / Mother in-law. We love you as our Son.

Dave and Marlene, you have a fine son with a heart of gold. Thank you. “For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11

- Bob & Mary Kariya

A Poetic Interlude – Kate Asche

Right around the time Stephen first started experiencing symptoms, another friend of ours had a cancer scare of his own.  He found a growth on his knee.  Being Charlie, of course it had to be something completely atypical, with something like 10 other cases in the entire US.  It’s something called a Melalumpasnuffleupagus…or something like that.

Anyway, I told you all that so I could tell you this.  His wife Kate, our resident Poet Laureate, graciously gave us a few poems that she has written. Inspired by Stephen and Rose and written by someone who has had a taste of the uncertainty they are going through.

Rosemary at the Glass

1.

I imagine her there

all the rooms instrument-humming

it’s morning

he’s awake in the airlock

rubbing his eyes and face

talk

talking into the glass

it jumbles their words

2.

I imagine her there

all the rooms are hospital white

it’s night

he sleeps still through the chemical drip

she watches him sleep

nosetip

fingertips against the glass window

between their one flesh

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