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

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.

How I saw 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

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

Well its finally here. We will traveling to Houston next week to begin the testing for the amazing treatment that MD Anderson has to offer. We talked a little with the doctor and she confirmed what we had heard which is great success with odd cases like my own where remission has been hard to get with traditional chemotherapy. We wanted to say thanks to everyone who has contributed to the fund to help us pay for next week. Thanks to everyone who contributed we have over $37,000 to help pay for the initial testing. I would have never believed we could raise almost the entire 41k in just 2 months. thanks so much. Continue to pray for Rosemary and I as we travel to Houston that this will be our last treatment that i need. I feel very confident that we are close to finally beating this horrible disease. See ya and thanks again.

Posted by Stephen S at 3/30/2009