A good story that doesn’t end the way you want it to

One day close to Christmas 2019, Pam was driving her Life Launch mentee, Tray, back to school at OSU Okmulgee. The two women had been matched on a Life Launch team and already completed their one-year commitment to the program. Now, they were just doing life together. On the occasional weekend or break from school, Tray would come home to Tulsa to spend time with Pam and her family.

The drive back was cold and prompted Pam to ask if Tray had enough warm clothes. “We stopped at this store, I think it was a Cato, and she’s just ecstatic, going from rack to rack and pulling out clothes. We were having such a typical, fun time,” Pam remembers. “I said, ‘Let me find that in your size. What size do you wear?’ And she’s like, ‘I don’t know.’” Teasingly, Pam said, “You don’t know your size?!” Laughing together, they finished their shopping. Tray ended up with a couple of outfits and a pair of boots.

Back in the car, Pam said, “I’m just in awe that you don’t know what size you wear!” As Pam remembers it, “Tray said, ‘I’ve never got to go shop like this and pick out my own things.’” After all their years together and fun things they’d done, the admission shocked Pam. “It was all I could do to hold back the tears. It was such a big moment for her and another thing that really connected us.”

Pam came to volunteer at Stand in the Gap through her church, Life.Church South Broken Arrow. She said, “I worked in women’s healthcare for quite some time. I have seen many young girls coming from hard places. I felt such compassion for them.”

After what she calls her initial “discovery phase” with Tray, getting to know each other’s likes and dislikes and talking about dreams and aspirations.  Pam helped Tray move into the goal setting phase of their relationship. “She wanted to have her own restaurant, so we started talking about a summer job and going to school for culinary arts.”
Pam’s son worked in the hospitality industry and helped Tray land a summer job. “Then we realized, she’s going to need some transportation.” Pam taught Tray to drive, an experience she calls “great for the prayer life.”

When they first met, Pam could see that Tray struggled to think beyond the present moment. She tended to “execute a thought, rather than a plan.” After her first paycheck, she called Pam from Wal-Mart. After walking to the store and buying many things, she realized that she wouldn’t be able to carry everything home. She asked Pam what to do. “I said, ‘well let me think, why don’t you go to guest services and tell them you need to leave your things and will be back in a little while.’” After she finished work for the day, Pam drove Tray back to Wal-Mart and helped get her groceries home. As they drove, they made a plan for the next time Tray needed to go to Wal-Mart.

Over the next few years, Pam and her family guided Tray as she set her career and financial goals. Tray would come to dinner with the family, spending time with Pam’s granddaughters and children. The two women cooked together—Tray’s specialty was fried chicken—and the rest of the family “just loved her and accepted her.”

Pam took Tray to eye doctor appointments and out for ice cream. Tray grew to thrive in the structure of school. But she began to suffer from many headaches and social stresses. At work one afternoon, Pam got a call from Tray saying that she had gone to the hospital and was being admitted because of her headache and other symptoms.

“I said, ‘What do you need? I’m right down the street so keep me in the loop.’ The next call I got was from TJ Warren (at that time, TJ was the Life Launch Program Manager) asking me if I knew her mother’s phone number. On my lunch hour, I called the nurses station, and I said, ‘I work on the nursing staff at St. John and I know you’re very limited on the information you can give me, but I have been Tray’s mentor for four years, I am like her mother, could you please tell me how she’s doing?’ She said, ‘I really hate to tell you this over the phone, but we just pronounced her deceased.’” Tray had undiagnosed hydrocephalus. She died one week before her 21^st birthday.

“It was such a shock. My whole family pulled together trying to make sense of it. We were so thankful that we had that time with her. It was an important time for her, and we learned a lot about ourselves, who we are and what we are here for.”

Four years later, Pam says, “Anytime you are in a love relationship, it will always end in pain. But this is still a good story, even though it doesn’t have the ending that we would have ever thought it would have. Tray got to experience family with us” and the last years of her life were filled with purpose and hope.

Pam’s Life Launch experience ended in the worst possible way. But she calls the time she was with Tray “really quite easy and quite rewarding. It’s not as hard as we make it. It’s just being available to someone else.”

When asked to give advice to anyone considering volunteering for a Stand in the Gap small group, Pam says, “Just be willing to step out and discover. You will find that it is more rewarding than you could ever imagine to see someone who maybe doesn’t have hope for a future, and we can give them that hope.”