Foundations of love – How loss turned into action for three grieving mothers

When the grief comes grinding down hard, families look for signs of the kids they loved.

A red balloon.

A white bird.

A circling hawk.

“I asked Bella, ‘When you are in heaven and Mommy wants to see you, what will you come back as?’ Her answer was a red bird,” says Kim Bowman.

Bowman lost Bella in December 2011 after the 8-year-old battled brain cancer, then succumbed to necrosis caused by the radiation used to keep the cancer away.

Since then, mysterious coincidences have occurred.

After the Bowman family did a birthday balloon release in honor of Bella at the local Chick-fil-A, a red balloon landed in their yard on the other side of town.

Bella’s daddy, Trey, almost ran over it with his lawn mower.

A dove visited the Bowmans on Easter Sunday. It stayed on their lawn all day. They believed it was Bella coming to say she loves them.

But signs from those who have passed only come when they come.

You can’t steer them. There’s no seeking them out.

Giving back is another matter. It’s an immediate action.

On March 7, the Bowman family will host its second annual Bella’s Ball, a date night for adults at L’Auberge Casino to benefit the Bella Bowman Foundation, a charity that Kim and her family started in the weeks after Bella’s death.

In 2012, the Foundation earned close to $90,000. Money raised will be used for research, education and comfort in the form of care bags and other hospital essentials for families of sick kids.

The Bowmans’ long-term goal is to build Bella’s House, a hospice care facility for little ones.

“If just her story touches someone, then that is the most rewarding thing,” Kim Bowman says. “That encourages me to do more.”

In January 2011, Bella Bowman was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

The little girl with wavy light brown hair imagined the tumor in her head as a red dot. She would say, “Go away, red dot, and don’t you ever come back again.”

By June, after five months of chemotherapy and radiation, the Bowmans got good news: Bella’s scans were clear. It was a good summer, and Bella had plenty of chances to goof around with her younger sister Baylor, now 5.

In August, though, Bella started having trouble swallowing. Tests showed that her brain had been affected by radiation. Over the next four months, she had 60 hyperbaric oxygen treatments.

In December, Bella had a stroke. Her final days at Our Lady of the Lake Hospital were bitter and also sweet, Kim recalls.

“Bella used to always say, ‘It’s going to be okay,’” Kim Bowman says.

“She was very special,” says Sharon Novas, Kim’s mother and Bella’s grandmother. Novas’s husband passed away a few years ago, and Bella was always eager to offer an encouraging word.

Soon after Bella passed away, Kim recalls, “I looked at my husband and said, ‘I’m ready.’ We always said when she gets better we would start a foundation.”

Bowman kicked off her charity efforts with a ball. Bella would have loved that. The foundation provides “comfort care,” support and counsel for families with children facing cancer.

“I won’t be able to plan her wedding,” Bella’s mom says. “I won’t be able to plan her Sweet 16. I feel this is my way to be able to do those things.”

Lisa McAlister sits in her kitchen cradling a stuffed bear. Press a button, and the whoosh-whoosh of a heartbeat echoes off of a rough-hewn table that McAlister’s husband Herman made.

It’s the sound of Lisa and Herman’s daughter Vivian’s heart.

It’s also Armani’s heart.

Armani’s mother recorded the sound of his heart into the stuffed bear and mailed it to Lisa McAlister as a way of saying thank you.

Armani is alive because McAlister and her family chose, on the darkest day of their lives, to give something precious to complete strangers.

They didn’t stay strangers, though.

One by one, in the months after Vivian died tragically, the McAlister family managed to meet each of the people who received Vivian’s organs.

In May 2009, just after her second birthday, Vivian, the youngest of the four McAlister kids, fell into the family pool.

Though first responders were able to revive Vivian, in the days that followed, it became clear that the lively, funny toddler wouldn’t recover.

As Lisa McAlister rocked her baby and tried to make sense of the fact that her daughter was brain-dead, she felt a stirring in her heart.

She knew donating Vivian’s organs would be the best way to make something good out of this awful experience.

And yet, it was almost too painful to give.

Talking about it now, McAlister can still remember the bright lights in the conference room at the hospital where she answered seemingly endless questions about her daughter so that representatives from Louisiana Organ Procurement Agency (LOPA) could follow protocol.

“I nearly just left the room screaming,” McAlister admits.

Herman stayed the course.

“No,” he said. “We’re going to do this.”

In the next months, McAlister says, she could hardly leave the house.

Friends came and checked on her. Eventually, Herman tore out the family swimming pool. In its place, the family planted a garden. Friends and loved ones brought plant cuttings and tended to the foliage.

But there was little else they could do to soothe Lisa’s immense suffering.

Then the bear with a recording of Vivian’s heartbeat arrived. And letters and phone calls followed.

Little Callie received Vivian’s liver.

John, an adult, has one of her kidneys.

Tedrick, also grown, has the other.

Knowing this helped Lisa pick up the pieces to her own life.

The McAlisters hit the road to meet them all.

When they met Armani and his family, his mother placed her hand on her son’s solar plexus and looked at Lisa. “She touched his chest and said, ‘Her DNA is there. She keeps him alive,’” McAlister recalls.

A year and a half after Vivian’s death, in 2010, Lisa McAlister gave birth to her fifth child, a little girl they named Alden. McAlister was 43 at the time, and the birth felt like a miracle.

“She was a gift from Vivian,” McAlister says, glancing at Alden.

The 2-year-old wriggles in the arms of her 12-year-old sister Claire, who hands her to 16-year-old Andrew. Neil, 8, looks on with a soft grin, always watching his baby sister.

Outside, flowers unfurl in Vivian’s garden. All those cuttings from friends and family took firm root and burst into color and life. It looks a bit like revival.

It didn’t take long for Staci Pepitone to adopt Baton Rouge.

As soon as she moved here to work at LSU in 1998, Pepitone was a purple-and-gold-wearing, never-slam-the-coach Tigers fan.

From Ohio, she told her mom Brenda about her new city. She made friends fast and enjoyed life in the Capital City. She dug in, working on Groovin’ on the Grounds and bringing the AIDS Quilt to campus.

When she was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2007, Pepitone vowed to beat it. Months later, when her chances of survival shrank to 3%, her answer was simple: “Someone has to be the three percent.”

Brenda Pepitone knew then she needed to move to Baton Rouge to help her daughter. It was the beginning of a new life for her that included both crippling sadness and a new calling.

The Pepitones often talked about starting some sort of foundation to help cancer patients who had to travel to get treatment.

While Staci was being treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, they’d been inspired by a young man named Jeff, who drove 10 hours each time he had chemo.

“When I get better,” Staci Pepitone vowed to her mom, “I’m going to start something that will help people like Jeff.”

The night in March 2010 before she slipped into a coma then died at age 43, Pepitone had a party in her hospital room. All her coworkers were there. There were no goodbyes. No sniffles. No movie-like monologs.

Just laughter and good memories.

“She had a great time that night,” recalls Brenda Pepitone.

Staci’s last words to Brenda Pepitone were decidedly everyday, but lovely. “I love you, Mama.”

In the months that followed, Brenda Pepitone made two decisions: one, that she wanted to stay in Baton Rouge. It was Staci’s home, and staying here made Brenda feel closer to her daughter. “Her spirit is here,” she says.

Two, Brenda knew that she was going to start the charity they dreamed of, even though she had no idea how.

“Staci never let grass grow under her feet,” Pepitone says.

Pepitone called her nonprofit Geaux Past Cancer—The Staci A. Pepitone Fund. The nonprofit’s mission is to help with the extraneous costs that come along with cancer treatment.

This fall Geaux Past Cancer put on the Geaux the Extra Mile 5K run. Pepitone gave Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center a check for $4,000 to help 160 cancer patients pay for gas when they travel for treatment.

“This isn’t for wimps,” Pepitone says. “Every day is different. Some days I can get up and think, ‘What wonderful surprises will I have today?’ Other days, I don’t want to get up.”

But giving back is good. And the Capital City is good, too. Staci knew it. Brenda has figured it out in the most difficult way possible.

“One of my dreams has always been to get in an RV and just go. That’s not it, anymore,” she says. “If I leave, it’s like leaving her again. Her friends here are the most amazing people in the world.”