December 15 was the birthday of my older daughter Giselle. She died of a brain tumor four years ago, leaving a husband and daughters aged three and 16 months. I miss her, and want to say a bit about her.
Giselle was always fair of complexion, with dark hair (eventually - she was blond as a toddler) and big blue-grey eyes, which she learned to use very early. One of her first friends was Jason Johnston, who lived across the street. From the time they were about two years old, she could get him to do anything she wanted, just by batting her eyes and threatening a little cry - and she knew it.
When she was about eight, Giselle started to play soccer - and I became the coach. Though she was always one of the smallest members on the team, Giselle was a good player, quick with her feet and always thinking strategically.
In school, Giselle learned to play the violin. At first she used the family-heritage violin made by my great-uncle, who handed it down. As it happens, I started violin before I ever played piano, but Giselle quickly played better than I ever did. In fact, she somehow bypassed that horrible squeaky phase that I never seemed to get out of. As she got to be a teenager, she joined the Bartlesville Strolling Strings, run by Barbara Wallace, who quickly became one of the more important people in her life.
Music was always important to Giselle. Besides violin, she played piano and had a beautiful, clear soprano voice, without the whiny breathiness that some high school girls develop. She was chosen to represent Bartlesville in All-District choirs and All-District orchestras while in high school. Her signature song was "His Hands," about the Savior. Here is a tape of her singing.
Giselle always got good grades, partially because of good native intelligence, but also because of her willingness to work hard to learn. One night during her senior year in high school, Giselle came to me in tears and said, "Dad, I've been trying really hard to get scholarships for college, but it just hasn't worked; I'm so sorry." I sympathized, of course, and said that she was still going to college anyway, and that everything would work out for the best. The next day, I got a phone call at work informing me that Giselle had won one of the four-year Phillips employee dependents' scholarships that would pay for her entire college tuition!
She spent two years at Ricks College, the LDS junior college in Rexburg, ID, (it's now called BYU-Idaho) then finished up her BA in Elementary Education at Pittsburg State, KS. She and her sister Krista were roommates at Ricks and at Pitt State, after having shared a room their whole lives at home. They never had better friends than each other.At Pitt State, Giselle met Hyriam Fleming in choir. Hyriam is a big, tall (6'4") man with a gentle way. He also has a degree in chemistry and plays jazz. I have always felt immensely flattered that Giselle was attracted to a chemist/musician like me, even if that was not the attraction! They soon started seeing a lot more of each other. Eventually, Hyriam joined the LDS Church, and they were married in the LDS Temple in St. Louis, MO. Two girls, Livia and McKenna, followed in due time.
For several years, Hyriam taught chemistry and physics in the little town of Sublette, KS, population about 1500. Sublette's only distinction is that it is the county seat of the flattest county in Kansas! But it was a good home for them for several years.
Giselle was unable to get a job as an elementary education teacher in Sublette, but was recruited to teach Special Education in a multi-county consortium. To retain her position, she had to have a master's degree - and the consortium paid for her to get it! She received her M.A. cum laude from Emporia State University.
Eventually, though, they decided that teaching was not a great way to raise a family, so Hyriam went back to school, enrolling in the pharmacy program at Kansas University in Lawrence. They bought a little house in Eudora, KS, just a few miles from Lawrence, and Giselle got a job teaching Special Ed in the elementary school walking distance from their home.In the fall of 2004, Giselle had several severe headaches that over-the-counter medications just didn't seem to deal with. Finally, one afternoon in October, the headache was so severe that Hyriam took her to the emergency room at the hospital in Lawrence. They basically took one look at her and sent them to Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, where tests confirmed that Giselle had a brain tumor. The diagnosis was astrocytoma, grade III or IV. According to one source,
"the highest grade (IV), also known as glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), is the most common primary CNS malignancy and second most frequent brain tumor. Despite the comparatively low incidence of astrocytomas to other human cancers, the higher grades (III & IV) represent disparate mortality rates. Median survival of GBM victims who forgo treatment is approximately 90 days, and even with aggressive surgical, radio- and chemo-therapies is only extended to about twelve months, while long term survival (at least five years) falls under 3%."It was determined that Giselle had a tumor roughly the size of a lemon, slightly above and forward of her right ear. Since astrocytomas are derived from star-shaped cells (hence the astro- part of the name), the surgeons hoped they would be able to remove all the tentacles.
Giselle and Hyriam approached this grim prognosis with faith and hope. Since it was nearly Halloween, they did all the things that families with young children do on Halloween - but they also made sure to have a family portrait taken. Halloween was a Saturday; on Monday, Giselle went into the hospital and had surgery on Tuesday.
Initially, the surgery seemed to have gone very well. Unfortunately, the surgeons were not able to remove all the tendrils of the tumor for fear of damaging her brain. Giselle was feeling pretty good, to the point that she was reading stories to her girls and looking forward to getting home again. On Wednesday and Thursday, though, things turned very bad indeed. It was later determined that swelling in her brain stem left Giselle without brain function, and she died Thursday morning, just after Vickie and I arrived from Salt Lake. Before her operation, we had wanted to come to Kansas to be near, but Giselle called and asked me not to come until afterward, because she did not want to deal with the problems that my former wife would cause if we were there. I cannot now and probably will never be able to forgive Robyn for that.
Since my father is a mortician, I learned as a teenager how to apply makeup; at that point it was mostly for Halloween and stage use, of course. But how many men can say that their father taught them how to do makeup? Anyway, I had the privilege of applying the makeup to Giselle's body prior to the viewing and funeral. It's not morbid at all, and in fact having Hyriam ask me to do that is one of the greatest honors I've ever received.
Giselle was buried in Eudora, KS, on - as is proper for Kansas - a windswept hill overlooking a pretty meadow bordered by a little stream. She left Hyriam with two little girls, Livia, age three, and McKenna, sixteen months.
Life continues: after some very difficult time as a single father (which he did very well at, though hairdos were always a trial) Hyriam has happily remarried, and his wife Sunny has become a wonderful mother to the girls. They now live in Riverton, UT, just about 15 miles from Vickie and me.
The girls recognize Giselle mainly from pictures; Livia remembers Giselle only slightly, and McKenna not at all. They have started to call Sunny "Mommy," which is good, because Sunny will be the only mother they will know for most of their lives. But Giselle lives on in our memories. We all miss her, now and always.
