Her leg is infected and required surgery before the the prosthetic was fitted.
Juanita’s Story
When Juanita died, we wondered if our help had truly mattered. At her funeral, her grandfather told us we had given the family one extra year—a year filled with smiles, laughter, and hope. “That was a wonderful thing,” he said.
Juanita lived just outside the city in a small farming and ranching community. Like so many families in the colonias, her parents could not afford cancer treatments. We contacted Giving Hope Worldwide, and they immediately partnered with us to do everything possible for Juanita.
As often happens, there were periods of progress and moments of deep disappointment. Even so, her death shocked us.
Her funeral—like her face—is an enduring memory. Many of her friends rode horses in the procession, and her casket was carried up a hillside cemetery on a horse-drawn wagon. The graveyard looked like something from a Dickens-era film: no neat rows of headstones, just scattered graves marked in every direction. The sky was overcast, heavy, and gray.
After the service, I stayed behind and slowly walked back to Juanita’s grave. My thoughts and emotions were all over the place. It had seemed so certain that she would recover. Everyone tried so hard, and she had been improving. Her death left me stunned.
My thoughts were interrupted by an elderly man who approached and gently asked if I was all right. I asked if he had known Juanita. “I’m her grandfather,” he said.
He told me I was thinking about everything the wrong way. “Everyone knows about you,” he said. “You gave us an entire year with Juanita that we never would have had without your help. That was a wonderful thing.”
He spoke about Juanita playing and laughing with her friends and reminded me that her last year was much more than hospital visits. “She had wonderful times during the months you gave her,” he said.
From that moment on, I realized that when these children die, we did not lose. We helped them fight back. We gave them time—time their families never would have had. I thought back to little Oscar, the first child we lost to cancer. Just a month before his death, he was outside tossing a football with me and playing with his friends.
Juanita’s passing gave me a new way of understanding success.