Warner Robins hospice team helps make Middle Georgia woman’s wedding wishes come true
After the stroke that could have taken her life last April, Sarah Smith realized that tomorrow is never guaranteed.
Now, three months after her doctor put her in contact with Hospice Care Options Warner Robins, Smith’s hospice team is helping put together the event that she used to think could wait: a wedding to her partner of 26 years, Thomas Wall.
Smith is a 60-year-old woman from Perry who has raised three daughters alongside her fiance. Before her stroke, she was known as a caregiver in her family who was always putting the needs of others first, according to Lisa Johnson, a chaplain for hospice care.
Plans for this wedding began soon after Smith met Johnson and the rest of her at home care hospice team, who asked if she had any bucket-list wishes they could help turn into a reality.
“We asked her, ‘Sarah, is there anything that you would like to accomplish before you pass away?’” said Johnson. “And she kind of laughed and she said ‘well I guess I probably should get married.’”
After hearing about her wedding wish, Smith’s hospice team began recruiting volunteers from the community to help out with everything from wedding cake to finding a mobility scooter.
“It has been amazing to watch the community come together,” Johnson said. “There’s the chef from Natalia’s and the Rookery who did a tasting for them last week, and she made them six different cakes to choose from with four different icings, and she’s just doing it out of the goodness of her heart. And then a funeral home is loaning us their sound equipment so that we can have sound that day. And there’s two different people who stepped up to do the photography… it’s just beautiful to me to watch people come forward.”
Local Jackson business Hunter’s Cafe has offered to provide food, and one woman in Warner Robins volunteered to lend Smith her mobility scooter for her wedding day.
Hospice team members and other community members have even volunteered to spend the evening decorating the venue at Indian Springs Pavilion the night before the ceremony, which is set to take place April 2.
“Sometimes you get down on the world and you just don’t think there’s any goodness out there anymore, but this has shown me differently,” Smith said.
This isn’t the first time Smith and Wall have talked about marriage since they met in 1995 in Perry. In fact, Wall has proposed twice in the past. And although Smith said yes both times, she was never in a rush to make the ceremony happen.
“I guess I had the mentality ‘if it’s not broke, don’t fix it,’” Smith said. “Because things were going well and you have everyday life to live. It became ‘I’m comfortable, we’re comfortable, let’s just live our everyday lives because we’ve always got tomorrow; we can do it tomorrow.’”
Right before Smith’s stroke, after more than two decades of being together, Smith and Wall were starting to make concrete wedding plans for the first time. But their plans were quickly put on hold.
“Then I had the stroke, and it could have resulted in me not being here any more,” Smith said. “So now I feel like you can’t really say ‘I’ll do it tomorrow,’ because tomorrow may never come. You need to enjoy your life today. You need to make your plans for today.”
