Honoring Denise Clow's Memory & Final Wish

Hello friends, family, and community. As many of you know, we lost our mother Denise Clow last June. After planning for mom’s funeral Sky, Michael, and I immediately knew our next move was to honor her final wish, which mom would tell us over and over as children, was to spread her ashes in St. Simons Island, Georgia one day when she’s gone. That day came too soon, but this is something my siblings and I are determined to do to honor her memory and let her know that we were listening all those years.

St. Simons Island’s significance to mom comes from a certain special night-into-morning in November of 2001, when the three of us kids were woken up in the middle of the night and driven all the way to St. Simons Island (we lived in Brunswick, GA at the time) so that we could see the Leonid Meteor Storm. In the wee hours of that morning we watched the sea of stars falling over the beach as a family, went and got Waffle House breakfast (the pecan waffles were our favorite), then came back to the beach and took the very photo you see above just as the sun was rising. That was mom’s all-time favorite picture of all of us together and that night-into-morning remained what mom described to be one of the best days of her life.

June 17th of this year will be the one year anniversary of mom’s passing, and my siblings and I chose that as the date we would like to do the ash spreading ceremony as well as honor her a little early for what would have been her 54th birthday (June 29th).

Unfortunately Sky, Michael and I have each faced significant financial hardship since our mother’s passing last summer due to illness, switching jobs, moving, and unemployment. Each month we’ve checked in about how to make the cost of this trip possible and each month our circumstances just haven’t made it seem within reach.

So today, we are reaching out to you all; our family, our friends, and our community, for help to make our mother Denise’s final wish possible.

The funds raised will go to round-trip transportation, room, and board for Sky, Michael, and I, as well as Michael’s wife Paloma and my boyfriend Casey. Any contribution, no matter the size, is deeply appreciated and brings us one step closer to making this journey possible. We totally understand that not everyone may be in a position to donate, but we would be grateful if you could share our story with others who may be able to help. To say it would mean the world to us is an understatement, to wait another year would be heartbreaking. But with your help, we can finally set our mom, Denise Clow’s, soul to rest the way that she would have wanted.

As always, your support, kind words, and prayers are invaluable to us during this difficult and emotional time.

Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for considering a contribution to our cause.

With all our love and gratitude,

-Heidi Tolson on behalf of the Tolson family