Satira's Funeral and Healthcare Fund

I would like to introduce you to my sister Satira "Tira" O'Connell. She was born in April in the mid-1960's, one of 8 children. She was a beautiful child: happy, spirited, eager to be a friend and a help to everyone she met. She ran track, played volleyball, was a social butterfly. 

She was GREAT with numbers and had great attention to detail, which made her a proficient bookkeeper and auditor as an adult. She was always a hard worker, starting at the age of 15 working at Knowlton's Ice Cream shop. She worked for HEB, later for Home Depot, then finally for Texas A&M University. It seemed like she never stopped. 

 

She married and had two children. She became a single mother after divorce, struggling to give them a good life. 

 

If Tira wanted to show you that she loved you, she made you something tasty to eat. Every Christmas she was in charge of desserts for her extended family. She was always adventurous in the kitchen. Teaching herself how to make tamales, becoming obsessed with Asian food, having an occasional crawfish boil. She loved to entertain, and you could find her in the kitchen, showing her love for her children and grandchildren with food made by her own hands.

 

In her late 20's she was diagnosed with diabetes, and she struggled to control her blood sugars so as to delay the health complications that almost all diabetics suffer. 

Despite all her efforts, in 2017 a series of adverse and life-altering medical issues came up,  a cascade of acute and chronic illnesses. She dealt with each of them the best she could. 

It wasn't the quadruple heart bypass, nor the uncontrollable blood pressures, high and low; and it wasn't even the end stage kidney disease that changed her life so much.  What finally laid her low, taking away her job, her independence, her joy, and finally her dignity was a series of strokes which began in 2019. In 2020 she had a major stroke which left her partially paralyzed, forcing her to leave her home in College Station and move to our home in Houston, where she could live in a safe and loving environment. She resented that she was so dependent on others. She longed for the days when she could just get up and go to work and take care of her life. Then in March of this year, 2021, Tira suffered another major, and final, stroke. This time she did not recover. She was never able to return home after being taken by ambulance to the hospital ER. 

 

She worked her whole life and had little to show materially for her hard work, reliability, and loyalty. She left this world with $10,000 in medical debt, even though over the past year we have been able to pay off nearly as much. And there will be more bills coming as a consequence of her most recent stroke, which resulted in a final hospital stay over two months long. She had Medicare disability insurance, which helped tremendously, but there will still be thousands of dollars more added to her existing medical debt. She had no pre-planned funeral arrangements, so her two children are left trying to figure out how they will pay to bury their mother. 

 

My sister's children, my family, and I would be so very grateful if you were moved to help us bury our mother and sister. We would also be grateful if we were able to help honor her by paying off her medical bills, especially those that she incurred after her most recent stroke. It was always important to Tira to do the best she could to honor her obligations.

 

Thank you for reading and learning about our beloved sister. We appreciate any donation that you are moved to give.

 

With gratitude,

Mary Thro neé O'Connell