Help Fill Marcie's Gray Clouds with Sunshine

Everybody has that special friend (if they’re lucky); the one who spreads sunshine and makes you smile just by being themselves. For so many of us, that friend is Marcie Abel. Besides being an upbeat, beautiful friend, she is also an amazing teacher, loving wife, supportive mother…and soon to be adoring grandmother! Marcie has always been there whenever any of us need her and I’m sure we all have stories of how she has lifted our spirits or helped us out, but now it is our turn.

As you know, Marcie's cancer battle began five years ago - and she won! She returned to teaching, then retired and fulfilled her lifelong dream of living at the beach. She and her best friend/husband, Mike, have enjoyed wonderful times in Venice, FL, and they have many plans for the future, but now cancer has again disrupted these plans. Instead of riding bikes and relaxing by the pool, much of their time is now spent travelling to appointments and as you can imagine, the bills are mounting.

Together with my friends, Kristin Stapor and Annie Mackey (aka the Sunshine Sisters), we have been looking for ways to help support Marcie as she battles cancer for the second time. Along with so many other people who love Marcie, we have sent daily texts and jokes, supportive cards and gifts, and funny, often inappropriate tokens of our love, along with our deepest prayers - but we wanted to do more. We put our heads together and came up with the idea to create a GoFundMe to help relieve at least one concern - the growing cost of her medical bills, doctors visits, and traveling expenses (including gas, meals, and hotel for Mike, who has logged many miles over the past 3 months). As much as we’d like to, we can’t take away her illness, but we can help relieve her financial concerns. Feeling helpless, we, her Sunshine Sisters, are reaching out to her many friends and colleagues and asking for your help.

William Butler Yeats wrote, “There are no strangers here; only friends you haven’t met yet.” and if you know Marcie, you know this couldn’t be a more apt description of her! Together let’s shower our favorite ray of sunshine with so much love and support while her skies are gray. Please consider making a donation in any amount and share this post to extend our reach. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts!