Meredith Walter remembers the anticipation of opening the letter from Wheaton College, her top choice. When she realized that she had been accepted, she jumped up and down, screaming. Then it hit her. The one person she wanted to share the news with most of all, her mother Karen Walter, wasn’t there.
“I know how much she wanted that for me,” Meredith Walter says. But Walter won’t see her mom cheer for her at Grant High School’s graduation. She won’t have the memory of her mom helping her move into a college dorm. And she won’t expect a care package or a phone call if she gets homesick at Wheaton.
Almost a year and a half ago, Walter lost her mother to cancer. As she ends her academic career at Grant, Walter continues to work through the pain from losing her mom by focusing on her relationship with God and on helping her family move forward.
Meredith Walter has lived in the same house since she was four with her younger sister, Caroline, and older brother, Grant. “It was a good childhood,” she recalls.
She remembers running around the house playing “bear” with her dad, a game they invented. Her mother would cook every night and they would always try to have family dinners together.
Her dad, Elliot Walter, remembers his wife as “a connector.” She not only connected the family, but she connected friends and neighbors, too.
It was January 2009 when Karen Walter detected a lump in her breast while getting out of the shower. Doctors diagnosed her with Stage IV breast cancer, meaning it had already spread to other parts of her body.
Meredith Walter was in eighth grade at the time. Although she had grown up with Christianity, she had a shaky time in middle school and veered away from her family’s church. She had just decided to renew her relationship with the church when she found out about her mom’s diagnosis.
In February 2009, Karen Walter had surgery to remove the tumor and underwent chemotherapy. Things seemed fine until the Fourth of July in 2010. Doctors told Karen Walter that cancer had spread to her brain.
“Brain cancer is scarier,” Meredith Walter recalls. “She had a lot more side effects and she wasn’t allowed to drive, which was hard for her because she was a very independent woman.”
Karen Walter was in and out of the hospital during 2010 and 2011. Relatives came and helped make sure the family was stable. A website was set up to bring them food and people offered to assist in taking care of the children. Then, just when Karen was getting better, she was back in the hospital with crippling back and leg pain.
That day, with the family gathered around her mom’s hospital bed, doctors came in and told them that it was terminal cancer. “She said something like ‘We’re going to get through it,’” Walter says of her mom. “She wasn’t recognizing the severity of it.”
At the time, Meredith Walter says she turned her attention to renewing her relationship with God. “When she got brain cancer, I was a lot more scared and was praying a lot more,” she says. “There was really a lot of relying on Jesus because you can’t really do anything else. I couldn’t do anything else.”
She saw the last few months of her mom’s life spent in a hospital bed in their house. As time passed, her mom wasn’t able to speak and sometimes even forgot who people were. By the end of the summer, the nurses told the family they had 48 hours with her. On Aug. 29, 2011, relatives who had stayed up all night to be with her mother woke up the children at 3:44 a.m. “We kept telling her, ‘You can let go now. It’s OK.’ Then she took a couple more breaths and then was gone,” recalls Walter.
The funeral was held in early September. Walter remembers how the church she went to every Sunday was now filled with people dressed in black. “A sea of black,” she thought. Her mother was never going to sit with her in the pews again. Her pastor got up to do the eulogy. Then her dad, aunt, brother and sister all spoke. Her sister ended with: “She is and was my sunshine and she will never leave me.” Meredith Walter didn’t want to speak at the event. It was too difficult for her.
The house hasn’t been the same since her mother died, but Walter was quick to get back on her feet. She only took two days off work and then went back to being a lifeguard. She focused on school. “My mom was very big on family. There was always a meal waiting for us when we got home and we always tried to eat together,” she remembers. “I don’t think we have had a family dinner in almost two years. As much as I wish it could be fixed easily, I know it won’t be.”
Next fall, Walter intends to continue practicing her faith with like-minded students and faculty at Wheaton College. “The goal is to go to college and come out with a major in nursing and then get overseas and be a nurse,” says Walter, who also wants to minor in ancient languages. “Ideally, Africa would be amazing but it’s up to where the Lord leads me.”
Her dad knows that everywhere she goes, she will bring a little bit of her mom with her. “Meredith is a lot like Karen,” Elliot Walter says. “She is very inquisitive, she is very driven. When Meredith decides there’s something she wants, she finds a way to go out and get it.” ♦
