Dying Michigan teen starts fundraiser to help his dad

GAYLORD — Fifteen-year-old Trae Hawthorne was dying of cancer, so the teenager started a fundraiser. But it wasn’t to help himself.

“It’s for my dad, because he’s my hero,” Trae said. “He deserves everything. He’s had it rough.”

His dad, 51-year-old Tim Hawthorne, hasn’t worked in two years because he’s been caring for his son around the clock while also raising an 11-year-old daughter, alone. The medical expenses were covered by insurance, but the household bills were piling up. So was the stress.

“He’s doing as best as he can,” said Tim’s mom, 73-year-old Elizabeth Small. “He’s trying to stay strong because he has a little girl as well. I’m very concerned about him because we know what’s going to happen, and he’s trying to adjust to it. It’s a lot, but we do what we have to do.”

***

The bedroom was dark. The only light was the dim blue glow of a television. The only sound was the hum of an oxygen machine. Trae sat in his wheelchair, playing a video game. An oxygen tube clung to his face. A blanket covered his lap.

This is where he spends most of his time now. Barely two years ago, just before his 14th birthday, someone noticed a small lump on Trae’s collarbone. It seemed like nothing, but after just a few weeks it grew noticeably larger. Tim took him to urgent care, which sent them to the hospital for scans. They barely made it back home to their driveway when the hospital called. You’d better turn around and come back, they said.

It turned out to be a very rare form of bone cancer found in only a few hundred kids in this country every year. Trae underwent 11 weeks of chemo, then had his collarbone removed, then endured another 15 weeks of treatment after that. Meanwhile, Tim quit his job at the auto dealership, stopped playing drums with his reggae band, devoted his time to caring for his son. “I don’t ever leave the house, other than running to the corner store,” he said.

By last summer, Trae was in remission. He returned to school in the fall, went back to playing football, resumed the life of a kid.

In January they were on a family vacation, and Trae was miserable. His whole body was in pain. “You could just see it in his face, but he didn’t know what was wrong,” Tim said. “He was like, ‘Dad, I’m dying.' And I’m like, ‘Boy, you’re not dying. You probably just got a cold coming on.’”

But the cancer had returned, and it was spreading. Chains of tumors glowed like constellations on his scans, encircling his lungs, pressing against his heart, pushing on his jugular. He started chemo again, this time at a heavier dose, delivered intravenously for hours at a time. But on his fourth visit to the hospital, a place he hated to be, Trae had enough. The chemo was making him too sick.

No more of those treatments, he said. I just want to go home.

***

Tim rubbed his eyes. He’d barely slept an hour. To keep his son’s pain and anxiety at bay, he had to wake him every two hours to give him a cluster of medications, which meant nights haunted by fragmented sleep, stranding both of them in a weary twilight world that hovered someplace between night and day.

But Trae also was just too scared to fall asleep.

Six years ago, Trae's mom Ashley was walking into the hospice care facility where she worked as a nurse. She slipped in the snowy parking lot and broke her leg. After a couple weeks, her cast seemed too tight, so she saw a doctor and had it loosened. Not long after, as she and Tim and Trae were sitting and talking in the bedroom, Ashley slumped off the bed and fell hard to the floor.

Tim, an Army veteran, started CPR on his wife of 14 years.

“I brought her back to life,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Ashley, you just died,’ and she’s like, ‘What are you talking about?’ " She sat up, drank some water, even talked for awhile. But she kept fainting. An ambulance was called. So was her mother, who got there just in time to hold her daughter in her arms as she took her last breath. She was 31 and died of a blood clot. Suddenly, Tim was left to raise two kids on his own.

“You hear that saying that the Lord only gives you what your shoulders can bear? My shoulders aren’t that big,” Tim said. “Sometimes I’m like, ‘How much can one person take, Lord?’ ”

And as it unfolded, 8-year-old Trae watched in horror from the closet as his mom seemed to fall into a sleep from which she never awakened. That’s why he’d been asking his dad to spend the night alongside him in the bed. It was the only way he could relax enough to sleep awhile.

“I haven’t slept in my bedroom in three weeks,” Tim said. “He likes someone to sleep with at night; he’s afraid he’s going to die because he watched his mom die. So he really does not sleep at nighttime.”

***

On Palm Sunday, Trae asked to be baptized.

He’d been talking more about God recently, asking some big questions, though not because he’d become resigned to the worst. “I was just scared at first, cause the word ‘cancer’ is just scary,” Trae said. “But I just have faith in God, like I believe whatever is going to happen to me will happen to me. But I won’t die not trying to save my life.”

He’d grown weaker, but he was still relatively healthy. His appetite remained normal, with cravings for big portions of fried chicken, carrot cake, Chinese food, milkshakes. In fact, his grandma had just baked him a whole ham on request, a full dinner with sides. Doctors guessed he had a couple months, maybe even several more with a new medication they’d ordered for him. The family was just waiting for it to arrive.

Somehow, Tim found a pastor who agreed to come over. That afternoon, Trae lay shirtless in his bed, an oxygen tube on his face, a blanket covering his legs, with relatives gathered around him as the pastor spoke in prayer.

“Because Trae has put his faith in you, I believe that promise for him that you have forgiven him; that you have given him the gift of eternal life,” the pastor said, anointing Trae with water. “And when that time comes that he breathes his last breath on this Earth, it will immediately be his first breath in heaven. And for Trae, it will be spectacular.” And he was baptized.

For doing things like that, like finding that pastor on a whim, and lying next to him every night so he could sleep, and quitting his job to care for him, and coaching him in football, and taking him on camping trips all those years, and above all just for raising him alone, Trae started the fundraiser for his dad by getting a local newscast to mention their Venmo address. Trae wanted to help his dad in return for all he’d done. And he wanted people to know about his gratitude.

“He’s done everything for me my whole life,” Trae said. “He’s always been there. Ever since I was 8 years old, when my mom passed, he’s had no choice but to step up, and you can’t do nothing but really respect someone like that. I just wanted to let him know that I care and I appreciate everything he does. He’s just a great father.”

***

It was a few days after the baptism. Relatives had come by to visit. Trae left his bedroom, took a shower on his own, then sat on the couch in the living room with everyone for a while. “Just being able to just spend all this time with my dad, my family, makes me happy,” he said.

By evening, Trae grew tired and went back to his room. His relatives had left, his little sister went to bed, and father and son were alone again. In that moment, they had no way of knowing that only four nights later, Trae would suddenly die in his sleep. In that moment all they knew was each other’s company. As the room grew dark at nightfall, Tim once again lay down beside his son and waited patiently for him to close his eyes and finally get some rest.

To donate to Trae’s fundraiser for his dad, Venmo to @Timothy-Hawthorne-6.

John Carlisle writes about Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Dying Michigan teen starts fundraiser to help dad