MYGIFTINMEMORY OFBELOVEDSTACEY
Husband gives Christmas cash to charity a year after wife died before they got to swap presents
Cream jumper, stories.com in love and get married or travel because of her condition.”
Stacey loved videos of flash mobs, so he organised one for her on a 2016 trip to the US – a long-haul break he realised she could not repeat when she needed oxygen on the flight.
Michael, an air traffic controller, organised for the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles to sing True Colours to Stacey.
He said: “If you’d look at Stacey you would know she was ill but you wouldn’t know what it was.
“I thought of True Colours because I knew what was wrong with her even though it didn’t show on the outside.”
The members of the group stayed in touch with Stacey and even sent over music for her funeral. Michael said: “Stacey never gave up. Inside, I know she was frightened. I have some of her old diaries and she’d write about how scared she was and how she hated the condition but she wouldn’t say it out loud.”
Stacey also suffered from superior vena cava obstruction – meaning she had a blockage of a large vein in her chest that carries blood from the upper half of the body to the heart.
As a result, she suffered blood clots and swelling. Her death still came as a shock.
Stacey had planned her funeral, saying she wanted a pink coffin with Tinkerbell and stars on it and certain songs.
She had asked to be cremated with her teddy bear she named Frank – but Michael couldn’t give it up.
Now without his wife, he is trying to keep on living his life, just like Stacey would have wanted him to.
He said: “Stacey didn’t let things get her down. She just kept going.”
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She told me she never thought she’d fall in love and get married because of her condition