Once Upon a Wish

by Rachelle Sparks

  The normal life Dakota was about to re-enter started in Houston, where he hung out and watched Survivor every Thursday night with good family friends, the Johnstons, played games and ate pizza with his Grandma Pat and Pa Pa Tom every Sunday night, and spent the weekends—when his counts were good and his energy was up—riding go-carts, visiting the zoo, going to the park, and playing golf, the only sport he never had to give up.

  One day, he got a call from The Point, a classic rock radio station based out of Little Rock, Arkansas, during its annual Make-A-Wish Foundation fundraiser. Dakota Hawkins had become a household name across the state of Arkansas, with local and statewide news coverage of his condition, his progress, and his story.

  At the MD Anderson clinic, where he went for regular tests and blood draws, Dakota sat at the nurse’s station for a phone interview with the radio station’s DJs about his progress, his transplant, his wish, and all the specifics of the Gator.

  “You know, man, it’s like a pimped up four-wheeler,” Dakota said, smiling at the nurses surrounding him, who threw their heads back with laughter, clapping their hands, catching their breaths.

  “A pimped up …” the DJ couldn’t even finish the sentence. He and the other DJs were in hysterics at the description.

  When the laughter faded, Dakota looked down at the ground, fingers intertwined in the cord of the phone, his face serious.

  “I’d like to thank Make-A-Wish for making my wish come true,” he said, and Sharon’s heart instantly became filled with happiness. She imagined her son’s voice in the ears of thousands, driving their cars, sitting in their offices or homes, listening to his story. The sincere gratitude in her son’s voice reflected how strongly he felt about the gift he had received and echoed his love for the Gator with which he would soon reunite.

  9

  Everyday checkups at MD Anderson turned into every three-day checkups, and after one hundred days, Dakota was released and sent home. The cancer was gone, his counts were up, and his organs were healthy.

  Two weeks after settling home, he and his family went to Colorado on an all-expense-paid, five-day trip to a dude ranch near Steamboat Springs with nine other families, a doctor, and a nurse from MD Anderson. With the other kids, Dakota and Riley explored the mountain ranges on horses during the day, played kickball in the evenings, and enjoyed cookouts, barn dances, and dips in their cabin’s hot tub.

  On their bus ride back to the airport, as they made their way toward Denver, nearing the Continental Divide, small, white flurries turned into what looked like the insides of a Christmas snow globe.

  “Stop the bus!” Dakota shouted, and the driver slowly pulled to the side of the road. “Let’s have a snowball fight!”

  That’s our Dakota, Sharon thought, grinning.

  He and the other kids, all cancer patients, survivors, poured from the bus and into the snow, shoveling handfuls into balls and launching them like little cannonballs. They dusted the bus, its driver, the doctor, and nurse, one another, in white—all while laughing, living in that moment, undefined by cancer, in its cool freedom.

  Sharon and Henry watched, smiles dancing on their faces, frozen in that moment of time. And while nothing could take away Sharon’s happiness, the heaviness in her chest, its pull through her belly, was something she could not deny. They were about to return to MD Anderson for a bone marrow aspiration—the deepest, most accurate cancer-detecting test—and all she could do was pray for good results.

  Once again, her prayer was answered. Dakota was still cancer-free and Riley’s cells, in all of their determination, remained a friend to his brother’s body. Dakota could go home and continue that life of normalcy, of freedom, that had started in Houston just a few months earlier.

  A peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) line in his chest was the only thing keeping Dakota from enjoying one of his favorite past times—swimming—so he had a decision to make. He could leave it in as a way for doctors to insert medicines and draw blood every month without having to poke him, or he could have it removed and get poked for those purposes every month.

  He wanted it out—needed what was, in his mind, permanent detachment from cancer.

  After healing from surgery to remove the line, Dakota went with Sharon to his friend Chad’s house for an afternoon dip, his first swim all summer. Chad and his family, who welcomed Dakota to their home at any time, were not home that afternoon, so Sharon soaked in the enjoyment of watching her son dive from the board, flip from the sides, and plunge deep into the water.

  “I feel so free,” he said with a smile, looking right at her before ducking under the water, swimming quickly to the other side. He got out of the pool, stood on the diving board in his bright yellow swim shorts, and smiled again at his mom. A soft layer of golden hair that had just started to grow back gleamed like the sun, mirrored his shorts, became living proof that her Dakota was here to stay.

  He’s the picture of health, Sharon thought to herself, smiling through tears as Dakota jumped back into the pool.

  As a family, they traveled to Silver Dollar City theme park that summer, the resort town of Branson, Missouri, and to Moccasin Gap—a place where Dakota, Riley, and Henry rode four-wheelers—with its endless streams and twenty-eight miles of ATV and horse trails weaving through the hills and hollows of Arkansas’s Ozark Mountains.

  As they did every year, Dakota, Riley, and Henry prepared for the upcoming deer hunting season at a deer camp in south Arkansas. They searched for signs of deer, inspecting bushes for places they might have rested and trees for traces of rubbing. They scoped out areas close to water that would quench the deer’s thirst and analyzed trees for their height and potential for deer spotting. Dakota would bring his Gator to collect their fallen prey, and his anticipation for October, deer hunting season, started on their three-hour drive home.

  When the summer was over, Dakota registered for eighth grade and, once again, excelled with straight As, advanced placement classes, and a position on the varsity basketball team. He attended school dances, birthday parties, church on Sundays, and rode his Gator often with friends. He had returned to his old, normal life, where cancer was just a nightmare from which he had woken.

  During Dakota’s next five monthly appointments, he received a clean bill of health—his cells were dead; Riley’s were thriving. The front door to cancer’s old home was closed, but like a sneaky robber, a malicious intruder, it found its way back in and hid behind corners inside Dakota’s body.

  “It’s like hide-and-seek,” Dr. Becton explained to Dakota and Sharon during their sixth monthly checkup, where cancer cells had slowly come out from around those corners. “We found little, bitty cancer cells hiding within your cells.”

  Cancer cells. Those words were supposed to be gone from their lives. How can this be happening again?

  Sharon didn’t speak her thoughts; she didn’t mutter a word. And neither did Dakota. They sat in silence, the heaviness of Dr. Becton’s words setting like stone in their hearts.

  It was time for chemo, once again.

  10

  They tried for two months at Arkansas Children’s and another two at MD Anderson in Houston, where doctors determined that those tiny cells had multiplied and cancer had taken over 100 percent of Dakota’s body.

  After realizing that chemo wasn’t working, they exhausted every experimental and compassionate drug and determined a second transplant would most likely be fatal.

  “I’m afraid Dakota doesn’t have long to live,” said Dr. Michael Rytting, one of Dakota’s doctors from MD Anderson, whom Henry and Sharon had grown to respect and trust over the course of the past year. He was one of those special doctors who treated patients the way Sharon imagined he would treat his own child. He was Dakota’s favorite doctor, he had years of experience, he specialized in cancer treatment, and he had an MD behind his name.

  Henry and Sharon, however, had never made decisions based on statistics or speculations, and they weren’t about to start.
They trusted the man standing before them, but trust only went so far. They needed to know if it was time to start seeking other options, finding other solutions. They were not going to give up.

  “How long?” Sharon asked. “A month, a couple of months, years?”

  “I’m thinking less than a year,” Dr. Rytting said sadly. “Single digit months.”

  Dakota’s blood had become a river of cancer, but his organs were still healthy, and Henry and Sharon were not going to wait around for their son to die. They stayed up late each night, got up early every morning, to research any other possibility, any other solution, to save their son.

  A friend at church told them about a missionary from Little Rock who was receiving treatment in Jerusalem, Israel, from Dr. Shimon Slavin, who, according to all of their research, was world-renowned for his work, untraditional and sometimes experimental, with cancer.

  “Blood cancer doesn’t scare me,” Dr. Slavin said to Sharon when she called to explain Dakota’s situation. “If his organs are good, get him here healthy, and I can help him.”

  His unwavering confidence rushed through the phone lines and into Sharon and Henry’s ears, into their hearts. They needed to get to Jerusalem.

  “He’s your best option,” Dr. Rytting confirmed. “If Dakota was my son, I would do it. I’m not saying it’ll work, but it’s your best option.”

  They had one week to return to Arkansas from Houston, get passports, and collect the money to pay Israel’s Hadassah Medical Hospital upfront—$175,000. Henry and Sharon planned to mortgage their home, but instead, word of mouth in the small town of Cabot spread like wildfire through every home, store, restaurant, and church.

  In one Sunday, their home church offerings raised $40,000, while other community churches raised a combined total of $40,000. After golf tournaments, school fundraisers, and personal donations, Henry and Sharon needs were met—ample enough to cover all expenses in one week.

  In Cabot, coming together as a community was a way of life. Aside from leaving for a few years to go to college, Henry grew up there and had never left. Cabot was home, and its people were his family. Local media had covered Dakota’s story from the beginning, keeping everyone in town up-to-date on his condition, encouraging endless support, welcoming love and prayers. But Henry, overwhelmed by their generosity, never imagined they would come together in such a powerful way for their son.

  They had returned from Houston to Cabot on a Thursday, and within one week, they scrambled to pack and obtain all necessary medical releases and passports before boarding a plane from Little Rock to Jerusalem, where they would live for nearly four months. Dr. Slavin’s plan was to perform a transplant on Dakota, but not with Riley’s cells this time. Wiping away Dakota’s blood to replace it with his brother’s was no longer a solution—he was going to use Sharon’s cells, a partial donor.

  He would replace half of Dakota’s blood with hers and let the battle begin with a graft-versus-host situation, where the healthy cells would fight against the remaining cancer cells, hopefully victoriously. It would be a fifty-fifty war, with well-planned strategies by Dr. Slavin and complicated manipulation tactics that would potentially wipe out the cancer cells.

  During the first several days in Jerusalem, Dakota and his family felt like they had stepped back in time and into the pages of the Bible. In between blood draws and preliminary tests, Dakota remained well enough to see many of the places he had studied in Sunday school since he was a little boy, turning scripture he had read and pictures he had seen into something real.

  Together, Dakota and his family walked along the edges of the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee, and visited the Valley of Megiddo, Nazareth, and the Jordan River. The day before entering the hospital, they went to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed his last prayer before crucifixion. They went into the Church of All Nations, a monastery that enshrines a piece of bedrock where Jesus had prayed. They walked along the quiet, marble floors, admiring the beautiful, floor-to-ceiling murals and mosaics, until they reached the center of the church, the Rock of Agony.

  Taking turns, Dakota, Riley, Henry, and Sharon leaned down and placed their hands on the rock, closing their eyes, saying the same prayer.

  Dakota’s transplant, his last chance, was the next day, and as they walked quietly from the church and into Jerusalem’s warm, promising air, Dakota sat without a word on the steps outside the church.

  Henry and Sharon looked at each other and tugged at Riley’s arm, motioning him away. They gave Dakota the space he needed, the quiet he craved in that very moment where, though she will never know for sure, Sharon assumed her son was talking with the Lord, praying for His healing, moved by the burden Christ must have felt when kneeling at that very rock the day before His crucifixion.

  Elbows resting on his knees, head in his hands, Dakota looked out over the old City of Jerusalem and wiped his tears.

  “I want to be with Jesus,” Dakota said.

  He was ready.

  They had been back from Israel for more than nine months, where a transplant with Sharon’s cells had failed and another using Riley’s cells for rescue wasn’t enough. Riley had given his brother life for the second time, just enough to bring him home to enjoy a couple of months, once again, in remission, his future unknown.

  Dakota wrote these words for his brother, Riley, after Riley gave his bone marrow twice to help save his big brother’s life. Riley framed the words and placed them in his room, where they would remain a reminder of Dakota’s battle, his strength, his love, and his life.

  11

  A few months after writing those words to his brother, graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) sped along cancer’s mission of taking Dakota’s life, which it did on March 2, 2006, when he was fifteen years old, four years after his diagnosis.

  During the last few months of his life, as Dakota suffered through GVHD with respiratory syncytial viruses and lung and skin infections, he came to peace with thoughts of Heaven as his new home and God and angels, his new family.

  Sharon had prayed on the hillsides of Jerusalem in the early mornings that God would take her life instead. But when they got home and Dakota’s condition worsened, pain and misery defining his life, hope was no longer something to hold onto, so she made one final plea before accepting the destiny her son had already accepted.

  “Please just give Dakota the thirty-three years you gave to your own son, Jesus,” she asked, but she knew that God had His own plan, His own reason for taking Dakota.

  From the day he took his last breath in Sharon’s arms, she struggled to see that reason—struggled to recognize God’s plan, to know His intentions, to understand His purpose for Dakota in the lives of others. But she never doubted.

  Less than a year later, she became involved with the Keep The Faith (KTF) Foundation in memory of Dakota and two other children who lost their lives to cancer, as a way to keep the spirits of those children alive and to carry out what she believed was their purpose—to help other families with what hers had already been through.

  With annual fundraisers and contributions, the Foundation raised more than $100,000 in its first six years to help families of children with cancer. In addition to helping families through prayer and encouragement, they also help relieve financial burdens by paying medical bills and other expenses accrued through cancer diagnosis and treatment.

  A true believer that no tears exist in Heaven, Sharon knows Dakota is watching from above, unable to see the wretched pain of loss she and her family live with every day. He cannot hear the sadness in their voices, feel the pain in their hearts. He can only smile, and she gives him plenty of reasons to do so through KTF and its largest fundraiser, Pennies from Heaven (PFH).

  She and KTF volunteers place buckets in schools, businesses, churches, and civic organizations all over town annually on March 5—the day they buried Dakota—and their first goal in 2008 was to collect one million pennies in one hundred days. They collected 1.1 million pennies—$11,00
0. They have collected a few thousand more every year, and in 2011, when they launched PFH statewide, the program raised $21,000.

  Sharon asks no questions, has no doubts, when pennies cross her path on the sidewalk or appear strategically placed on Dakota’s tombstone—they are small, shiny reminders that he is always with her.

  And over the years, with each fallen penny, Sharon, Henry, and Riley have slowly learned to see the world again through their tears, feel again through their constant ache, enjoy moments through their grief and pain, their forever loss.

  They have realized that Dakota is always with them, sending reminders with pennies on the street or memories with the Gator he left behind—a gift for them, a gift that will forever give.

  On the afternoon of Dakota’s death, Riley rode the Gator deep into the forest, through its endless trees, into the serenity his brother had always found in the woods. He found peace in the Gator’s hum that day, guidance in its freedom, hope that riding the Gator would always bring a sense of comfort, of closeness, to Dakota and his love for his Gator.

  Adventures on the Gator would not end that day, and it didn’t take much time for the Hawkins family to realize what a true gift it really was. Over the years, Henry, Sharon, and Riley have traveled hundreds of miles on the Gator, in the presence of Dakota’s spirit, through hills and forests, rain, mud, and the Arkansas sunshine. It has been stuck, rescued, and the saving grace on good hunting days.

  When Dakota first made his wish, Sharon was certain it was for him. It was for his freedom, his need to explore and was his way of getting something he knew his parents could not afford to buy.

  But every treasured moment on the Gator has revealed to Sharon and her family Dakota’s clear intent; his wish was for them—he had chosen something he could leave behind.