For Dying Adults, Dreams Take Flight

When doctors discovered that Vanessa Anderson, 47, had advanced breast and stomach cancer, they gave the gospel church choir singer one year to live. But rather than dwell on her misfortune, Anderson decided to make the most of her remaining days.

She turned to the Dream Foundation, an adult version of the groups that grant last wishes of dying children. Her dream--to record the hit tune “Unbreak My Heart” in a professional studio with its author, celebrated pop songwriter Diane Warren--was fulfilled in August.

“I’m not here forever. I’m just here on borrowed time like everybody else,” said Anderson, who undergoes chemotherapy every week. “I’m in a healthy denial.”

On Thursday night, Anderson, who usually sings at St. John Full Gospel Deliverance Church in her hometown of Hartford, Conn., will be among those performing at a benefit for the Dream Foundation in Santa Monica that will feature such popular entertainers as Melissa Etheridge, Kenny Loggins, Graham Nash and David Crosby.

Since its creation in 1994, the unorthodox Santa Barbara nonprofit organization says it has helped ease the psychic pain of more than 1,400 terminally ill adults. While the well-known Make-A-Wish Foundation and other groups grant wishes to dying children, the Dream Foundation bills itself as the only national organization that bestows such gifts on dying adults, who, supporters say, are no less needy.

Dying adults must grapple with a raft of emotional issues that are often complicated by marriage, family and a deep sense of their own mortality, said Dream Foundation founder Thomas Rollerson. The public often overlooks the tremendous strain that terminal illness places not only on the adult sufferers, but also on their children and spouses, he said.

“We adults have more baggage, more rings around our trees,” said Rollerson. “The dream gives them something to focus on. And there’s often nothing else going on in their life besides the illness. It’s something positive in a time of darkness.”

The most common desire is a reunion with relatives. Many adults want a trip to Disney World for the whole family. Some want eleventh-hour weddings to longtime loves. And in a celebrity-driven era, meetings with famous people are a frequent wish. The foundation has arranged encounters between patients and such people as Glenn Close, Garth Brooks and Rosie O’Donnell.

“Some of our celebrity wishes could be written off as frivolous,” Rollerson concedes. But “for an adult, the wishes are much less about fantasy than they are about recognition from a mentor that validates them as a human being. They regain some of the dignity they lost in their fight against the illness.”

And for the families it touches, the organization has become an important support network, Rollerson said. “I got into a big argument the other day with a man who said, ‘What’s the point of sending someone to Disney World?’ ” Rollerson recalled hotly. “I told him it was about restoring dignity to a mother whose kids are used to going to chemotherapy with her. She was no longer caring for her children; they were caring for her.”

Ara Johnson of Ashland, Ore., requested such a trip last year with her husband and two children, 9 and 14. The youngsters have spent the past four years with their terminally ill mother as she undergoes chemotherapy. Johnson, 46, has breast cancer that has spread into her lungs. A year ago, she learned of the Dream Foundation from an online support group for women with breast cancer. The Disney trip was something her husband, a Head Start teacher, could never have afforded.

“The biggest gift was for our children to have a childhood for four days,” Johnson said weakly, in a voice that wavers between a whisper and a sigh. “This has been very hard on them emotionally for the past four years--half my youngest child’s life. It was so wonderful to see the delight on their faces. It was more fun than you can imagine. I have very good memories. Ultimately, that’s what we have--our memories.”

It didn’t stop with the fulfillment of her wish. In May 1999, Johnson and her husband went to a foundation fund-raiser in Santa Barbara that was “like stepping into a fairy tale.”

Making Last Days on Earth Better

Supporters say it should come as no surprise that dying adults find solace in such simple comforting acts at a time when their lives have been turned into emergencies and their homes into hospitals.

“Everybody’s afraid to die,” said foundation supporter and honoree David Crosby, who faced death before receiving a transplant to replace his drug-and-alchohol-damaged liver. “Everybody’s desperately afraid in their last time on Earth. This is about trying to make somebody’s last time better.”

It was skeptical reactions to granting wishes for adults that got Rollerson to create the Dream Foundation in 1994. He had called a wish foundation to get charity support for his partner, Timothy Palmer, who was dying of AIDS, and was told such gifts were for children only. “People said he was ‘too old.’ That rang through my heart,” said Rollerson, who runs the foundation full time.

Sponsors--which have included Disney, Mattel, and Alaska Airlines, United Airlines and Northwest Airlines--grant 95% of the wishes through in-kind donations such as airline tickets and donated passes to entertainment venues. One of the biggest supporters, Nexus hair products, is sponsoring the Thursday night benefit.

The average wish costs about $1,000 to fulfill. Like that of Michael Ramon Padilla, who asked to see a Miami Dolphins game before he passed away from a massive brain tumor two years ago. Padilla got to meet all 45 players and drove to the Florida Keys for a swim with dolphins.

Turning Dreams Into Reality

Some dream on a grander scale. The foundation recently orchestrated an oceanfront wedding for a cancer patient and her longtime boyfriend just before she died. Rollerson said the Santa Barbara wedding cost the foundation $480 but would have cost $50,000 had they not received donated services from an army of caterers and florists.

A surprise wedding took place in 1998, when Santa Barbara cancer patient John Brenton was flown to Tennessee to visit his two sons, who lived with his ex-wife. During the hospital reunion, he asked her to remarry him, and a hospital chaplain performed a bedside ceremony the day before he died. A similar reunion between Oxnard mother Pamela Ramsey, her former husband from Florida and their two kids resulted in a similar matrimonial rejoining of the family in 1996, four days before her death.

Marcel Mire, a USC junior in architecture, had a more youthful dream. He wanted to party. Suffering from a rare form of stomach cancer, he lay in his hospital bed in 1998 and dreamed of a 21st birthday bash to bring back the friends who had grown withdrawn and distant as his illness progressed.

“A lot of people were afraid to come near me,” recalls Mire, describing a not uncommon reaction to the news that someone is seriously ill. “People just don’t know what to say. I wanted to show my friends and family that they didn’t have to say anything, they could just be there with me. I wanted to say, ‘Don’t give up on me yet.’ I wanted to show I wasn’t giving up on life.”

At a Santa Ana hotel, deejays played music from the B-52s and Will Smith. Mire shrugged off his chemotherapy long enough to dance and reconnect with his friends, breaking through his sense of isolation. For Mire, that simple gift of a shared good time was powerful medicine.

He’s still fighting his cancer, which has spread to his liver. Now 23, Mire juggles cancer treatments with a part-time job working for a land surveyor. He got married in April, and the couple visited Rollerson in Santa Barbara during their honeymoon.

“My wife and I talk about having kids. We have a tremendous amount of hope. Doctors don’t know what to say. They don’t know what to tell me. The Dream Foundation has helped me not give up.”

(The Dream Foundation benefit--featuring musicians including Etheridge, Loggins and Nash, and hosted by Dennis Miller--is scheduled for 8 p.m. Thursday at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Tickets are $45.)