Photo:ARTOGRAPHY BY R&D
ARTOGRAPHY BY R&D
Just weeks after Lorelai Mentzer learned she was pregnant, her husband Patrick, then 35, was diagnosed with colon cancer. By the time their son was born in August 2021, they thought he was cancer-free, but it came back and spread. Still, the couple was determined to “squeeze every ounce of joy out of every single day” they had left.
“The most important part of our story is just making the best of it, and still creating all these wonderful memories, even in these last days," Lorelai, 32, told PEOPLE before he died on May 11 at the age of 37.
“I knew in my heart I would lose him this year,” she said. “I’m trying to be grateful for what we had.”
The couple met on Tinder about 10 years ago shortly after Lorelai moved from Kentucky to her parents' home in Virginia. “The first time I heard his voice on the phone, I was sitting down and I still felt my knees go weak,” she shared.
After getting engaged over Christmas in 2016, they married the following September. “Some people take a full year to plan a wedding,” she said. “I couldn’t wait.”
Neither could he. “The night before, I went up to go to bed and finish my vows. He kept coming upstairs to steal kisses,” she recalled. “He was just so excited.”
Patrick and Lorelai Mentzer.Luke Mazurek
Luke Mazurek
In 2020, Lorelai learned she was pregnant around Thanksgiving. That January, Patrick woke in the middle of the night with significant GI bleeding. When they first got to the emergency room, they were told it was probably just hemorrhoids.
But a colonoscopy detected a small tumor.
“It was out of nowhere,” she said. “He seemed to be in perfect health.”
Lorelai and Patrick Mentzer.Kristy Mackenzie
Kristy Mackenzie
In August 2021, a little over a month after Patrick finished chemo, their son Jamie was born, and for a while, the couple didn’t “have that cancer cloud” hanging over them, she said.
Patrick and Lorelai Mentzer.Bethany Masone Harar
Bethany Masone Harar
Everything changed again that December, when Patrick went for a routine scan. Hours later he learned there were five new lesions on his liver.
“Friday night was just shock and Googling. Saturday was crying and funeral-planning,” she said. By the end of the weekend, she had joined theFacebook group Colontownand learned about clinical trials atMemorial Sloan Keterring Cancer Center.
As he continued treatment, the family endured another shock they never saw coming: Lorelai and her husband were on vacation over Father’s Day weekend in 2022 when her parents Andrew and Kristy Mackenzie — who shared their journey in a previous Real-Life Love story — were injured in a near-fatal motorcycle accident thatleft her father thinking it was 1993.
“I said to Patrick, ‘Watch us get through this recovery for mom and dad, and then your cancer comes back. Watch this take the rest of this time that we were hoping to be free and happy,’” she remembered.
When her father got his memory back, heproposed to Lorelai’s mother againand Patrick agreed to officiate their vow renewal ceremony in August.
A week before the trip to the Outer Banks, Patrick received some discouraging test results, but the couple still “tried to have the best vacation of our lives,” Lorelai said.
Patrick and Lorelai Mentzer with family.M. Palmer Photography
M. Palmer Photography
By March of this year, the bulk of Patrick’s liver was riddled with tumors, and Lorelai booked one more family vacation with the knowledge that it would be their last.
The next month, he was in hospice care. On days when he felt okay, she took him outside to sit on the patio with friends. “I tell him, ‘Thank you for this life,’” she recalled. “I tell him he’s done an incredible job, and that he’s been braver and he’s pushed through more than anybody should ever have to.”
She kept a camera in his bedroom recording moments of the family with their toddler as well as framed photos, aiming to surround him with happy memories. “I feel like it’s my job to make sure that he knows that he led a beautiful life, and he created a beautiful life for me,” she told PEOPLE just hours before he died.
When he woke from his nap on Tuesday, May 11, Lorelai asked if he wanted to see Jamie. He said yes. He heard his son laugh and smiled before muttering “I love you,” and drifting into a coma.
Later that evening, she told him it was time for him to rest. He took a last breath and then “he was gone,” she said.
Patrick and Lorelai Mentzer.M. Palmer Photography
On June 29, what would have been his 38th birthday, Lorelai plans to hold a celebration. She wants people to remember him joyfully. And every day she talks to Jamie about him.
“I tell him, ‘Daddy did absolutely everything for him. Daddy pushed through all the chemo, every single treatment, more than anybody should ever have to go through,'" she said. “And still was the best daddy out of anybody I know.”
Lorelai and Patrick Mentzer with son Jaime.M. Palmer Photography
Lorelai soon began receiving “the most beautiful messages from all over the world” and has sincecreated a GoFundMe to finance a foundation in her husband’s name. She hopes that it willhelp other families afford the “hidden costs of cancer.” Another fundraiser has also been set up onbehalf of their son.
“I love that all over the world, now people know Patrick’s story and what he did for us,” she said. “Ultimately, my purpose now is just to make sure that he’s remembered in the way that I remember him.”
“I want the whole world to know how much that man loved us,” she added.
source: people.com
