Lorrie Davis

We have appreciated your support and words of hope and encouragement throughout this difficult process with our mom, Lorrie Davis. We are setting up this website for just two reasons. First, after consulting with Mom's doctors at MD Anderson, we have decided to discontinue treatment. Mom of course will still have in-home care, and she'll still have us with her, but the doctors do not believe continued chemotherapy is in her best interests. Instead, and with the aid of hospice care, we will focus on making Mom as comfortable as possible. The only small silver lining with this form of otherwise merciless cancer is that Mom is not in much pain, and her spirits have remained excellent.


Second, as those of you who know her well know, Mom just loves receiving cards and other small reminders you are thinking of her. Even a sentence or two from her friends and family never fails to raise her spirits. The doctors tell us she does not have much time left, so if you have been thinking of sending something (or, as is the case with many of you, sending the 5th or 100th thing!), please do not hesitate. Do not feel like you have to send a card or anything fancy, just a post on this website is very much appreciated by all of us, but most of all by her.


We have posted some pictures of Mom. Please feel free and very encouraged to post a note, picture, or your favorite memory of Lorrie and we will share those with her.

Here is a beautiful FB post Matt wrote shortly after her diagnosis:

September 2017; undoubtedly the worst month of my life. And yet, still so much joy....

I've consciously resisted a Facebook post about my Mom, Lorrie Davis for a month now. This medium isn't good enough for her. She gives gifts on time and she makes cards for everything, and she keeps glossy calendars with days circled and names written in the squares, with hearts and exclamation points drawn in, reminding her to make phone calls or lunch dates or whatever else she thinks of that's so much more than a like or a post or a message.

But when your law school dorm room still holds the record for place-you've-lived-the-longest since turning eighteen, when you're not nearly as thoughtful, when Facebook is for better or for worse (for worse) the place you keep in touch with people who are important to you, to not post feels like lying and also feels like betrayal. As in, you can't write a post about your Mom when you write for a living and when if it was you in her shoes and she in yours who knows what armies she would conjure on your behalf?

My Mom celebrated her 65th birthday on September 3, and less than a week later me, Michele Baisley, Megan Sibley, and our Mitch Sibley and our Kevin Strohfus and our Iliana Pacheco sat helpless while we were told that my kind, joyful, loving Mother has inoperable grade IV glioblastoma; an aggressive form of brain cancer. For a point of reference, it's the same tumor that Senator John McCain has recently been diagnosed with.

Mom started chemotherapy and radiation and some late-recommended-who-knows-why-they-didn't-say blood vessel protein inhibitor on September 26. On September 30 my beautiful sister Michele married Kevin. The sheer range of human emotion is unfathomable. Life's chaos, moments of pure horror followed by pure joy with the natural expectation that we fully confront both, sometimes simultaneously, has left me fundamentally shaken.

Mom, I am so sorry that it is this that has finally shown me what you've always understood, and I am so sorry I am a quarter of the son you deserve. But I am so very, very thankful that you treat me, every day, like I'm twice the son you deserve, I'm so thankful for my sisters, who are strong and intelligent, and who make it easier to breathe and alright to laugh, and who make it possible to think we'll get through this, I'm so thankful for Iliana Pacheco, who is somehow an iron anchor constructed out of love and joy and laughter, who I also don't deserve but who I'll absolutely take, and I am so thankful for my Mom's friends, who reduce my sisters and I to tears every day with their coordinating rides to the hospital and constant dinners (we now have a soup kitchen side business) and visits with my Mom and flowers and advice and constant and specific offers to help with things we hadn't even thought of and everything else. If I was to introduce a stranger to my Mom I'd just show them how my Mom's friends respond, and in an instant they would know her. I'm not Facebook friends with all my Mom's friends, but I hope one of you will pass along my family's thanks.

Please keep my Mom in your thoughts as she faces this with the strength and grace that has defined her all her life.

And Mom, I love you so much. That this has happened to you, the weight of life's unfairness is crushing, heartbreaking, and senseless. But if there is a silver lining it's that the way you live your life is such that you'll have all of us standing with you every step of the way.