Lee Carlile

Erika Diarte-Carr was a 30-year-old single mother in Ogden, Utah, raising her son Jeremiah and daughter Aaliyah on her own. On May 7, 2022—the day before Mother’s Day—she walked into an emergency room thinking she had a routine shoulder injury. She walked out with a stage 4 small-cell lung carcinoma diagnosis and the doctor’s words still ringing in her ears: she was going to need a strong support system because the road ahead would be long and hard. For more than two years she fought the rare, aggressive cancer while trying to keep life as normal as possible for her kids. Early in 2024 she received a second crushing diagnosis: Cushing’s syndrome, a hormonal disorder that brought rapid weight gain, muscle weakness, and further decline. By mid-September 2024 an oncologist told her she had roughly three months left. Erika made the decision to stop treatment. She wanted the remaining time for her children, not for hospital rooms. With no life insurance and no savings left after months of being too sick to work, she created a GoFundMe. Her goal was modest: $5,000 to cover her own funeral and leave a little something behind for her kids. She wrote that she had never been good at asking for help, but she no longer had a choice. The page went viral almost overnight. Tens of thousands of strangers donated. Within days the total passed $1 million and kept climbing. “It happened overnight,” she said later. “I never expected that. I never expected to have a big funeral service, or a lot of people reach out and help me. With the way it’s went, I’m just in shock… just very grateful.” She made clear that anything beyond funeral costs would go into a trust for Jeremiah and Aaliyah so they would be financially stable as they grew up. On October 11, 2024—weeks after the fundraiser exploded—Erika died. Her cousin confirmed the news and noted that she had held on as long as she could for her babies. In the end, the money strangers gave did exactly what she asked: it paid for her goodbye and was placed in a trust for the two children she called her whole life, light, and soul. 🌹