It was the night Caleigh Hildebrandt — Little Miss Sunshine, the 24-year-old woman who inspired not only the Miami Valley, but people around the world — died in the arms of her mother, Bonnie, in their home outside of Bellbrook.
Until a day or so before that, Caleigh had spent 60 straight days, gravely ill, in the Intensive Care Unit at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center as she battled pneumonia and Stage IV carcinoma that had spread to several of her organs, all of this on top of the spina bifida she’d endured since birth.
“We had caught about a 12-hour window of stability with her breathing so we could get her home by ambulance,” her dad, Randy, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force who still works at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, said Saturday afternoon. “And that was really an answer to our prayers because Caleigh needed to be home.
“But about 1 a.m. Thursday, she started to leave us.”
Three hours later the family was gathered around her.
Bonnie sat in the bed with her daughter lying in her lap. Caleigh’s brother, Tyler, administered the oxygen from the two generators and three big tanks in the room and her other brother, R.J., and his wife Miranda, along with Randy, handled the morphine and opioid medicines.
“Her big bother R.J. first spotted it and said, ‘Look she’s smiling!’ ” Randy recalled. “And right then we all wiped away our tears and saw it. She had popped the biggest, most beautiful smile.
“I called it a Hollywood smile! It was like somebody had sculpted it: The beautiful curvature of her lips, her teeth, the countenance on her face, it was like looking at a masterpiece. God’s masterpiece.
“Right then she was sprinting to the finish line and that smile was her seeing her savior Jesus Christ. For us to be able to witness that was so precious.”
The family will conduct a private burial this week and next Saturday there will be a Life Celebration at Christ’s Church on Upper Bellbrook Road at 1 p.m. For two hours prior the family will receive friends. Contributions in Caleigh’s name can be made to the Dayton chapter of The Special Wish Foundation.
As for the sprinting references, they go back to the past two U.S. Air Force Marathons.
A year ago, Team Caleigh — she in her Burley jogging stroller, her dad pushing it as he ran — completed the race in style. Randy scooped her out of the cart and carried her across the finish line as Bonnie and hundreds of others — not to mention people around the world thanks to social media — cheered and cried and cheered her effort some more.
Caleigh raised $30,000 for the Dayton Special Wish chapter that day.
This year’s race was just three weeks ago and although registered, she was too sick to take part.
And yet, for the first time in a long time — and the last time ever — she managed to get out of bed and was taken onto the patio at the hospital so she could watch the race via FaceTime while sitting in the sunshine.
The nurses made up glittery race signs that said things like “Go Team Caleigh!” and they even put a finish line on the patio that Caleigh was wheeled across.
“And even though she had been flat on her back all that time, she raised $5,000 more for Special Wish this year,” Randy said. “And she inspired other people to run, too.”
He told of one woman who had been in the crowd in tears watching Caleigh finish the 2016 race. That had driven her to get in shape and run this year.
“She said she never would have finished because of the exhaustion if it weren’t for thinking of Caleigh,” Randy aid.
Sitting there on the back deck of his home, Randy grew quiet for a moment.
“I know some people will look at the metaphor of the marathon in all this and say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a cute story,’ but no, it’s a hard story.
“It’s a story of determination and strength and always finishing, finishing, finishing.”
Confined to a wheelchair because of the spina bifida, undergoing over 40 surgeries, some life-threatening, getting the devastating cancer diagnosis a year ago and finally the pneumonia, all made for a tough life for the 2012 Bellbrook High School grad.
But she didn’t complain or retreat or sour on life. Just the opposite.
She got a job at McGohan Brabender in Moraine as the CHO — Chief Happiness Officer. Her main task was to cheer up her fellow workers and she reported straight to the founder and former CEO, Pat McGohan, who dubbed her “Little Miss Sunshine.”
Caleigh was full of love and faith and beauty, both inward and on the outside as was captured by a Washington Post photographer at the Cinderella Ball in Washington D.C. in 2010.
Her dad, then still assigned to the Pentagon, was in his regal full mess dress that night. She looked like a princess and the photographer snapped them as they began to dance to Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.”
All those images came swirling back Saturday for Randy:
“Caleigh taught us to be happy during sad days. She taught us to be thankful for everything. And she taught us how to run.
“Boy, did she ever teach us how to run.”
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