08/01/2026
⚠️ Warning * Very Graphical ⚠️
Dear Karen Joy Clarke, my mother, my grandparents daughter, my sisters' mother, my friends' friend, and a person with an incredible story.
As some of you may have already heard, my biological mother, Karen Joy Clarke, passed away July approximately ~9:00am July 30th, and 2026. She succumbed to her heart issues and other medical issues that she's been fighting against for decades. We always said, as a family, that the hospital was her second home - all the doctors, nurses, and paramedics knew her personally, loved her joyful personality, and welcomed her at every turn when she got sick. It truely was a miricle that she was able to fight and hold on for so long. If I had a list of her entire medical history, I would lock in it a time capsule for future civilizations to study, in hopes they find a way how one human-being could elude death as much as My beloved mother has.
She had my sister in 1992, me in 1993. When things got rough for her and my biological father, my grandmother and grandfather took us in, adopted us. Karen was always welcomed to visit Beardmore while growing up. I still remember being a young boy and my grandfather would tackle my sister and I with a big blanket so we couldn't see anything - then pull the blanket off really fast, revealing my mother as a surprize.
When I was 14, my mother fell into a life threatening coma - when the doctors said nothing could be done, she woke up, recovered, and moved in with us into our little Beardmore home. This was the first time we started to become close. She met Biz, and they stayed together for years - he looked after her, we all looked after Karen, the whole community did.
Karen left the family with several life threatening scares, however, the most prominent story, was the time she was saved from choking in the basement in Beardmore.
I was 16 or 17 years old. My friends, sister and I were all out at the Lodge Park for a party, drinking.Throughout the night, I started to get a odd feeling, and wanted to go home. I was already 'half in the bag', and started to walk home. For those of you who don't know, Poplar Lodge Park is 15.5 Km from Beardmore. After about the first 1 kilometer, an old friend (M.D) picked me up, and offered me a ride home. We conversed, reminisced about old times, and he dropped me off. My first instinct when I got home was to go see my mother - my mother, at the exact moment I walked into the house, started choking on one of her pain patches, effectively cutting oxygen off to her brain. She was unconscious - my inebriated brain went into a shock and I called for my grandfather - and he initiated basic CPR while I called the ambulance. The paramedics set her up and the patch got sucked out of her throat, drove to the hospital and and she was okay.
I don't know what urked me to go home in that exact time frame. I don't know why it worked out so well to the point that if I was delayed by even 1 minute, she would have died that very night. Jesus works wonders.
The close calls, almost deaths, FAFO stories I can share would mind blow some of you all. The list is so long that we definitely forgot some of the close calls that happend.
She was so brittle that one time she woke up from a typical nights sleep, and broke both of her ancles.
She fell asleep once with an electric blanket turned up on the highest setting - woke up and her foot was bruned to the 2nd degree.
She had 1 eye, half a lung, no legs, no gull bladder, no teeth, had alapechia (genetic balding), and much much more - this was my mother, this is my mother. She literally outlived some of the most heinous medical phenomenons on this planet while loving her family every step of the way. We know some of your life chocies were not the best, but at the end of the day you were loved by the entire family, and loved by many others in the community and in the hospitality sector.
RIP
❤️ Karen Joy Clarke ❤️
We love you, always. Say hello to Mama for us ❤️💋
