By Michael R. Morris

For Sherrie, the summer of 1991 began like all of her other fondly remembered summers—full of warmth, youthful exuberance, and happy days that seemed to defy mortality. Then nine years old, Sherrie rode bicycles with friends through her friendly hometown of Ammon, Idaho, marched in the Fourth of July parade with a community dance team, and camped in the mountains with her parents and sisters—Kerrie, her twin; Melinda, her older sister; and Janice, the baby. Sherrie looked forward to entering fourth grade in the fall.

Stomach problems slowed Sherrie down in mid-August, but Clayne and Debbie Grigg weren’t alarmed until medication failed to improve their daughter’s condition. Sherrie soon started losing weight and strength. After something began triggering her vomiting reflex, the family doctor quickly arranged for tests at Primary Children’s Medical Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, a four-hour drive south. Clayne and Debbie were unable to find a hotel room when they arrived in late August, so they decided to check Sherrie directly into the hospital rather than wait until the next day as scheduled. That decision would save her life.

“The doctors were doing a lot of whispering,” Clayne says of tests conducted Sunday morning. “We knew that things were serious because the more tests they ran on Sherrie, the more physicians gathered and the more specialists they started calling in.”

Clayne and Debbie were not prepared for the results of an MRI scan, which revealed what is called an astrocytoma—a rare tumor that grows within the spinal cord. Although astrocytomas are usually benign, their location makes them risky to remove. Sherrie’s tumor stretched from the base of her brain stem nearly nineteen inches down her spine, strangling spinal nerves and threatening paralysis. Doctors decided to operate immediately.

The words of pediatric neurosurgeon Marion Walker gave Clayne and Debbie hope. “Three years ago we would have told you to go home and enjoy with Sherrie what little time she has left,” he told them. “But because of modern technology, we can go in and chase that tumor now.”

To reach the tumor, surgeons carefully cut and removed a section of Sherrie’s vertebrae. Then, after splitting open the back of the spinal cord with a laser, they used an operating microscope and an ultrasonic aspirator to suction the tumor, hoping Sherrie’s immune system would destroy residual tumor cells faster than they could reproduce.

Sherrie’s three days of scheduled tests turned into ten weeks of painful recuperation and physical therapy following a fourteen-hour operation. “Compared to this, going to school would be easy, and doing dishes would be fun,” she told her parents.

Their daughter’s suffering was the hardest thing Clayne and Debbie had ever endured. News of her tumor devastated Sherrie’s grandfather, Reeve Norman, who is close to his granddaughter. He and his wife, Doris, had weathered a tragedy in 1984 when their sixteen-year-old daughter, Cheryl, was killed in an automobile accident. The thought that they might now lose a grandchild weighed heavily on their spirits.

Following Sherrie’s surgery, which left her hovering near death, Clayne felt embittered and doubtful. In the hospital’s chapel, however, he found strength and spiritual refuge. “Once, as the sacrament was being passed in the hospital branch, I remember a mother’s tears falling on her sick baby she was holding,” he says. “Another time, as I was blessing the sacrament, we heard a Lifeflight helicopter coming in. We knew it was carrying a child who was just hanging on to life.”

By empathizing with other parents who were mourning their suffering children, and through meditation and prayer, Clayne and Debbie gained an increased understanding of the Atonement and of the Savior’s ability to “succor his people according to their infirmities” (Alma 7:12). “What happened from then on was a growing, positive experience,” Clayne says.

Sherrie was able to move some of her fingers and toes after being released from intensive care. Dr. Walker was encouraged, but he told Sherrie’s parents that surgeons certainly could not take all the credit if Sherrie recovered.

“There is a power in surgery that is not mine,” says Dr. Walker, a member of the Cottonwood Fifth Ward in Salt Lake City. “I really felt that was manifest in Sherrie’s case. She came in here almost totally paralyzed, but things went so smoothly. A lot of good things happen to kids here that we can’t take credit for. Maybe because we help children, the Lord looks over us.”

When Sherrie came out of anesthesia, Dr. Walker asked her, “Sherrie, do you still love me?” She forced a smile through the pain.

Following the surgery, Clayne and Debbie spent the day praying fervently and taking turns keeping vigil at Sherrie’s bedside. As he watched his red-haired daughter sleep in a curtained cubicle that night, Clayne worried that she might die, as Dr. Walker had warned. But Sherrie awoke the next morning and immediately began speaking. A feeling of reverence engulfed the cubicle. For a moment, Clayne was puzzled by Sherrie’s words.

“Daddy, Aunt Cheryl is here,” she told her father. “And another lady I don’t know is with her.” Clayne and an attending nurse, the only ones at Sherrie’s bedside, glanced at each other. Sherrie continued.

“Grandpa Norman [Sherrie’s deceased great-grandfather] and Grandma Brown [Sherrie’s deceased great-great-grandmother] are here. And Daddy, who is that standing beside you?”

“I don’t know, honey,” Clayne replied. “Who does he look like?”

“He looks like you, only taller.” Sherrie paused, then continued. “He says he’s your brother, Jimmy.”

Clayne was three when Jimmy, ten years his senior, died of cystic fibrosis. “I doubt that during Sherrie’s life Jimmy’s name had ever been mentioned,” Clayne says. “She had never even seen a picture of him.”

Clayne, feeling that Sherrie’s death was imminent, hurried from the intensive care unit to awaken Debbie, who was sleeping in the hospital’s parent room. “There are visitors,” he told his wife. “I can’t see them, and I doubt that you can see them. But I can feel them.”

For nearly an hour, Sherrie looked about the cubicle and described her visitors, all deceased family members. Exhausted, she then fell asleep.

“Daddy, all of the children here in the intensive care unit have angels helping them,” Sherrie later told her father. Other visits and sacred experiences, before and after subsequent surgeries and during painful tests and procedures, followed.

“People from the other side helped,” Sherrie recalls tearfully. “When I was really in pain, they would come and help me calm down. They told me that I would be okay and that I would make it through.”

—The Ensign, June 1995