The sticker lady has stuck around and still has more to say.
You might remember Aleon DeVore from a column in October. She’s the 88-year-old hospice patient who wore her “I Voted” sticker on her forehead for three weeks until Election Day.
Aleon made up her mind to battle heart failure long enough to see Barack Obama elected president, and then a few more weeks until her granddaughter’s birthday and Thanksgiving.
Nearly a month later, she’s still hanging tough on oxygen, saying: “I never knew dying could be so much fun.”
Aleon’s 2 1/2-month stay at Lakewood’s Hospice of St. John far exceeds the average stint of 10 days.
But that’s not what makes her newsworthy.
I write again about Aleon because she is dying so well.
For one thing, she has taken up drinking, downing shots of Scotch every afternoon.
“I’m on heavy morphine, which makes me a drug addict. I figure it’s never too late to become a drinker too,” she says.
She has a steady stream of visitors, including the owners of 40 acres where she used to live in Deer Creek Canyon, who cut a Christmas tree from the land to adorn her hospice room.
For 12 years in the 1960s and ’70s, Aleon wrote a weekly column for the Littleton Independent about life in the foothills. Her “Star Route Ramblings” conveyed “an extraordinary sensitivity to life around her,” says her former editor, Garrett Ray.
She’s no different a hospice patient than she was a columnist.
After nurses told her about the college courses they’re taking, Aleon started editing their term papers.
One day, she praised nurse assistant Candice Savery — a compliment Savery shrugged at out of shyness.
“Don’t do that, honey. It doesn’t become you,” Aleon told Savery, who says she’ll never again duck a compliment.
Hospice spokeswoman Sharon Cooper gave Aleon a book she wrote and apologized for a few typos.
“Nope,” she scolded. “Honor your work.”
Hospice workers witness death every day. Aleon has taught even the most seasoned among them a few things still about living.
“She’s not done showing us things we should be paying attention to,” says nurse Teresa O’Harold. “She’s our sherpa.”
Out of all the patients Savery has cared for, she says, “Aleon is the most fearless about dying.
“She’s carrying no rocks, no weight with her.”
“She has broken a rule that you have to know someone a long time to be moved by them,” Cooper adds. “You leave her feeling stronger.”
Out of devotion, staffers waded through piles of dirty laundry weeks ago to retrieve Aleon’s “Old White Women For Obama” button from one of her housecoats.
And in a testament of their affection for her, they made a party out of finally removing the sticker that made her somewhat of a local celebrity. Night nurse Andy Williams kissed her forehead as he peeled off the white oval on election night. Five other nurses lined up to follow suit.
Photos of that evening hang by her bedside. She looks at them for comfort when she has trouble, increasingly, breathing.
“I don’t have any worries, any problems. Everybody’s just so filled with love,” says Aleon, who looks forward now to Christmas and sharing a slice of a prime rib with her son, Chad.
“Nice and thick, I like it,” she says. “And with horseradish and cream.”
It is said that people die the way they live. Aleon DeVore has made an art of both.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
