Sometimes you stumble into a happy ending. This one goes like this.
One week ago, Molly Tyler arranged herself in her chair, collected her two children, Trinity Jo, 5, and Jacob, 4, and made her way out the door and down the front ramp of her Gunnison home.
It had been months since she had been outside. It seemed forever since it was with the kids. When they reached the park just up the street, Trinity Jo took her brother’s hand, and they ran off to play.
Molly Tyler for a time just sat and watched them. And then, she cried.
People here are unselfish. I do not know if the ink had fully dried on this column a few weeks ago when the first donations came through the door.
A mailman in Littleton stuffed five dollars in an envelope that read simply “From a mailman in Littleton.” A Colorado State Patrol trooper stuffed $1,000 into another. It went on like this for weeks.
I wrote of the efforts of Tyler and her best friend, Lora Thomas, to raise enough money to get the medically retired State Patrol trooper an electric wheelchair.
Tyler had fallen on ice and fractured her spine at the start of her shift in January 2008. She has lived in painful misery since.
Thomas, a retired State Patrol major, made getting her friend a wheelchair her life’s priority.
And then a different thing happened. Tyler was sitting at home when her telephone rang. It was her workers’ compensation representative. They needed a little information. They were getting her the electric wheelchair she needed.
The Jazzy Select 6 power wheelchair arrived last Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Thomas, who had sought to raise $2,000, amassed more than $6,000 and arranged to buy a used chair — a chair her friend no longer needed.
“We got cards and letters from that first day, it was so amazing,” Thomas said. “I think we got more than 50 that first week.”
As it happened, during those weeks of fundraising she heard about a 49-year-old Douglas County sheriff’s deputy whose multiple sclerosis had recently forced her into retirement. She needed a chair.
Thomas contacted her.
“It came at the perfect time,” the sheriff’s deputy, who asked that her name not be used, wrote Thomas. “Send my thanks to everyone who donated to it. Is there someway I can thank them?”
Thomas and Tyler are now at work writing thank-you letters to everyone who donated money. There is enough left to have a wheelchair lift installed in Molly’s vehicle.
“What surprised me the most, I guess,” Thomas said, “was the sheer generosity of strangers, just people helping someone in need, which I think is fabulous.”
People, Tyler, 39, said, will say it is just a wheelchair. But it has given back to her, she said, a big part of her life.
“To be outside again, to watch my kids in the park, it was really something else. I’d forgotten how good it felt.
“I believe in God, you know. I do believe He has angels here to help others. Lora, I think, she is one of them.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
