It started with a dream. She’d had others, Debbie Turner said, but not like this one.
In it, she was told her daughter, Kesha, was in danger. It was Oct. 20. The next day, the telephone rang.
Kesha, she was told, was in a hospital in Steamboat Springs. She’d stopped breathing.
Debbie Turner called the hospital. Kesha was on life support.
She and her husband, Dicky, live in Wicksburg, Ala., a tiny community in the southeast part of the state. They would have to drive two hours to Montgomery, and catch a flight to Charlotte, N.C., before flying on to Denver.
Debbie Turner cried the entire way. On the Charlotte-to-Denver leg a young man, probably in his late 30s, leaned over and asked, “You OK?”
She told him everything and asked if he had children. Yes, he replied. He had three daughters.
“I told him to give them a hug every chance he gets because you can never know when it’s going to be the last time,” Debbie Turner said.
Minutes passed before the man leaned over again. He didn’t want an argument, he told her. He was arranging for a private jet to fly her and Dicky to Steamboat. If the weather stayed bad, they could stay at his place, and he would drive them back to the airport.
“This man didn’t know us or anything about us,” she said. “He was doing it out of the compassion in his heart. Dicky and I were floored by his kindness.”
It turned out that the private jet could not be arranged. The couple thanked him. His compassion, she said, had meant so much to them.
They arrived in Denver and made their way to the Steamboat shuttle flight. Someone, they were told, had already paid for the tickets. She thinks the young man, whom she knew only as Steve, somehow managed it. They boarded the flight. Debbie Turner was seated next to a man who’d lived in Steamboat only three months. He, too, inquired about her. Well, he asked, did they have anywhere to stay?
On the ground, he called the Steamboat Grand Hotel, reserved and paid for a room for the couple for two nights, plus anything else they needed. Oh, he told them, he would leave the keys to his truck at the nurse’s station at the hospital for them to use while in town.
Kesha, 31, died of liver failure on Oct. 23.
“We got time with her,” Debbie Turner said. She sang hymns and read to her from the Bible.
Too soon, the nurse told her and Dicky it was time.
“We got to hold her, to whisper that it was OK to go, that Jesus was waiting for her. ‘Goodbye,’ we told her, ‘you just go on.’ “
A memorial service was held the following Thursday. People in Steamboat they also did not know paid for everything, Debbie Turner said.
The hotel catered it for free. The Bear River Bar & Grill where Kesha worked picked up the rest of the couple’s hotel stay.
Last December, people in Steamboat held a fundraiser for the Turners. It raised enough to pay for Kesha’s cremation, the couple’s air fare, rental car and other expenses.
“God has just blessed us and blessed us,” Debbie Turner said.
It is why she called me from Alabama. She wanted Steve to know what he had begun.
“I never got his last name,” she said.
She will never forget his kindness on Flight 1525, she said.
“He has no idea what an impact he had on two grief-stricken people he did not know. I think he truly was a guardian angel.
“Do you think you could thank him for us?”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
