Thank you all for joining us in this celebration.  There are so many things I would like to tell you about Tess, but Tess didn’t want any draggy speeches – so I’ll do my best. When Tess was 5, she walked out of school one day with a rather stiff gait.  I asked her what she had tucked in the waist of her pants.  Quite surprised by my easy discovery of her theft, she said “nothing”.  I then pulled two wooden stakes out of her pants which had worn splinters into her belly.  “Are you supposed to have these?” I inquired.  “They were just out in the play ground for anyone to have” she replied.  How she put up with hours of pain hiding those stakes, I couldn’t guess.  Only Tess would have seen the magic in a pair of wooden stakes.     When Tess was eight and scheduled to leave one morning for Florida to visit her dad at the beach, I knew something was wrong and insisted she go back to the doctor for more tests.  The next thing I knew I was standing in hallway of the doctor’s office looking at an ultrasound picture of a large mass in the place of Tess’s right kidney.  The doctors told us she had Wilms’ tumor, a cancerous tumor of the kidney.  I rushed her to St. Francis for immediate surgery, explaining to her the necessity of removing the tumor and her right kidney.  She looked up at me out of the corner of her eye and said she sure hoped the surgeon who worked on her wasn’t blind. Then she laughed.  When the tumor was removed after two difficult surgeries and several chemo treatments, Tess asked Dr. Marshall if she could see the tumor.  Dr. Marshall snuck us down to the pathology lab so we could get a good look at it.  Tess started laughing at the ugly 5 lb mass, amazed she had been harboring it in her abdominal cavity all those years. She named her tumor Mr. Wilson, after Dennis the Menace’s grumpy neighbor.  A few weeks later when Tess recovered from her surgery, she created a replica of Mr. Wilson out of whole wheat flour and red dye, conducted a funeral service and buried Mr. Wilson in her grandparents’ backyard.  Those of us in attendance held sparklers and assisted with the shovel. Tess loved the beach and body surfing in the waves and was so disappointed she missed her trip to Florida.  With the help of her cousin Laly, she spent long stays in the hospital imagining the roof top outside her 5th story window as a beautiful beach.  She created a Tess beach cocktail of coke, grape juice, goldfish crackers, milk, gummy bears, body lotion and hair and set it out on a cart at the nurses station, spying out of the door of her room and squealing with delight at a nurse’s gasp of horror. She roamed the halls of St Francis hospital pulled by her father in a wagon.  She would finish each journey by directing her father to push her down the long incline in the lobby, while she steered the wagon handle to a stop through and outside the automatic doors that opened to the outside world.  One day, as she built great speed approaching the automatic doors, she cried out “It’s not openiiiiiiiiiiiing!” , slammed against the doors, jogging them off their track and spilling her out onto the floor.  When her father got to her, she was already scrambling back into the wagon so that they could escape undetected.  After retreating to the chapel where they giggled uncontrollably over their escape, they self-confidently returned to the scene of the crime.  Suddenly, as Tess told it, a guard jumped out of a closet in the lobby and told them to never again race the wagon through the lobby and the automatic doors again, as they had knocked the doors from their tracks.  As her father began to protest that it wasn’t they who had committed this heinous crime, with Tess looking up innocently, the guard shot back “Look, we’ve got it on camera.  Don’t do it again.”  Her father and Tess in tow, sheepishly slunk back to her room. Just as the beach was beginning to look suspiciously like a rooftop outside the window of her hospital room, the people from Make-A-Wish told Tess they would grant her a wish.  Without hesitating, she said she wanted to go to Hawaii.  A month later, Tess and I arrived at the Grand Wailala Hotel in Maui, the fanciest hotel Tess ever saw.  She rushed into the ocean, throwing her arms up to the heavens.  Tess drew great strength from the ocean.  She moved through water like an ocean nymph. After a year of chemo, Tess celebrated with a No More Chemo Party, directed and produced by her uncle Lou, written by her cousin Bailey and participated in by all her family and friends.  Her hair began to grow back and she looked forward to beginning the school year as a “normal” kid.  Although her friends at Riverfield always made her feel like one of them, she yearned to have long hair and run and play like the other kids. Six months later, the cancer had relapsed in her lungs.  Her chances of survival dropped from 85% to 20% under the relapse protocol, which required more radiation therapy and another six months of chemo.  Tess handled the news with her usual calm.  It was at this point, in January of 1996, on the brink of 10 years old, that Tess asked if she could make all the decisions regarding her treatment.  Her father and I agreed.  Although many people questioned the wisdom of this decision, we knew Tess needed to feel as much in control of her disease as she could and we knew without question, she would make good choices.  She returned to the magic of the beach to make her decision, this time in Grand Cayman where she swam with stingrays and her uncle David.  Knowing she would lose the hair she had worked so hard to get back and would face more gut-wrenching nausea and weakness, she arose smiling from the sea and chose more chemo and radiation. After three months under the relapse protocol, the doctor told us the tumors in her lungs were not adequately responding to the treatment.  As a last resort, the doctors recommended “as not unreasonable” - another surgery to remove the gross tumor from her lungs, high dose chemotherapy, and stem cell infusion.  I feared the aggressive rigor of a bone marrow transplant, scared that the highly toxic treatment of the disease would kill Tess faster than the disease would.  Tess decided to have the surgery and go to Mayo Clinic in Rochester for the bone marrow transplant.  Knowing that she might not make it out of Mayo, she wanted to celebrate life – again at the beach.  She and I went traveled to Kuai and returned not only refueled for the journey ahead, but in the company of two new travel companions, John and Sandi, from Minneapolis who traveled with us down the long, difficult road through Mayo and later on a cruise in the Caribbean.  John and Sandi helped Tess and me decorate her room in the transplant unit at Mayo where she lived for a 6 weeks while she underwent chemo so toxic it ulcerated the her GI tract and she had to be bathed every two hours so that it didn’t burn her skin.  Tess put up butcher paper over one wall and scribbled angry epithets, which she soothed by covering them with pictures of people and places she loved.  John, Sandi, Tess and I hung strings of bright, multi-colored ribbons all around her bed and donning face masks and the empty cardboard spools as bracelets, we danced with Tess in a wheelchair around the unit.  We wore paper hats and played hokey pokey on the elevator.  We laughed until we hurt when Tess told her jokes about the Chihuahua and Pinocchio.  And later, laughing, Tess walked out of Mayo and into the arms of family and friends who met her at the airport here in Tulsa, which was celebrated by her Absolutely Fer Sure No More Chemo party at her uncle Lou’s.  Tess decided she did not want to get any CT scans or x-rays, as there was no cure if the cancer came back.  She didn’t want to worry about it.  She wanted to live life fullout, and be a normal kid.  And so she did.  She went to school at Riverfield; she painted under the guiding hand of Jodi Ellison, she sang; she danced; she played piano with Billy Cortez; she IM’d all her friends and family; she listened to an eclectic mix of music from 92.1, 101.5, 102.3, 104.5 and 106.9; she laughed and cried with her friends over all the joys and heartbreaks of adolescence; she walked down the aisle with her friend and former teacher, Ms. Kelly, and with her role model, her cousin, Laly.  And in the winter of this year, she got sick.  Although she was having great difficulty breathing, she continued to refuse diagnostic tests.  She knew what they would show and she wanted to graduate with her friends from Riverfield, the school she loved.  Finally, in early May, she agreed to find out.  The tests showed that her right lung was blocked by tumor which wrapped around the trachea, nearly closing off all air to her lungs.  The doctors wanted to operate immediately.  Tess however was going to go to Frontier City with her graduating class and attend graduation no matter what anyone said.  She had the best time in Frontier City with you guys.  And determined to get through graduation without coughing, she delivered a heartfelt, coughless, thank you to all the teachers and friends at Riverfield who loved, taught and nourished her for ten years and celebrated with her friends at the reception following graduation.  I hope all of you at Riverfield know how much Tess loved you. The morning after graduation, Dr. Ranne performed his last surgery on Tess, removing her entire right lung.  As always, he managed another miracle and within 4 days, Tess was up and greeting the largest group of visitors ever amassed in a room at St. Francis – all her friends from Riverfield.  Their laughter filled the pediatric floor. After treatment, she returned again to the beach.  Though not as grand as the beaches of Hawaii and the Caribbean, the beach at Destin was the most perfect to Tess as she was surrounded by all of the Gonsalves family.  The picture of Tess on your program was taken there.  You can see the pure joy of her spirit. Family has always been important to Tess.  Though she and I were our own little family, we are a part of a much larger family -  on my side,  her grandparents – Olga and Lou Gonsalves,  her uncle and aunt David and Jane Gonsalves and cousins, Beth Ann, Erik and Meaghan; her uncle and aunt Lou and Rhonda Gonsalves and cousins Trenton and Laly and Monte Evans; her aunt Judy Hamilton; her aunt and uncle Mary and Tom Seng, and cousins Bailey, Michael and Evan; and her uncle and aunt Bill and Ana Gonsalves and cousins, Josh, Zachary and Amanda. On her father’s side, her dad Chester McMullen and stepmom, Karen Seabury, her half-sister Whitney Bard and half-mom Paula Bard; her grandmother Ruth McMullen, her uncles Mel, Dean and Dan McMullen, her aunt Martha McMullen; aunt and uncle Cilla and Jim Glaeser and cousins Amy and Josh Roberson and Becca McMullen.  I want to take just a minute to tell all of you at Bishop Kelley how happy you made Tess by welcoming her into your family.  She was so excited about coming to Kelley and wanted so much to rejoin you here.  She even asked Ms. Birney when she visited a few weeks ago to bring her homework so that she could catch up.  She was so touched by all your letters, email, flowers, phone calls and visits.  She loved the poem Ms. Aboud’s class wrote for her and the video Ms. Birney’s class made for her.  Her face beamed when Mr. Dang’s class called her on the phone and sang “you are my sunshine.”  She was only able to be with you for a short time, but you made her feel as if she would be with you always.  I hope she will be.   Last year, she chose Bishop Kelley because she knew it would be her next home.  You let her be what she so much wanted to be - a normal teenager, complaining of too much homework, uniforms, and laughing at everything.  So many people told me that Bishop Kelley was a big happy family that held its own close and dear.  All that you have been to Tess and allowing this celebration to be held here at the chapel proves that to be true.  My family wishes to thank you by establishing a memorial fund in Tess’s name.       Last Wednesday, Tess called the family together and told each of us good-bye.  Each good-bye was special, saying just what was needed to be said.  She organized everything from what spreading her ashes over the ocean outside the Grand Wailaia Hotel in Maui - to what she wanted for a prayer service.  She wanted a celebration.  She chose the music and the format.  She instructed her Uncle Lou to dress as Buttons the Clown, to lead the processional with Pachabel’s Canon, interrupted by Louie Louie, to have her cousins and sister dress in wild clothes, to ask everyone to wear bright, happy colors, to have lots of flowers, and to asked those who wished to do so, to share a happy memory.  Most of all, she wanted everyone to laugh and celebrate her life and our lives with her and to thank all of you who have loved and supported her. Thank you.  A special thanks to all Tess’s caregivers – Drs. K, McMahon, and Hum and all the staff from the clinic, Dr. Linda Murphy, Dr. Ranne, Dr. Brickner and his staff, Dr. Marshall, Dr. Purser, Drs. Anderson and Arndt at Mayo and their staff, Dr. Kramer, the staff at Hospice of Green Country, particularly, Linda Biggs and Lenetta Clark, and  Judy Bomar, Ruth Ann Odom, Jim Rambo, K.B. Austin, Chief Joseph, Sister Rachel, Carol Dillard, and so many more. Tess was my perfect dance partner.  We always knew the other’s next move.  We danced slower the last few weeks but it gave us the time to hold one another close and learn to let go.  Tess told me I had to laugh at least once every day, not that polite laugh, but the kind of breathtaking laughter she always drew out of me.  I see her dancing under the silver apples of the moon and golden apples of the sun. In closing, I want to share with you the vision Tess had during a healing ceremony with Chief Joseph this summer.  She was standing outside her body looking at herself sitting in the chair.  A large eagle of light hovered over her head and then disappeared into a vortex in her body, pulling her spirit back into her body.  A beautiful, clear stream wound its way from her right shoulder through her chest and out her left side.  She looked down and her chest was filled with beautiful bright flowers.  And as she raised her head, the flowers turned into stars and filled the heavens of her head. Wild of Nothing, my Tristesse, my joy.  It’s all good.