Free-spirited Girly-girl
February 2023
When the doorbell jarred Cody and Kathleen Hampton awake at 3:30 a.m. on Sunday, Feb. 12, 2018, they felt sick to their stomachs. Kathleen pulled open the front door to find two Leon County sheriff’s deputies standing on her porch. Her heart sank.
“We all know what that means,” Kathleen said, solemnly.
Over the shoulder of one of the deputies, Kathleen saw the flashing lights of patrol cars and heard sirens wailing in the near distance. Her 19-year-old daughter, Debbie, had not come home yet after a night out with friends.
“My husband and I just knew,” Kathleen said.
Debbie almost made it home safely. She was just a quarter of a mile away when she made the grave decision to unbuckle her seatbelt and bend down to retrieve her cell phone that had fallen to the floor of her car. Debbie’s vehicle hit a utility pole head-on, and she was ejected from the automobile. It is likely that she never saw the accident coming.
Debbie was taken to Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare where she was placed on life support. She was pronounced brain dead two days later.
Standing in a hospital room full of family and friends, Kathleen suddenly had an out loud aha moment.
“It’s like, all of a sudden, I realized, oh my God, Debbie’s an organ donor,” Kathleen said. “It’s like she got in my head and said, ’Mom, I’m a donor.’”
Debbie enrolled on Florida’s organ donor registry at age 18.
“She made the decision the year before to be an organ donor when she got her driver license, never thinking the next year she would become a hero to many,” Kathleen said.
On Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 2018, Debbie shared the Gift of Life with seven people. She also donated tissue and her corneas to help improve the lives of many others. Cody and Kathleen could not be prouder of their daughter’s life and her gifts.
“She donated most of her major organs, including her heart, and now a number of people are living because of her sacrifice,” Kathleen said. She has written letters to all of Debbie’s organ recipients and hopes to meet them someday.
Just like that, Kathleen said her life shifted from a roller coaster ride to complete silence. Debbie struggled in school and dealt with personal trauma, but she had discovered her right path. She earned her GED at Tallahassee Community College and had landed a steady job.
“She was my angel on earth, and now she is Heaven’s angel and my daughter and granddaughter’s guardian angel,” Kathleen said.
Kathleen treasures the beautiful memory of her curly, red-headed girly-girl. Debbie loved painting and writing, as well as fashion and jewelry, and she also enjoyed wearing makeup.
“I always told her she didn’t need makeup, and she would say, ’you don’t need a bra, but it makes you feel better,’” said Katy Fisher, Debbie’s sister.
Family and friends also remember Debbie as loyal, fun-loving and a free spirit.
“She was always the life of the party,” Kathleen said, recalling a family trip to EPCOT when Debbie was 2 years old. “She was dancing and turned around and mooned me. The whole place erupted in laughter.”
The way Katy sees it, her sister viewed things through a different lens. In Debbie’s epitaphic, Katy wrote that Debbie had a smile that “made her eyes disappear” and a laugh that “bellowed from God knows where.”
“Debbie would say, ‘it doesn’t matter how you do it, do it different than anyone else,’” Katy said. “And from her first day on earth up to her last, Debbie never failed to do things her own way.”
That Debbie was both lively and challenging inspires Kathleen. She works for Make-A-Wish and volunteers at Pace Center for Girls in Tallahassee, which provides services to at-risk teen girls.
“Helping at Pace has helped me navigate my pain and suffering,” Kathleen said. “Affecting and impacting people in a positive way is my way of honoring my daughter’s legacy.”
To honor Debbie’s memory and the five-year anniversary of her “spirit in heaven,” Kathleen set up a campaign to raise $5,000 through Make-A-Wish, enough to grant a wish to a seriously ill child.
(By Kim Gilmore, Senior LifeQuest Public Education Coordinator)
