Unplanned but wanted.  This is how Chérie entered life in human form.

Her birth mother, Paula, tried desperately to keep Chérie, caring for her for two years before deciding to give her up for adoption.  Imagine a woman's strength to love her child that much to surrender her over to what she knew would be a better life.  Chérie was adopted by Beulah and Arthur, an older couple who were unique for the times because it was the second marriage for both.  Beulah longed to be a mother and had experienced not being able to keep several foster children before Chérie, which made Beulah doting and overprotective.  Beulah and Arthur gave all they had for Chérie, even putting a second mortgage on their home so she could attend USC for college.  They also unofficially adopted Michael (known as Skip) to help out his mother with his care.  Skip became like a brother to Chérie, their birthdays just days apart in July.

It was while Chérie was living with adopted parents and Skip that she first met David who would eventually become her second husband.  David's family lived at the end of the street so he and Chérie would play together as children and sometimes attend the same schools.  David's father was a well-known Baptist Evangelist and David was too shy to tell Chérie he had a crush on her.  As they grew, David thought he heard Chérie say she liked men in uniform, which Chérie denies ever saying.  As a result, David enlisted in the Air Force and went to Vietnam.

Chérie met both her husbands on the same street.  Both men knocked on her door and instantly expressed they were in love.  Both of these neighbors were/are excellent, exceptional men.  Her parents, moreso her mother than her father, were totally against her first marriage to Charles.  He was twenty-four years older, Irish, and his wife had abandoned him to raise their four children alone while he waited for an annulment.  Because he was taking solo care of his four children while working full time, the neighbors would make him casseroles to help out.  When he went to return an empty casserole dish to Chérie's mother's house, Chérie answered the door.  He went "whoa" and she invited him in to help her untangle a lamp chord.  Her mother refused to attend the wedding and locked Chérie out of the house, so she had to collect all her belongings by crawling through the cat door (yes, she was that slim since she had been a beautiful ballet and hula dancer and model).  Out of this relationship came Chérie's only child, Katherine (Katie), whom Chérie called the best thing she'd ever done.  In 1985, Charles received a contaminated blood transfusion during emergency open-heart surgery and contracted a then unknown disease, now called Hepatitis C.  Chérie's role transitioned to nurse, which in fact, she said she always wanted to be–either a nurse or a nun.  At the same time, while still teaching, she cared for Beulah who by then had dementia.  Chérie would come home from teaching all day and cook four different meals–a heart-healthy one for her ill husband, one for her picky child, one for her elderly mother who she would go feed, and finally one for herself.

Several years after Charles' death, by this time David had moved away, married, had a son Trevor, and divorced.  David was driving up north to visit his mother when he needed to use the bathroom mid-journey and thought to stop at Chérie's (or was this just an excuse?).  Unlike David, Chérie hated unexpected guests and was less than excited for the surprise, but when she opened the door, the childhood friend standing in front of her was the same shy little boy with a lasting crush and he finally told her.  The rest of that love story is history.  Chérie was David's "sweetie".  They enjoyed many adventures in David's homebuilt airplanes.  David also bore witness to Chérie's suffering and upheld the true meaning of his vows, caring for Chérie "in sickness and in health".  He did everything for her - helped to feed and dress her, comb her hair, manage all her medications, chauffeur her to the many medical appointments, and champion her strength, still taking her on dates to eat at favorite restaurants and walking her out to sit on the dock and feed the ducks and swans which she adored.

David also helped set up Chérie's art shows when she retired from teaching and juried into the Laguna Art-a-Faire with her jewelry.  She was a self-taught jewelry maker whose work made the cover of several magazines and sold in her Etsy shop.  Saying Chérie was a talented or gifted artist is really an understatement.  She began a thirty-five year career teaching high-school art when she was so young that people who came into her classroom would ask her where the teacher was.  She defied age and gender roles, becoming the first woman print shop teacher.  She painted in watercolor and oils, did glass etching, calligraphy, papier mache sculpture, collage, ceramics, basket making, photography, piano, etc.  Not only could she create in all these artforms, she could also teach them to others which is a skill in itself.  She would admonish her students that they were forbidden to say they "can't" and reassure them she was grading their effort.  Her student, Marlene, went on to become a Royal calligrapher for the Queen.  Chérie's home is a gallery, a testament to her talent and a palace of bountiful art supplies!

Challenging emotional and medical issues were part of Chérie's everyday existence yet all, including her doctors, were stunned with how gracefully she handled such severe pain, seeming always to maintain a pleasant demeanor and showing kindness and generosity to all.  For years, Chérie searched for her birth mother, expressing that she would look in the mirror and wonder who she looked like, or pass women on the street and wonder if they were her mother.  When she actually found her birth mother, it was a bittersweet relationship.  Mutually joyful at being reunited, but also unfilled as her mother's lasting shame was a barrier to her being able to answer many of Chérie's questions.  While Chérie's spirit was strong and an inspiration, her physical body endured many challenges.  She had three spinal fusion surgeries to her neck and back, and was scheduling the fourth one when instead she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  Chérie had chronic back pain but her positivity was baffling - can you imagine that after spinal surgery to her neck, while still recovering in a neck brace, she went with David on safari to South Africa?  She had suffered with migraines and their treatments since she was eighteen, had a replacement ankle, hardware in her elbow from another fall, and right after receiving her cancer diagnosis fell and broke her right wrist and knee having to start chemo in casts as an inpatient yet still smiling through it all.  Though Chérie spent much time in bed, and worked on her jewelry in bed, there was a period of time when she felt well enough to attend Aquafit (senior pool aerobics) which brought her so much joy and led to amazing friendships.  Chérie described herself as a painfully shy child whom others would judge as snobby for not speaking; later in life, she was the opposite of shy, making fast friends with anyone on the elevator or random bead artists in Greece she ordered from on Etsy.

Chérie accepted her cancer diagnosis fully understanding that pancreatic cancer is fatal with just 12% of people still alive 5 years after diagnosis.  The family, especially Katie, accepted and supported all of her health wishes and made sure to do everything they possibly could to help Chérie achieve her medical goals all the way to the end of life.  While no one was in denial that her diagnosis was fatal, people of faith still tend to believe in miracles.  At the start of Chérie's chemo, Katie anointed her with holy water from Our Lady of Lourdes in France using a bottle that her father had collected from the grotto when he was a young man and a bottle Katie herself had collected when she visited the grotto as a young woman after her father's death.  Chérie shocked all the doctors by how well she tolerated 9 cycles of the strongest chemo available, each cycle lasting 50 hours, and then flying through 27 sessions of radiation even going out to lunch after or getting her nails done with Katie.  After finishing radiation, she was only supposed to be resting ahead of her big surgery, a horrible, 12-hour procedure known as a Whipple that would have left her needing to take enzymes before eating small and frequent meals and made her an insulin-dependent diabetic.  Chérie never got to attempt her Whipple, entering the hospital on April 1 for what became a roller coaster of unpredictable issues eventually leading to respiratory failure.  It was actually strange to witness Chérie's profound pull on strangers while in hospital; like some kind of oracle, she attracted people such as all the nurses who would come to her even when she wasn't their patient or stay to visit after their shift ended.  This wasn't pity; it was something spooky or even divine.  One night with Katie there, Chérie was wearing such an uncomfortable breathing machine and had to try to sleep.  She told Katie through the oxygen mask that she felt like a disciple of Jesus.  Katie, alarmed that she may be seeing Jesus, had her clarify that imagining the disciples' suffering helped her to bear her own.

Surrounded by her loved ones, including her beloved dog Molly (nicknamed her barnacle), Chérie expressed her wish to be with God.  Ever her advocates and devoted soldiers, David and Katie helped her start hospice care and she died a few hours later.  It's not her death that's shocking because with pancreatic cancer it was pretty much inevitable; rather, it's the fact that she had been doing so well and was a stable cancer patient just awaiting surgery - a surgery she was incredibly brave enough to elect and had chosen a specific surgeon to attempt.

Unplanned but wanted.  This is how Chérie exited life in human form.

She is survived by her husband (David Orr); daughter (Katherine/Katie Guevara) and son-in-law Katherine's husband (David Guevara Rosillo); step-son (Trevor Orr) and Trevor's wife (Julie Orr) and their children, her grandchildren, (Taylor and Duncan Orr); her adopted brother (Michael "Skip" Fifield) and his partner (Satoko Matouji) and their family.

For more information please visit - https://everloved.com/life-of/cherie-fitzsimons-orr/