Carol Gray from the book "Mormon Women: Portraits & Conversations" by Kent Miles & James N. Kimball, (Handcart Books, 2009)

Carol Gray 

Humanitarian, Home Maker

Sheffield, England 

          As a Relief Society President, it was not Carol Gray’s intention to become a recognized humanitarian leader throughout Europe and the United States. She simply proposed to her ward members that something be done to help bring relief to the war ravaged areas of Bosnia. Seven years later, over thirty truck convoys had delivered food, clothing and medical supplies to Bosnia.

          Carol has also adopted a school for the mentally handicapped near Sarajevo, several residential schoolhouses for children who suffer from dementia, a retirement home for the elderly and a front-line emergency hospital.  In 2001, after the end of the Balkan conflict, she founded an orphanage in Ghana. A mother of seven, Carol expresses her gratitude “to my dear husband, Stuart, and valued friends who helped me so much on the home front.” 

          “I did not plan on personally driving a lorry to deliver relief supplies into the areas of conflict.  When the agency we were working with failed to organize a convoy, I simply did what had to be done.”

          Carol passed away on July 3, 2010.  Her husband Stuart wrote “She had battled cancer for 35 yrs and suffered from the effects of chemotherapy so much these last 6 yrs.” 

*****

Part 1
Interview March 7, 1997 
©Kent Miles & James N. Kimball
Excerpted from "Mormon Women: Portraits & Conversations" Handcart Books, 2009

My parents joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was about five. I have always loved the gospel and my parents were wonderful examples of how the gospel teachings work in our lives. So I grew up in the Church and I was very happy.   I've held lots of different callings in the Church, and thoroughly enjoyed every one.

It's challenging to be a member of the Church in England.  We have built our own chapels and have to do so many other things.  We have to work hard for everything, but I wouldn't have it any other way.  It's wonderful.

I married my husband when I was 21.  Stuart has always been a wonderful support. Our home is always full. I have seven children there are four daughters, three sons and seventeen grandchildren. But apart from them, I have lots of adopted kids who come and stay at our home quite a bit.  It's a very busy household, we've always got people in and out all the time, but it's lovely and I wouldn't have it any other way.

When I had my patriarchal blessing, it told me that my life would be spared for a special purpose.  I never gave that any thought until I was a young woman of 28 and I was diagnosed with having cancer.  It was terminal cancer.  The doctors rushed me into hospital and they had to do an emergency operation on me.  They literally shut me up and sent me home and told my husband that I had about three months to live at the most. 

While I was being wheeled back out of the operating theatre, a gentleman was in the hospital who was a very well-known English surgeon.   He specialized in many forms of operating procedures and often worked in America. I didn't know this until later, but apparently as I was being wheeled out he just inquired what was wrong with me, and they said, "Oh, she's dying basically.  There's nothing we can do for her, the cancer is too extensive, so we've shut her back up and we're sending her home to spend her remaining time with her family."  He said, "But she's only a young woman.  She's too young to die."  I was 28, I had just the four girls then and my youngest daughter was only six months old. 

So he robed up and he said "Let me take her into the theatre and see what I can do."  He went in and apparently he did an experimental operation on me which has only been done twice since.  One gentleman died in the operating theatre and another lady died ten days later, so I'm the only survivor of this unique operation.  They did all sorts of things, but I'm basically a mass of plastic tubing and steel inside. I have to take tablets daily, which keep my body going because I am minus most of the things which regulate the normal functioning of the body.

I knew with the fasting and prayers of my stake, that my Patriarchal Blessing had come to pass, that I had obviously been saved for something.  I assumed it was for the birth of my three boys which followed a few years later.  I felt we had been blessed with a miracle when our first son was born, who was Jamie and then three years later we had twin boys, it was incredible. It actually hit all the newspapers because they couldn't understand how I'd actually managed to have them safely. I had the boys and I assumed that the reason why my patriarchal blessing said what it did was because I was to raise my boys. 

I've always stayed at home with my children.  I'm a blessed Latter-day Saint mother and I've never needed to work.  I have stayed at home and contented myself with looking after and raising my family and doing lots of creative things that mothers tend to do.  I enjoy gardening, painting, flower arranging and writing poetry, so I was perfectly happy at home and never went very far a field.

I have always tried to live my life very close to my Savior.  I think when you have been faced with losing your life and not knowing how long you've got on the earth, to put your life in order, it changes your attitude to living.  When you think that maybe you've only got three months left, you forget about things like getting cross with people or getting irritable or delay doing tasks until tomorrow.  You learn to pack so much into every minute.  I suppose that is something that has never left me from that experience.  I now had my seven children and life was wonderful for me.  I was very grateful to my Heavenly Father for the extra time which he had profited me. 

About five years later I was phoned by a local hospice.  It was because of my experience they asked me if I would go in on a voluntary basis and if I would like to do bereavement counseling for the families who were preparing to lose their loved ones, due to cancer. I jumped at the chance.  The boys were getting a little bit older now. They were old enough to leave with my family or with neighbors. I started to do it and I got know some lovely families. 

There was one couple in particular that I got very close to.  They were very old, they must have been in their late 80s, and she was dying with bowel cancer.  He was obviously distraught to see her virtually disappearing before his eyes and being helpless to do anything for her.   I spent a lot of time with them.  They had no family, so they were everything to each other.

I got a phone call one day and when I answered the phone it was him. He was obviously very tearful over the phone. He said “Carol can you come to the hospital please?  She's going to die."  I immediately got ready, sent the children off to the neighbors and I got in the car.  The particular house that we lived in at the time was a Victorian home.  It had a beautiful garden that was full of the most exquisite old English roses and the fragrance from these roses, the honeysuckle and the quince was beautiful. 

As I got into the car and I started to go down the drive, I had this really strong feeling inside that I needed to stop the car and pick a single rose.  I just put the idea to one side and said "Don't be silly.  The woman is dying.  There's no need for you to take her any flowers."  So I carried on down the drive.  But again, this feeling came, this time even more strongly. "Pick a single rose and take it to the hospital."  Again I just pushed the idea away and made the usual excuses that there wasn't time to do it as he needed me there now because she was dying.  As I drove out on to the road I knew in no uncertain terms that something unusual was happening, because the feeling that I had seemed to reverberate right through every part of my body and it just said (this time it was very specific.) "Turn the car around and go back and pick a single yellow rose."

I knew that I had been chastised by the spirit.  I turned the car around and I went back into the drive, but all the time I was thinking, "But I don't have any yellow roses in my garden."  I have pink and red and white and peach and every colour you could imagine, but no yellow roses.  It was the only colour I didn't have.   I stopped the car in the drive and I got out. There facing me on one of my pink long-stemmed roses, was the most beautiful yellow rose.  It wasn't pure yellow, it was fringed with pink bits all around the edge, but nevertheless it was yellow.  I just stared at this rose in total disbelief, because in the eight years that I had lived there that plant had never produced a yellow rose for me before.

I rushed into the house, totally bemused by what had happened. I fully expected that when I got the scissors and had gone back outside again, it would disappear because it was a figment of my imagination. It was still there when I got back, so I snipped it off quickly and popped some maidenhair fern with it, wrapped it up and put a nice bow on it.  I put it at the side of me, this remarkable rose that I couldn't take my eyes off.

I rushed into the hospital, still not knowing what the rose was for and I quietly went into the ward where they were.  The curtains were pulled around the old lady.  She was obviously very close to dying.  As I peeked through the curtains I noticed that he had got hold of her hand, but his head had fallen onto her bed. He just sat there with his head on the bed near her hand.   I just felt it was a very tender moment and I didn't want to intrude. I just laid the rose by the side of her and tiptoed out.  I was about to go to the matron’s office to explain that I was here and if he needed me to come and fetch me.

 But before I got there, he came shuffling down the corridor after me, and he had got tears streaming down his face. He shouted my name, and I turned round, then he said, "Carol, how did you know?  How did you know today was our wedding anniversary?" Every year on the day of their wedding anniversary he had given her a single yellow rose.  I had no idea, absolutely no idea whatsoever.  He had never mentioned that to me before.  But it made me realize that the Lord knows the desires of our hearts and He had obviously listened to the heart of the old man who was so distressed about losing his life-long companion and it was their 70th wedding anniversary that day.  That was a special experience for me and I will never forget it.

The feeling that prompted me I know has prompted me many times in my life, but because of that experience I was more aware of it.  I recognized it when it came.  It was that same feeling that came one day when I had been watching the events that had been unfolding in what was then Yugoslavia.  We were watching awful scenes of what was happening there day after day and night after night. Although I didn't want to see it, I was compelled to put the TV on every day to see how the situation was unfolding. 

(To be continued)