Utah mom with terminal cancer plans her own funeral after three month diagnosis

A Utah mother with terminal cancer planned her funeral after receiving a diagnosis from doctors telling her she had three months left to live (GoFundMe)

A Utah mother battling a rare terminal cancer planned her funeral after being diagnosed with three months to live.

In her GoFundMe campaign, Erika Diarte-Carr, 30, revealed that she’s been struggling with Stage 4 small-cell lung carcinoma for the past two years, and doctors gave her a terminal diagnosis. After an 18 September oncologist appointment, she no longer planned on pursuing treatments as she was told that they would “no longer help.” The doctors told her she had at most three months left.

“3 months to spend with my babies and loved ones. 3 months to make the best of what time I have left,” she explained. “During these next couple of months I need to make sure my kids will be ok after I am gone. I am faced now with the most difficult thing of planning my own funeral.”

Her campaign goal was to raise $5,000 to cover the cost of her future funeral service, but to her shock, more than 30,000 donors have since helped her raise $900,000.

“It happened overnight. I never expected that,” she told ABC News. “I never expected to have a big funeral service, or a lot of people reach out and help me.”

She added, “With the way it’s went, I’m just in shock … just very grateful for everybody and everything that’s been there.”

As of 29 September, the mother of two revealed that she planned on putting the majority of these donations in a trust fund for her two children: Jeremiah, 7, and Aaliyah, 5. In the campaign’s description, she called her children her “whole life, light and soul … and what keeps [her] going.”

She also thanked her “amazing medical team” – including Carl Gray and Kylie Money at Ogden Hematology Oncology, Steven Brown of Tanner Clinic and Brandon Fisher – for their continued support.

Back on 7 May 2022, the single mother walked into an emergency room sporting a “normal shoulder injury,” only to find out that day that she had cancer. Since then, she noted that the doctor’s words of warning looped in her head, replaying as she wondered how she was going to survive this diagnosis. She wrote that the doctor told her, “I hope you have a good support system at home because you’re going to need it, you have a long and hard journey ahead of you.”

“The doctor than proceeded to tell me that there were multiple tumors that had metastasized to other parts of my body including my skeletal, which is how we were able to find the tumor that was causing my shoulder pain,” Erika continued. “By that point the damage had already been done. In that moment, mine and my kids’ entire lives had changed forever, as well as all of those around us.”

Things for the mother took a turn when she was diagnosed with Cushing’s syndrome on 17 January 2024, a disorder that leads the body to make “too much of the hormone cortisol over a long period of time,” according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

“That’s when I started to decline and things got worse,” she explained to ABC News, with the syndrome causing rapid weight gain and swelling, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, and muscle and bone deterioration, among other symptoms.

“Since my diagnosis I have managed to keep working full time, taking only 2 months off in the beginning for surgeries, biopsies, appointments, radiation and chemotherapy treatments,” she added on her GoFundMe page. All while still being a full time mama. I do have an AMAZING support system but over time it has put a major financial, emotional, mental and physical toll on us all.”

She’s chosen the time she has to spend with her two children and ensuring their future, the latter of which seems to be secured thanks to the goodwill of thousands of donors.