PALM HARBOR, Fla — Last year, teen volunteer Zoe Lazanowksi sat down with 96-year-old Daqueta Shelley. She asked her question after question about her life.
Zoe: “Do you have any advice you want to give your family?”
Daqueta: “Just to love them, to enjoy them. Families are the most beautiful thing on earth.”
Zoe started volunteering at the Empath Health care center in Palm Harbor and interviewed her for the Lifetime Legacy Guide and Journal.
The answers are turned into a video for families to have after their loved one is gone.
Daqueta included a final message for her family — ”How much I love them. The longer I knew them, the better I loved them.”
Questions in the journal include:
Are there any world events that had an impact on your life?
Has your life met your expectations?
And what brings you the most joy?
“A lot of times it presents an opportunity for closure for the patients. But also a priceless gift for the families,” said volutneer coordinator Jessica Wilbur.
“It was really inspiring because I only met this person one time. I went to her house and I was meeting her for the first time and yet I knew so much about her. And it was really crazy that I could look into someone's life like that and get to know them so well in just an hour or two,” said Zoe.
Daqueta died on February 1.
Future generations will know she owned a salon, enjoyed writing prose and poetry, loved gardening, flowers, and cooking everything from scratch.
“It was bittersweet because obviously whenever people are under hospice, you know they will likely pass away. It was unexpected. I wasn’t expecting her to pass away so shortly after. But it was nice that we had that video already,” Zoe said.
Suncoast Hospice has more than a hundred teen volunteers in Pinellas and Hillsborough.
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