Dena Strickland, A Rare and Valuable Spirit

I met Sally Ann Papageorge only once and then briefly. I spied her daughter, Dena, as she and her mother were headed toward the amphitheater at Cascades Park where a Shakespeare in the Park performance was about to be held — or it would have been had it not been canceled by a thunderous tempest.

Dena was then the development director at Boys Town in Tallahassee and had at one time taken me on a tour of its facilities, presenting me with a booklet about the history of the organization and its founding by Father Edward Flanagan as well as the story behind its motto: “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.”

Had someone other than Dena Strickland presented me with that booklet, I likely never would have read it. But she did, and I did.

Dena introduced me to her mom, who was in her 70s at the time, with abundant pride, and I was pleased to meet her. Sally Ann exhibited the very same qualities that have endeared Dena to so many in Tallahassee and beyond. It was said about Sally Ann that she had a talent for sales. She enjoyed success as a real estate agent for many years.

Dena sells causes.

For 15 years, she was the chief fundraiser at Boys Town. She has long been a part of the Greek Food Festival held each fall by the Holy Mother of God Greek Orthodox Church. Five years ago, she became the director of the Big Bend Hospice Foundation.

Dena had occasion to turn to Big Bend Hospice for help in the days leading up to the death of her mother on Feb. 19 of this year. Already, she had been working to generate community contributions to a capital campaign in support of Big Bend Hospice’s First Commerce Center for Compassionate Care (FCCCC) project.

The eight-bed center, which is located at Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare and will cost approximately $6 million, has been designed to provide high-quality care in an optimal environment for patients and their families as they transition from hospital to hospice.

Dena is deeply grateful to Big Bend Hospice for all that its team did for Sally Ann and her family last February. Then, she was in a position to discover firsthand the differences that the FCCCC will make. She learned that even a short ambulance trip can be excruciatingly difficult for a person with critically low blood pressure and an elevated need for supplemental oxygen.

So it was that Dena came by an extra dose of motivation for her hospice fundraising efforts. As if she needed it.

Dena describes the rooms at the FCCCC with the kind of verve her mother surely displayed in touting the features of a four-bedroom, three-bath beauty on a two-acre lakefront lot.

“Steve,” she began, “these rooms are state-of-the-art. Can you imagine being in the hospital and being able to go to this restful place? We will have a bereavement area, a chapel. The patient rooms are like bedrooms. The beds have headboards. The wiring is hidden by gorgeous art. The art throughout the facility will relate to Big Bend Hospice’s eight-county service area. The couch will pull out into a bed! When we do tours, that is a big win with people! And in the ceilings, we have Sky Factory, a virtual skylight with moving clouds and swaying branches!”

I thought back to the tour I had taken with Dena at Boys Town. There, too, she directed my attention to details that mattered to her and as much as said, “Steve, they should matter to you, too.” Every shelf and nook, the ways in which the resident children made the rooms their own with personal effects, the tidiness of the place, the spaciousness of the kitchen, the sharing of duties.

I am enamored of Dena’s enthusiasm, no doubt, but it is that enthusiasm, combined with unmistakable genuineness, that makes her a dynamo and a refreshing break from all that tiresome and ubiquitous forced positivity. When she says “awesome” or “perfect” or “100 percent,” she means it.

“Dena is one in a million,” said Big Bend Hospice CEO Bill Wertman. “When she gets into something, she’s fully engaged. Our project at TMH, she has made that happen.”

What if she were even 10 in a million? What a difference that would make.

Be well,

Steve Bornhoft, Executive Editor

sbornhoft@rowlandpublishing.com