Gay Ilene Cornelisse Shane
Gay Shane is a young 81. Heck, she acts like a young 61.
Shane sits on the board of directors of Operation Renewed Hope Foundation, a nonprofit that provides aid to homeless veterans. She helps serve meals and collects clothing for Rising Hope United Methodist Mission Church in Alexandria, and is a member of the Franconia Citizen Advisory Committee that supports area police.
“I don’t have time to be 81,” says the busy Alexandria resident.
When she’s not volunteering, she devotes her unclaimed free time to staying in touch with her seven surviving children, 24 grandchildren and 31 great-grandchildren scattered around the world.
Her life is full—although not as full as it was before March, when she lost her 54-year-old daughter, Janice Toney, to Covid-19.
In the process, Shane’s close relationship with two of her great-granddaughters (Toney’s granddaughters), was also severed. Toney had raised the girls since the younger one was 3 days old.
Shane liked to help out. She would often take the girls to and from school, make them dinner and host sleepovers while Toney worked as a home health nurse. “They were like my kids,” Shane says of the girls, who are now 11 and 9.
When Toney died without a will, Shane’s loss was multiplied by three. Custody of the girls fell to their birth mother, who moved the kids to Fredericksburg, limiting their contact with extended family. For a while, the girls called Shane on tablets, but then their mother took them away.
“The mother is opposed to me seeing them,” Shane says. “I have a lot of clothes and games here. She will not permit me to bring any of those things into her house.”
Directly and indirectly, Shane says, Covid robbed her of that familiar, comfortable kind of love that grows from a million moments of daily interaction.
“It’s not that I love [those girls] more than the rest of my family,” she explains. “It’s a different relationship. They’re a part of me.”
She still hopes to regain part of what Covid has taken away.
“God has worked so many miracles in my life,” she says. “I just have to keep a positive attitude that [they] will soon be able to call. I keep praying, and I believe that prayers are answered.”
Lisa Kaplan Gordon is a freelance writer, socially distancing in her home in McLean.