20/10/2023
A special thank you to all of Melissa's wonderful clients. Especially those who were with her for nearly 15 years of sessions. She cherished meeting each of you, watching your families grow, seeing your new babies being born, and even a few kids getting married and having babies of their own. In tragic instances like this, when her work made the biggest impact on a client's life. She was both saddened and felt truly blessed to have captured moments for families in need. It was the most fulfilling aspect of her job. And hugging all those babies, and playing with kids during holiday sessions.
For her fellow photographers and vendors, she also cherished meeting you and learning from you and your products. She was honored to have her work featured by many of her vendors.
Thank you to everyone who participated in Melissa Donaldson Photography over the years!
Below is my tribute to my wife from her personal page. I've reposted it on her business page for anyone who didn't know of her battle or anyone who wants to read her final update of her battle. Her personal page will turn into a memorial page. I will be leaving her business page up for some time. I want to allow her work to live on in remembrance of an amazing woman.
As many of you know Melissa was diagnosed with cervical cancer in March of 2022. She fought valiantly for the past 19 months. She underwent 19 chemotherapy treatments, 25 radiation treatments, just over 100 restorative IV therapy treatments, and received 3 units of blood over 2 transfusions. We shifted her care plan in late August and on September 25th her tumor markers turned in the right direction and started to reduce. However, after a multi-month struggle with pneumonia, she entered the hospital on October 9th. Although she fought an incredible battle, it sadly came to an end on October 17th, 2023. She passed peacefully and was surrounded by family and friends.
In true Melissa fashion, our family and friends took over the hospice center, cooking meals, and celebrating her life. Cameron and the 8th-grade girls of GCS made cards and distributed flowers to the other patients in the center's care. Melissa received by far the most amazing care from her team of nurses and staff that I’ve ever encountered in health care. And we’ve seen some good ones in the past. Her hospice staff at the Lund Home of HOV was a God-given and gifted care team.
Melissa will always be remembered for being a fiercely strong woman. She raised our two oldest children Hannah and Jacob for seven years on her own as a single mother. We were joined together in marriage on November 1st, 2008, and we just missed celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary by two weeks. A month after we were married, I adopted Hannah and Jacob to complete our family union. A year later we added our youngest, Cameron to our family. In late January this year, she welcomed her first grand-baby little Ethan.
Melissa had an extremely deep faith and spent many years helping with student ministries, participating in or leading women's bible studies, mentoring young women, and despite her lack of strength she tried to start a cancer ministry earlier this year. She was active in church until this past summer when her battle took its biggest downturn. She continued to watch online, journal, pray, and most of all worship.
Melissa was a gifted saleswoman and won numerous high-praise sales awards, president's clubs, and other achievements. She really found her calling in life as a photographer. She successfully ran her photography business for 14 years.
Although she most loved her newborn sessions and all those babies. We could see her gift best on display during her fall holiday picture season. Melissa was often booked solid months in advance. For many years of her career, she photographed from mid-July to mid-January 7 days a week with only our anniversary, her birthday, and holiday days off. She loved almost every minute of it.
Photography was such her calling that she did several photography sessions last fall despite receiving chemo treatments that day or secretly dealing with the side effects.
She was blessed to retain many of her clients for nearly a decade or more. A small few were with her from beginning to end. Melissa was super proud of the many clients who crossed over from being in a business relationship to being among her close friends. She began closing her business down this summer only due to the devastation of having to continue to battle cancer she believed was cured earlier in the year.
In photography, Melissa won 27 international photography contest awards and several national and local awards. Her work was featured in printed magazines, and online magazines, and used by numerous photography prop and product companies for their marketing.
We moved to a small horse property during COVID-19. This allowed Melissa to spend the last 3 years of her life exploring a newfound interest in farm life. She started by adopting two goats, a dozen chickens, and a pony. At its peak, this grew to 5 horses, 40 chickens, and the darn goats. Of the livestock, she most loved her Tennesee walking horse Mr. Bojangles (BJ), her Polish chickens, and her bantam silky chickens. Raising chickens assumed to be hens, doesn’t work out with much accuracy. She was scared to death of several roosters we ended up with. But her two Polish roosters Gene Simmons and Prince Diana were highly entertaining to her and would play chase with our mini wieny dog Remi. We’ve had a rough 2023 with dogs. She lost her chocolate lab of 10 years to diabetes on Jan 2nd. 5 days later we lost an 8-month-old mini dachshund and a month later we lost another 12-week-old pup to parvo. We still have our 3-year-old Remi who was her constant cancer-fighting companion.
While Melissa’s health did not allow for the years of trail riding we planned. In June we enjoy one family trail ride together up the Queen Creek wash.
She'll be most remembered as a loving mom, a woman of faith, and an absolutely incredible wife.
