My mother, Nancy, will turn 80 in a few weeks; she has a pacemaker, she's still healing from a fracture just below her hip, and Chuck is nursing a recent case of shingles. They retired to Ecuador a few years ago, and in one month, her only sibling, my uncle Dave, will be laid to rest with full military honors at Camp Williams, just outside Salt Lake City, Utah, in the plot right next to their father, my grandfather.

We're raising $4,000 ($2,000 each) to bring Nancy and Chuck home for the service: round-trip flights out of either Quito or Guayaquil, a hotel room, a rental car, and a little bit of time with family before they have to fly back. Given Mom's age and health, everyone in our family knows something hard and simple: this will very likely be the last time she and Chuck are ever in the United States together.

Nancy and Dave were the only two children their parents had. As a Leo she's the oldest, and he was a Scorpio. If you know two siblings like that, you already understand most of what I'm about to tell you.

They were close growing up in Minnesota, in a nice Lutheran family, like most of the good Scandinavian families around them. That changed some when Dave enlisted in the Marines at 18, right after the Tet Offensive, and shipped out to Vietnam. Nancy, who was never one for the war, didn't take the news well. A few months later, Dave was severely wounded and nearly killed. He carried the weight of that for the rest of his life: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually: it never fully left him.

They found their way back to each other once Nancy settled down, married my father (an Air Force veteran of that same era) and started having kids. It mattered enough to my grandfather, a WWII Army captain who landed on Omaha Beach, that he moved the whole family (my grandmother and Dave included) from Minnesota out to Utah, just to be near their grandchildren as they grew older. One of my very first memories is from before that move, swimming in the Mississippi River with my grandfather.

After my grandfather passed, I got a nice long stretch of time with Dave and my grandmother in August of 1998, when I drove out with them to see my sister graduate from the Great Lakes Naval Academy. We spent a few days in Chicago and then spent more than a week in Minnesota fishing and visiting cousins and other relatives I hadn't seen since I was small. We caught a Vikings preseason game, and it happened to be the pro debut of a rookie named Randy Moss; I still have the jersey.

Like a lot of siblings carrying old wounds, Nancy and Dave's relationship had its good years and its hard years, sometimes both in the same month. But over the last several years, that changed for good. They both got sober, and they both found their way to the LDS church. When she married my father, Nancy had converted decades earlier, but fell away; over these last several years, she recommitted to that faith and married my step-dad Chuck. Just a few years ago, Dave converted from the Lutheranism that the whole family had grown up with, and I was there both the day Dave asked my dad to baptize him, and the day the ceremony happened, just a couple of years before my dad passed away. It's one of the memories I hold onto hardest.

The two of them also found a shared interest in genealogy, and it led them somewhere they'd wondered about for most of their lives. Growing up, Nancy and Dave had heard rumors and whispers that my grandfather had had other children before he ever met my grandmother, but my grandmother forbade a single word of it, and the subject went silent for decades. Digging into it themselves, Nancy and Dave finally confirmed what those old whispers had pointed to all along, and it's become clear that my grandmother almost certainly knew the truth the whole time. They reached out to the family they'd found, built a relationship with them, and Dave had been planning to finally meet them in person. He will not ever get the chance. But they're coming to the service. They want to meet Nancy. They want to keep this new branch of the family close, and Nancy wants that too.

That's what we're asking your help for: to make sure she gets to be there. Not just to grieve her brother, but to be with family, both old and newly found, one last time, while she still can.

Any amount helps, and so does sharing this with anyone who might be able to give. Thank you for reading this far, and thank you for helping us bring my mom home.