Utah mother with terminal cancer plans her own funeral after three months of diagnosis

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A Utah mother battling a rare, terminal cancer planned her funeral after it was discovered she had just three months to live.

In her GoFundMe campaign, 30-year-old Erika Diarte-Carr revealed that she has been battling stage 4 small cell lung cancer for two years and doctors gave her a terminal diagnosis. After an appointment with an oncologist on September 18, she stopped planning further treatments because she was told they would “no longer help.” Doctors told her she had at most three months left.

“3 months to spend with my babies and loved ones. “Three months to make the most of the time I have left,” she explained. “Over the next few months I need to make sure my kids are okay while I’m away. I now face the most difficult task of planning my own funeral.”

Her campaign goal was to raise $5,000 to cover the costs of her future funeral. But to her surprise, more than 30,000 donors have since helped her raise $900,000.

“It happened overnight. I never expected that,” she said ABC News. “I never thought there would be a big memorial service or that many people would come forward and help me.”

She added: “The way it went, I'm just in shock… just very grateful for everyone and everything that was there.”

On September 29, the mother of two announced that she planned to put the majority of those donations into a trust fund for her two children, Jeremiah, 7, and Aaliyah, 5. In the campaign description, she called her children her “whole.” Life, light and soul… and what keeps them going.”

She also thanked her “amazing medical team” — including Carl Gray and Kylie Money of Ogden Hematology Oncology, Steven Brown of Tanner Clinic and Brandon Fisher — for their continued support.

On May 7, 2022, the single mother went to the emergency room with a “normal shoulder injury,” only to discover that day that she had cancer. Since then, she noticed that the doctor's warning words kept replaying in her head and she wondered how she was going to survive this diagnosis. She wrote that the doctor told her: “I hope you have a good support system at home because you are going to need it, you have a long and hard road ahead of you.”

“The doctor then told me that there were multiple tumors that had metastasized to other parts of my body, including my skeleton, and so we were able to find the tumor that was causing my shoulder pain,” Erika continued. “By this point the damage had already been done. In that moment, my life and the lives of my children and everyone around us were changed forever.”

Things changed for the mother when, on January 17, 2024, she was diagnosed with Cushing's syndrome, a condition that causes the body to “produce too much of the hormone cortisol over a long period of time,” according to the National Institute of Diabetes, digestive and kidney diseases.

“Then I started losing weight and everything got worse,” she told ABC News. The syndrome caused rapid weight gain and swelling, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and muscle and bone loss, among other symptoms.

“Since my diagnosis, I have managed to continue working full-time, initially only taking two months off for surgeries, biopsies, appointments, radiation and chemotherapy treatments,” she added on her GoFundMe page. All while still being a full-time mom. While I have an AMAZING support system, over time it has taken a huge financial, emotional, mental and physical toll on all of us.”

She has chosen the time to spend with her two children and securing her future. The latter appears to be secured thanks to the goodwill of thousands of donors.