GIVERS
CARING and
COMFORT at life’s end
L by TODD COHEN
Life can unfold and conclude with a mysterious kind of symmetry. Brenda Gibson’s mother, Violet Chappell, once longed to be a nurse. She worked at Duke University Hospital for 17 years but, lacking a nursing education, ended up managing the operating supply room. At age 15, Gibson was also drawn to health care, volunteering as a candy striper at Wake County Memorial Hospital, now WakeMed. She currently chairs its board of directors. In 2012, when Chappell, then 92, was dying of congestive heart failure, Gibson served as her primary caregiver. After her mother was admitted to WakeMed four times in six months, Gibson arranged for her to receive home visits at least once a week from the nonprofit Transitions LifeCare, formerly Hospice of Wake County. “There was no way I could have dealt with it, as emotional as I was, without them,” Gibson says of Transitions LifeCare. “It kept her from having to go back to the hospital. Everything she needed, they provided.” Today, Gibson is one of three cochairs of a capital campaign that aims to raise $6 million to expand Transitions LifeCare’s 20-room facility with 10 new patient rooms and other spaces to allow it to serve another 500 patients and their
Billy Dunlap, Brenda Gibson, and Thad Woodard families each year. In the five years since it opened its Hospice Home, known as the William M. Dunlap Center for Caring, Transitions LifeCare has served over 3,000 patients and their families. The complex also is home to a spiritual sanctuary, grief center, and administration building. Co-chairing the campaign with Gibson are Dr. Billy Dunlap, a retired oncologist who co-founded Hospice of Wake County, and Thad Woodard, retired president and CEO of the North Carolina Bankers Association. Dunlap, 76, a South Carolina native, moved to Raleigh as a young child in 1943. He is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and the School of Medicine at Duke University, and served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah for two years during the Vietnam War. In 1973, he started practicing medicine in Raleigh with Robert Bilbro and Allan Eure. The practice became Raleigh Medical Group, the largest internal medicine group in Raleigh. Dunlap lives in Hayes Barton with his wife, Shawnee Sundquist, a nurse at Rex Healthcare. He has two grown children and six grandchildren. Woodard, 70, a Raleigh native, was raised in Selma in Johnston County and moved to Raleigh at 12. A graduate of
Pfeiffer College, now Pfeiffer University, he served in the U.S. Army and worked in the mortgage industry, and then the gubernatorial campaign of Hargrove “Skipper” Bowles, who lost the 1972 election to James Holshouser. Woodard was one of the first 12 employees at State Bank of Raleigh, then worked for a year as vice president of development at Pfeiffer before joining the North Carolina Savings and Loan League as CEO. After its 1997 merger with the Bankers Association, he continued to serve as CEO. He lives near North Hills with his wife, Jan, who chairs the Duke Raleigh Hospital Guild. He has two married daughters who live in Greensboro and Cleveland, Ohio, and two grandchildren. Gibson, 59, a Raleigh native, worked for Wachovia and BB&T before joining Highwoods Properties in 1985 as a commercial real estate broker. Since 2003, she has worked as an independent commercial broker. She is a former board chair for the WakeMed Foundation, and co-chaired its 2011 capital campaign that raised $50 million to build WakeMed’s first children’s hospital. She lives in North Raleigh with her husband, Ron Gibson, founder and retired CEO of Highwoods. They have a grown daughter. He also has a daughter from a previous marriage and two grandchildren. photograph by JILL KNIGHT
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