D’Laney Ford, a multimedia design student at the University’s School of Journalism and Communication, died of a viral infection two weeks ago on July 15. She was 34 years old.
After being given between two to four weeks to live, Ford arranged to return to Siletz, Ore. and her childhood home near the water. She would not make it in time, however, passing in her sleep mere days after the prognosis at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. The diagnosis: an untreated viral infection, resulting in hepatitis, jaundice and organ failure.
Her mother, Patti Forcier, remembers a girl more concerned about those around her than her own well-being.
“She looked at her death as a new journey, not that it was an ending but that it was a new beginning,” Forcier said. “She was extremely remarkable.”
Ford had been declining for a weeks leading up to her visit to the doctor. The young woman often described as zany and playful was now constantly fatigued. The Student Health Center was unable to pinpoint the source and gave Ford medicine for her stomach aches, but she never recovered. She was admitted to Sacred Heart on July 1, then transferred to OHSU.
“I never saw her shed a tear about it,” said Jeremy McKenzie, one of her best friends and a constant traveling companion, “She never expressed any fear about what would happen to her.”
Ford grew in Newport Bay with her single mother, who took Ford on summer-long camping trips as soon as the school year wrapped up. A roadtrip around the country when she was 8 planted in Ford an insatiable urge to travel for the rest of her life. A 1996 graduate of Newport High School, she discovered a passion for painting, photography and writing when she was in her early teens, as well as her first taste of international travel on a school trip to Mexico.
Following graduation, Ford moved to Eugene to attend Lane Community College, however, she quickly swapped her books for a blank itinerary and jetted off to the San Juan Islands with McKenzie.
“She said, ‘let’s go to Orcas Island for the summer,’” McKenzie said. “I said ‘what’ll we do when we get there?’ and she just said ‘doesn’t matter. We’ll figure it out when we get there.’” The pair waited tables, camped and generally made due with very little for a few months, though initially slept in Ford’s car before they found a more stable sleeping situation.
They then departed to Thailand after a few months, working in restaurants yet again. In all, she traveled to the Caribbean, South and Central America, East Africa and had a stint busking across Europe. She also lived in Hawaii for a period of time recording video of dolphins. The opportunities to record and photograph her travels inspired her to return to Eugene and attend the University of Oregon with a focus in multimedia, with the goal of producing nature documentaries eventually.
While at the SOJC, she worked on a documentary, “An Elephant Never Forgets,” that was picked up by Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Oregon Lens program last summer.