Lexington teen won pageant on Father’s Day after her dad died. She wants to help kids like her.
Abigail Anderson and her mom Jessica Anderson mark time in two ways: before Abigail’s dad died and after.
David Anderson’s death in 2018 turned the Lexington family’s world upside down.
“He got sick when I was 12,” Abigail Anderson said in a recent interview.
“We never believed for a minute he was going to die,” Jessica Anderson said. “We didn’t go there.”
Instead, she said the family kept a positive outlook on her husband’s battle with colon cancer.
While Abigail and her cousin Amiyah, whom she considers a sister, continued school in Lexington, David Anderson was cared for at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.
But months later, just a few weeks before Christmas, he was gone at just 39 years old.
Now, Abigail said she’s found some comfort in working to help other children who are going through what she did.
And on Father’s Day this year, Abigail, now 18 and a senior at Henry Clay High School, won a statewide pageant against more than 20 other girls, taking home the title of the National American Miss Kentucky Teen.
Throughout the week of Thanksgiving, she was slated to compete for the title of National American Miss Teen in Orlando. The NAM system also has competitions for younger girls, which she’s competed in previously, as well as a pageant for 19 and 20-year-olds.
For Abigail, competing in pageants is one way to get more attention for her cause, which she calls DADD, Delivering Activities During Distress.
Through it, she collects and delivers to hospice units toys and activities that can be done quietly by children whose family members are dying.
“I want to get this platform nationwide,” she said.
She said she still remembers what it was like during the three weeks her dad spent in a palliative care unit at Vanderbilt.
“There was nothing for me to do,” she said, just some broken crayons for coloring and some children’s books with pages torn out.
Jessica Anderson said she made runs to the store to buy crafts and activities to try to keep Abigail and Amiyah busy while they spent time with their father.
“I didn’t want to leave, but I was running to Walmart,” she recalled.
That, they said, was the inspiration for Abigail to begin holding drives to collect toys for other kids in her situation.
“People would randomly bring me things,” she said.
A few weeks ago, she went back to the Nashville hospice unit for the first time since her dad died, taking a load of toys with her. Not much had changed.
“They didn’t have anything,” she said.
She hopes to turn DADD into a nonprofit organization someday.
She’s also working on a coloring book for helping kids work through their feelings about losing a loved one.
The illustrations are being created by her pageant coach’s boyfriend, who is also undergoing treatment for cancer, she said. They will feature Doodlebug, the corgi her dad bought her before his passing.
“Whenever I picked her up for the first time, I felt, like, a connection with my dad,” she said of her beloved pet. “My whole life he always called me Doodlebug. He rarely called me Abigail. If he called me Abigail, I was in trouble.”
When it’s finished, the coloring book will be available for download by hospice units through a QR code, she said. She hopes to spread that code all over the country by sharing it with other pageant competitors.
Though Abigail has found comfort in this work, she said going into hospice units has not been easy.
“What I’m doing right now, it hurts so bad,” she said. “Those were some of the worst times of my life.”
But she said she hopes the toys can help make the process a little easier for others.
Abigail is a member of the JROTC program at Henry Clay and is enrolled at Bluegrass Community & Technical College. She plans to attend her dad’s alma mater, the University of Kentucky, next fall and hopes to become a detective someday.
She said she’s been acting, singing and modeling from the time she was about 8 years old, and she’s represented by Heyman Talent in Louisville.
She said she got her singing voice from her dad.
“He was a big part of my life when it came to singing,” Anderson said.
After his passing, she said it was a long time before she felt like singing again.
“You didn’t do much of anything for a long time,” her mom said.
“One day, I was like, Mom, I want to do a pageant,” Anderson recalled. She said she had competed in just one pageant prior to that, which also happened to be in the NAM pageant system, when she was 7.
Her mother’s response: “That’s a crazy world.”
But, Abigail said, “We soon realized that it is nothing like television portrays it to be.”
She said the competitions have allowed her to travel across the country, and she said she’s not the stereotypical beauty queen.
“People think pageant people are so prissy and perfect,” she said. “I’m the opposite.”
Her mom said she’s not afraid to let people see the “real” her, which includes struggles with dyslexia.
“Although I have lost so much,” Abigail said, “I have gained so much.”
