Ohio restaurant sends one last mocha milkshake to dying woman in Virginia

Is there anything you need, he asked his dear friend?

A Cleveland Indians hat, Emily Pomeranz answered.

Done. Sam Klein took Pomeranz a hat the next day when he visited her again in hospice. She was dying of pancreatic cancer.

There was one other thing she wanted.

“What I would do right now for a Tommy’s mocha milkshake.”

Klein knew exactly what she was talking about, he wrote Monday on his Facebook page: Tommy’s Restaurant in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where they had both grown up, is known for its shakes.

“If you grew up on the east side of Cleveland, you have probably had the milkshakes,” Klein wrote. “Although I now live in the Washington, D.C. area, I still get to Tommy’s every time I am in Cleveland.”

Is there anything you need, he had asked his dear friend. She needed a Tommy’s milkshake and he was determined to get it for her.

He told his Facebook friends how he found the restaurant’s email address on its website and placed a tall order: Is there any way you can deliver a milkshake 375 miles away to a hospice in Arlington, Va.?

Restaurant owner, Tommy Fello, was stumped.

“This was my first request like this,” Fello told Fox 8 in Cleveland. “I wasn’t even sure if we’d be able to do it.”

But a few days later Klein got a call from Tommy himself, who told him he’d figure out a way.

“It touched my heart, and I said, ‘boy, I’d love to be able to do something,’” Fello told Fox 8.

So he packed a frozen milkshake in dry ice, paid a $123 overnight shipping fee, and sent it to Pomeranz.

Klein posted a photo of his friend, smiling, in her hospice bed, holding that mocha milkshake. His story has been shared around Facebook thousands of times and Emily’s happy face has been seen by people around the world.

Pomeranz talked about that milkshake for days and days, Klein wrote on Facebook.

“Seeing her in that picture was just something else, I’ll tell ya. What a reward,” Fello told Fox 8. “I was so happy it worked. I wasn’t sure how it was going to work, and Sam called me and said it worked. We called it the ‘Milkshake Mission’ or something like that, ‘Mission Impossible.’”

Pomeranz died on Friday. She was 50.

The restaurant posted a tribute to her on its Facebook page Thursday.

“Emily has certainly made an impact on the WORLD!! In a time when we see so much hate, crime and negativity in the news, this is a true testament to how many caring and kind people are out there working for the common good,” the post reads.

This story was originally published August 4, 2017 at 10:28 AM with the headline "Ohio restaurant sends one last mocha milkshake to dying woman in Virginia."