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It has taken two years for me to share this story beyond a small circle of friends. Still, the story has been waiting on the edge, waiting for the right time. The time has come.
She was only 57 when she received the impossible news: pancreatic cancer. She was young and vibrant, healthy and wise. Only a few people knew about the abdominal pain. Now we all knew. We recoiled in disbelief. We shook to the roots and sobbed with bottomless denial, anger, bargaining. Acceptance? No! Way too soon for acceptance.
A few months later, we sat together in her living room (the just-right place for this conversation, as you will see). Kerry wanted to develop a wellness plan, and asked me to be her coach. She expressed herself in terms unique to the beauty of her soul. She described her view of life as a continuum between living and dying. "We are all somewhere on the continuum," she said. "We have a choice," she said. "I want to focus on the living end of the continuum."
For fifteen months between diagnosis and departure, Kerry repeatedly chose life. The photos from her son's wedding show a proud mom bursting with joy. She went to Hawaii. With a granddaughter on the way, she wrote a book about grandmothers.
She started a blog, and called it "Kerry's Project." It displays remarkable views from the journey. We join her at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where she validated the initial opinion. We meet her team at MD Anderson in Houston, where she joined in a clinical trial. We get to know her family and friends, featured in intimate stories from decades of living and loving. We share her commentary on living with death in the viewfinder.
Kerry struggled with the fact that her loved ones started to grieve before she was ready. While she made a daily effort to choose life, we often succumbed to our own fears and sense of loss. Each of us looked for a way to help, to offer what was needed, not to get in the way, not to overwhelm, not to make her story a story about us.
We knew it was our last visit. The time was coming when life would pass her along to the next adventure. I asked if there was anything I could do. She asked if I would "say something nice" at the memorial service. I teased that it would be hard to think of something nice. I was deeply touched that she asked. At last, there was something I could do to help.
It didn't work out that way. I was a thousand miles away. I wrote some nice things and sent them to her family, to be used as they wished. I thought about her all day, and felt that she was very near.
The gifts of sharing that year with Kerry continue to be precious. I learned that it is not denial to choose life with a diagnosis of terminal cancer. It is making the most of what-is and letting go of the rest.
What is your experience of dancing with dying? What have you learned? How has it changed your view of choices we face at the end? Of choices we face every day?
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