Renn just passed her first year anniversary as a breast cancer blogger.  In this post she honors a fellow traveler whose journey had recently comes to its end. Renn writes at The ‘Big C’ and Me

HONORING MARY

Another bright light has been extinguished by breast cancer.

Mary (aka MBJ on BCO) has died.

Doctors gave her four months. She was gone in six weeks. Her passing has left the online breast cancer community at a loss for words.

Cancer is some scary sh*t.

I feel a need to honor this lovely woman who was so generous in spirit and insight; who always had a kind word to spare no matter where you found yourself on the breast cancer path; who so readily shared her own pain in the hopes that it might help others. And she helped so many others.

Mary was just two years out from her initial breast cancer diagnosis when she developed constant shoulder and arm pain. Several doctors told her she had a frozen shoulder; another said she had nerve damage. Mary herself suspected that maybe she tore a muscle or ligament. She received cortisone shots and some physical therapy, but the pain never went away.

Mary was also uninsured. She waited months for an MRI appointment (which, ironically, is tomorrow). When she was finally (correctly) diagnosed in early February (yes, just last month), doctors sent her home with hospice. She died six weeks later. She never had a chance. But you do.

How can we honor her life? By listening to our bodies, speaking out on behalf of our discomfort, and not taking no (or “I don’t know”) for an answer.

And listen to your gut. If what you are hearing from a health care professional doesn’t sit well with you, keep shopping — until you hear something that does.

R.I.P. Mary. (To hear her lovely singing voice, visit the website her husband created for her here.)

from~

Got an email last week from Beth Fox who lost her son to cancer.  So this is a bereavement blog, a tribute.  The web design is interestingly different.  Learning to navigate it is its own voyage of discovery.  Beth writes at A year of Black

Spring is coming. In my house we love the outdoors, we spend lots of time hiking and walking and going to the park. Nolan was famous for bringing a sword everywhere he went and he protected all of us from the usual horrors, aliens, rattlesnakes and imaginary dinosaurs. He loved hiking and we made up names for the trails we went on and I still call them those names when I run, and I think about him and how happy he was to be outside and running around and being a kid with a sword. Now I have 2 little princesses who I take to the park, and some part of me always cringes when I go, because I am afraid. I read recently about how parents with Kids who are dying should prepare themselves( as if…) and one of the things they said was that a parent should prepare himself with answers to questions people would ask, like “how many kids do you have?” Harmless question normally. Ugh, but not at my park where there is a mecca of jogging strollers and too many sand toys, these are professional moms and they like to be social, and if you know me then you know that I struggle with general sociability. So I am afraid to go to the park because In my moments where someone is brave enough to approach me, (ok, not true! I am mostly friendly!) they always ask how many kids I have. Let me lay this out for you. I miss my son, I often don’t mind talking about him and sharing stories about him ,but strangers don;t know that, and so what then? They ask, they see your 2 girls and do you throw in a bombshell about a son in heaven or do you mention 3 kids and hope to heck they drop it so it doesn’t get awkward. Or do I lie and say 2 kids, which isn’t a lie but a technicality and feel like crap because it makes you feel like you have lost the ability to count him anymore. whew. I know I am not the only parent who has felt like this. Sometime I avoid it all together, but mainly I change my answer everyday and still nothing feels right, after 2 years I cannot decide how many kids I tell people I have.
I have learned that people take there cues from you. If you are sincere and stable about your losses, then they are too. Sometimes My answer depends on the type of person I judge them to be, wrong I know, but sometimes I wonder how I could touch someone in a moment unaware of what they might be going through. I can put surety in my voice and hope in my response. I can cover a hand in peace and I can stand up before a throng of people and say that something terrible has happened and yet there is still life and goodness and Peace. I can share hope when I can. But to be honest sometimes I can’t; some days I wrap myself in black and murmur that I have 2 girls and they are making me crazy, and then shuffle home and stare at curly hair and a big smile that I wish I could touch and I scoot myself under the covers and bury my head in my pillow and talk to God all night long because there is no good sleep anymore.
I don’t have an answer, and If i could bury my head in the sand at the park I would, but then, who would push the swings?

~ from A year of Black

I thought that this post would be a good way to start the year.  It combines sadness with hope, a place we often find ourselves in.  This is certainly true of those of us battling cancer.  It is true for those who cherish and love us.  And I can say it is true for we professional  caregivers who choose to follow this journey, experiencing sadness and hope month in and month out.

Dear Mom, I’m married.

Hi Mom,

It’s been a while since I’ve written. My last post, when I just got engaged, pretty much described everything leading up to the wedding. I survived it all and even had a great time. A lot of people have been talking to me about it, asking me how it went, so here’s the list of what I thought I wouldn’t survive – and what ended up happening:

• You won’t be there for me to tell you I am engaged. You weren’t, but I survived.
• You won’t be there to help me with the preparations. But Grandma came with me to be fitted for the dress the first time (the seamstress offered her a job), my baby sister the second, and my good friend the third. Shanainai tied it for me and everything. I survived.
• Your name will be listed as z”l (deceased) on my wedding invitation – or is it not supposed to be listed at all? I have no idea. A non-issue. We didn’t list any parents on the invite, we just made the invitation from us. That was easy. I survived.
• You won’t be at the signing of the Ketubah. Neither was any other female. If anything, you were there, but I wasn’t. I didn’t even know when it happened. Survived.
• You won’t be walking down the aisle. Grandma went with me instead. The rabbi suggested it, and I loved the idea. So did she. Definitely survived.
• You won’t be under the chuppah with me. Grandma was. But then again, so were you. I know it was you that made that wind blow and knock everything over. Definitely survived.
• You won’t be beaming down at me. Ever. No, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I guess I accepted it, so I survived.

The truth is, the  most stress I had about and from the wedding was that I was afraid of the attention. I was hoping no one would mention you when they saw me, and thankfully just about no one did, other than a few of the elderly. But I had that invisible “pretend you are someone else” wall up, and it worked perfectly.

In fact, everything went very smoothly, from the planning (which I hated, but I would have hated it if you were here, too, to be fair), all the way through the wedding. I had more offers of help than I knew what to do with, and The Boy and I knew what we wanted and wouldn’t let anyone bully us into something we didn’t want to do. Well, we did invite a few people I didn’t want to invite, but The Boy was right, it wasn’t worth the fight.

I had the sleeves from your dress removed, and the back opened up with a corset-type thing to tie it with, and the dress ended up being great. I would have preferred to be a few pounds lighter, but who wouldn’t… Dad’s best friend growing up actually asked me at the wedding if it was your dress – he somehow remembered your dress from 36 years before!

I’m so happy I got to wear it. There were a few times where I felt I  missed out on the choosing-a-dress part of the wedding, but the truth is it doesn’t matter – who wouldn’t rather wear their mother’s dress if it was as gorgeous as it is? There were times where I would suddenly think, I can’t believe my mom danced in this and ate in this and got married in this. I thought it would make me cry, but I loved it. By the way, I hope you didn’t take it personally that I changed clothes when we were dancing. I was just jealous of The Boy and wanted to be part of the t-shirt fun, too.

The wedding itself went by in a second and a half, like everyone said it would. I survived the family picture taking (mostly because people were already coming, so I just wanted it to be over), the reception was great, and the hike to the chuppah was a lot of fun. After a brief 10 minutes when we couldn’t find Grandma, she appeared, and the ceremony started.

It was the fastest 10 minutes of my life. I felt like an actress playing a part, just I was surrounded by people I love instead of random actors and stand-ins. At one point, the rabbi said that Jewish tradition says that 3 generations back come to visit at the chuppah, and that we have to mention your absence. I swear, he could have been talking about sauerkraut if you were to judge by my reaction. I can’t believe how calm I was. The only time a few tears fell down my face was when I heard Grandma sniffling beside me. Of course, The Boy is amazing and took  me hand the second he heard it, just to beam some extra strength into me (which worked, of course).

And then she asked when do we kiss already, so that was over.

The rabbi picked up one of the glasses of wine, started the first prayer, and then an insane gust of wind blew in and knocked everything over – the other glass, the ring, etc.

My reaction: Yey, The Boy broke the glass succesfully

The reaction of the 175 other people at the wedding: That was Talia’s mom.

Thankfully, I made no connection. I didn’t think about it at the chuppah, I didn’t realize it during the wedding, and only later when I got home, people started talking to me about it.

And as it turns out, everyone thought it.

So I’ve accepted it. Even though I am not mystical in any way, I kind of like the idea that you made a statement and said, “Ahem! I am here! I am in the dress and the wind and the glass of wine that just shattered on the floor.”

So the wedding went by smoothly, and honestly, it couldn’t have been more perfect, that is other than you actually being there. Everyone laughed and danced and ate and had a great time.

I waited a while to write about the wedding because I was waiting for a nervous breakdown. A week passed, another week passed, and another, and I was OK. I don’t know how. And then suddenly it was just over; Reports of the impending emotional storm were greatly exaggerated.

A few weeks after the wedding, I started feeling really weird. Not sick or anything, but just weird. After a few more weeks of weirdness, I decided to take a small test.

It had 2 definite lines on it. I am pregnant.

A few weeks later, the doctor was able to tell me exactly what day we conceived.

It was 5 days after the wedding.

On your wedding anniversary.

from Daughter of Cancer

Since I began this blog, I have always wrestled with the question of how to handle Guest Posts of survivors that are not doing well.  Early on I even considered whether or not to publish the names and URL’s of blogs of folks that have passed away.  Last Wednesday I offered the difficult post by Alli, who was struggling with the inevitable issue of quality vs quantity of the time left us when our disease rises up and begins to beat down our last defenses.

Now that I am working in a bone marrow transplant clinic and proudly wear my leukemia and transplant badges in order to give my patients hope, the editorial conflict is more acute.  I frequently had out Being Cancer Network business cards to my patients.

But after all Death is what we fear when we first heard our doctor say the word “cancer”.  Death is what we begin preparing for, at least at some semi-conscious level, in the days, weeks, and months after our diagnosis.  Most of us are familiar with the statistics of our particular disease.  Those statistics tell us that there are some that do not make it.  This fact comes as no surprise.  We only hope to not be included in those grimmer numbers.

There are lessons to be learned from every story of cancer, lessons to be learned from every stage and phase of our struggles.  In fact that is our reason for publishing Guest Posts in the first place.  Some lessons are dearer than others to learn.  Some posts are harder than others to read.  The author of the following post admits that.

One could argue that there is nothing noble in suffering, that there is little to admire in death.  And yet that is part of the transcendent nature of human experience – that meaning can be derived from both.  It is even popular to think that this is the special nature of dealing with those diseases called cancer.

Marjorie Walker has been writing as the Cancer Curmudgeon · Can your blog save your life? since November 2009.  She wrote the following post on July 1 of this year.  One week later the following was posted:

Marjorie Walker
22nd December 1938 – 8th July 2011

Marjorie passed away peacefully on Friday 8th July.

Margie was a psycho therapist.  Throughout her blogging career she thought a lot about illness, disease, death and dying with dignity. It is certainly worthwhile to peruse the archives of her writings.  You will also notice that her blog did not end that July 8th.  It continued on in memorial tributes by friends.

The learning from our life can continue on after our life, expanding to others who may be struggling still.  This is why we continue to publish at Being Cancer Network.  Marjorie’s thoughtful writing is a testament to the power of cancer blogging.

Take care, Dennis