{"id":942,"date":"2012-04-04T22:48:29","date_gmt":"2012-04-05T02:48:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.katrinakenison.com\/?p=942"},"modified":"2012-04-04T22:48:29","modified_gmt":"2012-04-05T02:48:29","slug":"a-brief-friendship-a-lasting-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/a-brief-friendship-a-lasting-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"A brief friendship, a lasting memory"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Her doctor told her she had, at best, two years to live.\u00a0 That was nearly twenty-five years ago, when Kathy Rich learned that after a brief remission, her stage four breast cancer had returned.<\/p>\n

My friend Jamie Raab knew Kathy and I would hit it off, and she was right.\u00a0 Last summer, when I went to spend a weekend at Jamie\u2019s country house in upstate New York, she arranged for Kathy to come, too.<\/p>\n

The day we spent together was a scorcher; ninety-eight degrees in the shade.\u00a0 But the heat didn\u2019t stop Kathy from suggesting that we hop in the car and drive over to Rosendale, to walk around at a street festival and hear some music.<\/p>\n

I was eyeing the pool, a novel I\u2019d brought along, thinking it was way too hot to move, let alone fight the crowds milling around between a dozen outdoor stages.\u00a0 But I kept my mouth shut.\u00a0 Kathy was game, and she was the one with a leg brace, a crutch, a wig, and cancer.<\/p>\n

The music was pretty loud and mostly awful, the heat was withering, but the people-watching was exceptional \u2013 it was as if we\u2019d stepped back in time, landing smack in the middle of Woodstock Nation.\u00a0 We wandered slowly, painstakingly, through a sea of tie-dye.\u00a0 We watched girls in pig-tails and bikinis do amazing things with hula hoops.\u00a0 We drank lemonade, bought silver earrings, marveled at the displays of peace signs and hemp tote bags and gauzy India Import blouses, just like the ones we\u2019d all worn in high school.\u00a0 We sought shade.\u00a0 Kathy never complained, though it was obvious that each step required an effort, that it hurt her to walk, and that the heat was taking a cruel toll.\u00a0 What she made clear however, without ever having to say so, was that pain was a price she was willing to pay for experience.<\/p>\n

Later, back at the house, Kathy and I hung out for a couple of hours, while Jamie went off to buy groceries and pick up another friend at the train.\u00a0Kathy asked if I\u2019d mind if she took off her wig; on the hottest day of the summer, a thick helmet of someone else\u2019s hair on your head is its own particular form of torture.\u00a0 When she came out of the bathroom a few minutes later in her bathing suit, she\u2019d removed both the wig and the brace.\u00a0 She seemed a lot more comfortable.\u00a0 And heartbreakingly vulnerable.\u00a0 Tiny, pale, completely bald, with enormous dark eyes and a dazzling smile, Kathy looked, I thought, like a luminously beautiful alien from another planet.\u00a0 And in a way, that is what she was.\u00a0 How does anyone live on this earth for twenty-five years after being told your time is up, without becoming a little other-worldly?\u00a0 She\u2019d had a foot on the other side for a long time.<\/p>\n

To say she also had perspective on what\u2019s important in life is, of course, an understatement; what astonished me most, though, was the purity of her joy.\u00a0 Sick as she was — and even though she knew the disease she\u2019d somehow outwitted and outlasted for years was catching up with her at last– Kathy was also an eternal optimist; how, at this point, could she be anything but? And she was, quite simply, lots of fun to be around.<\/p>\n

I slung one arm around her waist, held on to her elbow with my other hand and, laughing at my clumsiness, we somehow managed to hobble down to the pool. We lolled around in the water for an hour or so, talking as if we\u2019d known one another all our lives.\u00a0 Kathy was that kind of person — she cut right to the chase.\u00a0 Right away, I loved her for that. Why waste time on social niceties when you can get down to the real stuff, life and death and the big questions, instead?\u00a0 There was no subject I couldn\u2019t broach with her, nothing that felt off limits; who cared that we’d only met that morning?<\/p>\n

\u201cHow long have you needed the brace, and the cane?\u201d I asked.\u00a0 She told me that, although there had been times in the past when she\u2019d been bedridden, this new, apparently permanent disability was recent.\u00a0 She was still getting used to being so visibly and so physically \u201chandicapped.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut you know,\u201d she said, \u201cit’s a funny thing. \u00a0When I started having so much trouble walking, what I found out there was just the friendliest world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kathy didn\u2019t stick around for dinner that night. \u00a0She was tired and wanted to get home before dark.\u00a0 I remember watching her slip her wig back on, give it a little tousle and a quarter turn, so that one auburn lock hung down casually over her face.\u00a0 We hugged good-bye, and Jamie told her friend she\u2019d see her soon.\u00a0 And then Kathy took her crutch and made her way out to her car, lowered herself in, and drove away.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t see her again.\u00a0 But I see her now, in my mind\u2019s eye.\u00a0 And I know I will remember her always, a woman who knew all there is to know about living in the moment.<\/p>\n

As most of you who are regular readers here are aware, I\u2019ve been finishing work on a new book, trying to meet my deadline, which is now less than two weeks away. I\u2019ve had to let the blog go for a while, in order to focus all my time on the manuscript.\u00a0 But when I woke up this morning, and found a note on my phone from Jamie saying that Kathy had died yesterday, I knew I wouldn\u2019t get a lot of writing done today.\u00a0 Instead, I took a long walk.\u00a0 I went to my favorite spot in the woods to pray and meditate and listen to the wind in the trees.\u00a0 And I remembered Kathy.\u00a0 I knew her only for that one day, but in that short time, we managed to cover a lot of ground.\u00a0 It feels odd to say it, but I feel as if I\u2019ve lost a friend.\u00a0 Certainly, all who knew her have lost a teacher.<\/p>\n

Below is an essay Kathy wrote a few years ago for the New York Times.\u00a0 I read it again early this morning, through tears.\u00a0 I may have written a book called The Gift of an Ordinary Day<\/em>, but Kathy Rich, more than anyone else I\u2019ve ever met, knew just how much the present is really worth.<\/p>\n

17 Years Later, Stage 4 Survivor Is Savoring a Life Well Lived
\nBy KATHERINE RUSSELL RICH
\nEach year on a day in January \u2014 the 15th, to be precise \u2014 I go to a Web site and post a message to hundreds of women I\u2019ve never met, saying, essentially, \u201cI\u2019m still here.\u201d
\nWithin days, a thunderous chorus comes back, 200 voices, 300. A few of them ask, \u201cHow can this be?\u201d Sometimes they begin, \u201cI\u2019m crying.\u201d Many answer in kind: \u201cI\u2019m here, too. It\u2019s now three years.\u201d \u201cFive years.\u201d \u201cThree months.\u201d \u201cSeven.\u201d
\nWhat we\u2019re doing, in a way, is checking for lights in the darkness.
\nNow there probably aren\u2019t a lot of Web sites where the announcement that you\u2019re around and breathing would cause anyone to take notice, let alone respond. But this is a site for people with Stage 4 breast cancer, something I\u2019ve had for 17 years. The average life expectancy with the diagnosis is 30 months, so this is a little like saying I\u2019m 172 years old: seemingly impossible. But it\u2019s not. I first found I had the illness in 1988, and it was rediagnosed as Stage 4 in 1993. That\u2019s 22 years all together, which is the reason I post each year on the anniversary of the day I learned my cancer was back: to let women know that it happens, that people do live with this for years.
\nI tell them that when the cancer returned, it came on so fast, spread so quickly, that I was given a year or two to live. Within months, the disease turned vicious. It started breaking bones from within, and was coming close to severing my spinal cord.
\nNothing was working, till a doctor tried a hormone treatment no one used much anymore, and the cancer turned and retreated, snarling. It remains sluggish but active. Every so often, it rears its head; when it does, we switch treatments and it slides back down. In that way, I stay alive.
\nI tell them: you just don\u2019t know.
\nTwo and a half years after the Stage 4 diagnosis, I confessed to my mother that the doctors had said I had two years to live, tops. I\u2019d kept this information to myself because if you say it, it\u2019s true. I told her this laughing, as if we were trading preposterous stories. \u201cWell, I guess you\u2019re going to have to hold your breath if you\u2019re going to make that deadline,\u201d she replied, in her slow Southern drawl when I gave my previously stated expiration date.
\nI spent the next five years holding my breath, then did the same for another five. I enacted every New Year\u2019s resolution, past and future, all at once. Quit work that had grown stale and became a writer. Wrote a book. Went to India on assignment, fell in love with the language that was swirling around me, went back to live for a year and learn Hindi. Didn\u2019t realize the reason I\u2019d come to dislike that hyperbolically overachieving Lance Armstrong was that his behavior was too familiar. Take a nap, Lance! I\u2019d think to myself, though in truth I couldn\u2019t either.
\nBut if I was verging on radical levels of life consumption, I had a reason: No one had told me I wasn\u2019t going to die soon. About 12 years out, my doctor finally did.
\nThere\u2019s a small subcategory of people with Stage 4 breast cancer, it turned out, who live for years and years. \u201cTwenty. Thirty,\u201d said my doctor, George Raptis. This group constitutes about 2 percent of all cases. Doctors can\u2019t predict who will fall into this category. They can\u2019t say you\u2019re in it till you\u2019re in it \u2014 till you\u2019ve racked up the necessary miles.
\nThe reason they can\u2019t is that for all the pink-ribbon hoopla, despite the hundreds of millions that have been poured into breast cancer research, hardly anyone has looked into the why of long-distance survival; not one doctor has specialized in this field.
\nHere\u2019s pretty much the sum of collective knowledge: People in this group tend to have disease that has spread to the bone (as opposed to lung or liver, say) and feeds on estrogen. They tend to do well on hormone treatments. End of commonly known story.
\nBut as Dr. Gabriel N. Hortobagyi at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston told me, you can also find women whose breast cancer spread to organs other than bone, for whom hormone therapy did exactly nothing, who had their lesions surgically excised and who have been free of cancer for 30 years. None of these women could have expected to live.
\nYou just don\u2019t know, and neither, unfortunately, does the medical field.
\nOne reason, as the breast surgeon Dr. Susan Love told me, is that \u201cmany clinical trials are funded by the drug companies to run for five years,\u201d obviously not enough if you\u2019re investigating long-term survivors. But through her institute, the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, she has begun to conduct research.
\nDr. Love said she was inspired by a colleague who told her that in World War II, aviation experts focused on planes that went down until someone said, \u201cWhy aren\u2019t we studying the planes that stay up in the air?\u201d By no means a reflexive optimist, she thinks there\u2019s hope we\u2019ll find a cure.
\nOn the Web site, I tell the women how deeply I believe there\u2019s no such thing as false hope: all hope is valid, even for people like us, even when hope would no longer appear to be sensible.
\nLife itself isn\u2019t sensible, I say. No one can say with ultimate authority what will happen \u2014 with cancer, with a job that appears shaky, with all reversed fortunes \u2014 so you may as well seize all glimmers that appear.
\nI write to them (to myself) that of course this is tough: the waiting to see if the shadows are multiplying, the physical pain, the bouts with terrible blackness.
\n\u201cBut there can be joy in this life, too,\u201d I say, \u201cand that\u2019s so important to remember. This disease does not invalidate us. This past year, I\u2019ve had the joy of falling in love with my sister\u2019s kids, who live states away and whom I hadn\u2019t had the chance to know. I\u2019ve had a second book come out, one I worked on for eight years, about going to live in India with Stage 4 cancer. I\u2019ve had so many moments of joy this year, but when I\u2019m in blackness, I forget about those.\u201d Then I ask them to write and tell me about theirs, and lights begin to flash.
\n\u201cHad a pajama party with my oldest friend, laughing through the night in matching pajamas about old times.\u201d
\n\u201cCame in second in a bridge tournament.\u201d
\n\u201cI went on a wonderful camping trip with my family.\u201d
\n\u201cSeeing my older daughter grow taller than me. She\u2019s now 5-9.\u201d
\nOne thing I don\u2019t ever think to say: When I was told I had a year or two, I didn\u2019t want anything one might expect: no blow-out trip to the Gal\u00e1pagos, no perfect meal at Alain Ducasse, no defiant red Maserati. All I wanted was ordinary life back, for ordinary life, it became utterly clear, is more valuable than anything else.
\nI don\u2019t think to say it, and I never will. The women on the site already know that.<\/p>\n

Katherine Russell Rich is the author of \u201cDreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language\u201d and \u201cThe Red Devil: To Hell With Cancer \u2014 and Back.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Her doctor told her she had, at best, two years to live.\u00a0 That was nearly twenty-five years ago, when Kathy Rich learned that after a brief remission, her stage four breast cancer had returned. My friend Jamie Raab knew Kathy and I would hit it off, and she was right.\u00a0 Last summer, when I went […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,20,25,26,29,31,14,49,15],"tags":[112,155,234,251,317,433],"class_list":{"0":"post-942","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-acceptance","8":"category-books","9":"category-courage","10":"category-faith","11":"category-friendship","12":"category-grief","13":"category-soul-work","14":"category-writing","15":"category-writing-and-reading","16":"tag-cancer","17":"tag-dreaming-in-hindi","18":"tag-jamie-raab","19":"tag-katherine-russell-rich","20":"tag-ordinary-days","21":"tag-the-red-devil-to-hell-with-cancer-and-back","22":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/600x600.png?fit=600%2C600","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}