The Patient Person for May 11, 2007

• By BOB ANDERSON
• Advocate Florida parishes bureau
• Published: May 11, 2007
• Editor’s note: This column marks the final chapter in Laurie Anderson’s chronicle of her life with cancer. She died peacefully Wednesday morning about an hour after her husband submitted this last column.

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As I helped Laurie from the bathroom a couple of weeks ago, she stopped to glance in the mirror. Puzzlement crossed her face as if to ask who was the frail woman she saw. Where had her youth, her strength, her beauty gone?

A woman in her early 50s, she exuded youth two years ago, before cancer began to steal it.

She sweated as she worked tirelessly in her garden. She exuded contentment as she went through her yoga routine. Her energy seemed boundless. Despite the fact that our children had gone away to college, she seemed younger and more vivacious than women who had lived far fewer years.

Now, as I look at a slideshow that our son put together of Laurie’s life, I feel sad as images of the young woman I dated and married flit across the screen. The pictures of us boarding a boat La Paz to cross the Sea of Cortez on our honeymoon leave me wondering how our youth escaped so quickly.

It takes only 15 minutes in the slideshow to see her transformation from that young woman to a thin person, still smiling, looking out a window at her garden and fighting the final stages of cancer. In the days since Casey took that picture, she became unable to even see the visitors to her hummingbird feeders 5 feet away. She became unable to respond other than with an occasional blink of her eyes or squeeze of her hand.

Though her youth unmistakably disappeared, strength has proven a different story. Though no longer possessing the physical strength to chase news stories, hurry home to cook a meal and then rock her babies to sleep, she has continued to display a strength of spirit that has amazed her hospice nurses. Weeks ago they advised me to call the kids home because her death was imminent. Laurie’s strength fooled them.

Since then the tide of her life has moved backward and forward, sometimes ebbing to a point where she stopped responding to sounds or touch. Once, days ago, she ceased to breathe for so long that I thought death had come. Yet, some strength pulled air back into her lungs.

Each time she drew herself back from death, she was rewarded with periods when she could laugh, take interest in the lives of her children and even sit on the deck in the sunshine and peel crawfish.

As I write this, her strength to continue breathing erodes rapidly. Eventually — possibly by the time you read this — it will topple against the siege of disease.

Though she might not have agreed as she looked in the mirror a couple of weeks ago, the one thing cancer has not conquered is her beauty.

Laurie’s face might not radiate to perfection the way it once did. The curves of her body may have melted to gaunt limbs. Her blue eyes may not shine with excitement and occasional mischief the way they did not so long ago. Still, Laurie has maintained a spiritual beauty from which lots of pretty faces could learn.

Part of that beauty is that, as often as not, her concerns haven’t been for herself. Throughout her illness she has continued to display a genuine caring whether it be for another cancer patient struggling across a parking lot to get to chemotherapy or a young homeless woman on the street that Laurie was determined to see get help.

The chair beside Laurie’s sickbed has often tempted visitors to spill their own woes, because Laurie has maintained a sympathetic ear even as illness sucked away her youth and strength.