In advance of our meeting, Judy Rosen of Estes Park describes herself so that I will recognize her. “I’m 5-1,” she says. “Petite.” She says her hair is short and mentions chemotherapy.
She was diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer in October 2009. It went into remission for a year, but has returned. When she first e-mailed me in January, she called her illness “a gift in living life fully and fearlessly.”
Such sentiment when expressed by the healthy is dismissed as trite. When offered by those who are dying, it is met with a range of emotion from understanding to skepticism with stops along the way at pity and condescension. Well, of course, you would say that.
This last reaction suggests a belief that anyone who is dying and who has time to contemplate that death, would react with the same all-out embrace of life. It assumes no other choice, when, of course, there is.
This is among the first of Judy’s understandings. It did not come cheaply.
Cancer has claimed nearly all her family. First two aunts, then Judy’s three sisters, taking them in order of birth, oldest first. “Like dominoes,” Judy put it. Between the death of one sister and the diagnosis of another, cancer claimed the Rosen girls’ mother too.
Judy’s sisters, like Judy herself, carried the BRCA2 inherited gene mutation that made them more susceptible to breast and other related cancers. “Ashkenazi Jewish background,” Judy explains. After the death of her second sister, Judy had a preventative double mastectomy. She could have, says now she probably should have, had her ovaries removed then too.
Her sister Jamie was the psychotherapist. Amy was the choreographer and dancer. Lisa was the poet. Judy was the National Park Service ranger, a go-getter mother of two teenage boys. Just before her diagnosis, she’d completed a two-week kayaking and climbing trip through the Grand Canyon. “I thought I was invincible,” she says. “I’d never felt healthier.”
Judy is exactly as she described herself to me. I would not have guessed her cancer had returned. I would not have guessed she is undergoing weekly chemotherapy. She is funny and radiant and full of curiosity.
What she is not is angry. This surprises me almost as much as it surprises me to discover that I am. Twenty- two years after my own mother’s cancerous death, I am stunned to find that I am still capable of anger.
Judy is 51. She says she realized that for 15 years she thought she’d confronted the fact of her sisters’ deaths, of her father, mother, stepfather — she is the only one left — by retreating to the outdoors. It was the refuge, she says, for all her “hurts and unnameable sorrows.”
But anger, Judy tells me, has just never come up. “Depression, yes. Escape, yes. Victim, yes. But that was before my diagnosis, which changed everything.”
So many people have known cancer, she says. They have it or someone they love does. They might be contemplating preventative surgery. “I’ve had all of that and so I wonder now, can I help someone else feel less alone in their journey?”
She talks about the love and support of the Estes Park community and how it has helped her heal. She talks about her sons. She has just finished a memoir. She is writing journals for and to her boys. We talk about what she calls the gifts of her disease: the way the present comes into sharp focus, the reordering of priorities, the ascent of the spiritual life.
It seems to me the gift is grace. And grace does not abolish sorrow or uncertainty, but it offers in the midst of that, gratitude and joy for what has been given, and acceptance for what is to come.
Judy is still working. The National Park Service recently gave her an award for “Ranger Spirit.” The inscription is appropriate. “You have breathed life into things that will return to further our way, touched pieces of our future that bear your hand.”
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
