I taught high school journalism for over 30 years. The last eight we put out the only daily high school newspaper in the country. We did it in a school that had no business doing that. We were too small, too poorly funded, and the best students in town went to private schools in droves.

When I arrived there in the mid-’80s from another small school, but one with deeper pockets where we had built an award-winning paper in five years, people wondered why I made the switch. I told them I liked challenges.

But they still laughed when I told them we would build the same kind of success.

They laughed when we moved to weekly, to twice weekly, to daily.

They always stopped laughing when we succeeded. They always started up again when we announced the new challenge.

The kids never laughed. They believed.

They believed at the start because of the accident of a song. They believed at the end because they had the evidence of their eyes and the evidence of their experience.

At the beginning of my career the nights putting out the paper were long. One kid could not stand the silence. He took to bringing in his stereo and his records. And as we worked the music in the background built a strange level of camraderie. As we collated papers one night the kid put on Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain.” It became a theme song for their lives.

And for mine.

My first principal told me I had no white knights on that newspaper staff. He was right. My first production manager was suspended for 30 days for possession of marijuana on school grounds. We survived that month without him.

And somewhere in that month he became a white knight. The other students were transformed as well. It became our tradition to take the kids no one else wanted and transform their lives.

When I moved, I took the song and the tradition with me.

And then I met Jane, who often referred to the students no one else wanted as “her people.”Together we set off to change the world one rejected child at a time.

Oh, we had our white knights–the kids my German teacher once told me would succeed no matter what you did to them. But there was a special joy in reaching the ones the schools termed “at risk,” who felt the schools had abandoned them years before.

We made a difference in their lives.

And then the ultimate black knight arrived in the form of NET cancer.

On the last day of what would be Jane’s last year in the classroom, one of her students came up to her and said, “I know there were days when you were not well and could have stayed home–should have stayed home–but you came in anyway. I want to thank you for that.”

Jane was not given to easy tears, but they welled up in her eyes when she told me that story.

We fought the disease with every resource we could bring to bear. We believed every minute–up until the final day–that she would defeat the cancer. The courage of that fight–and that belief–changed the lives of still others.

Finally, the only way to kill her cancer was for her to die and take the cancer with her. She went out on her terms.

We did not know then what I have learned since–just how badly the deck was stacked against us. But even if we had, we still would have fought the battle. Either you believe you will win or you don’t.

The Bible says when people marry they become one. I can’t say that is true of every marriage, but for us, it was: we were one soul in two bodies.

That soul chose its next mission the day her body was diagnosed with NET.

We have faced long odds before. We have faced doubt before.

We will find a way to kill this cancer.

We will find a way.