One year ago today I was at the funeral home preparing for Jane’s wake. I spent a few private moments with her, wondering what we could have done differently, wondering why I was standing there looking at her empty frame when just a year before we had been making final preparations for Christmas.
We had never heard of Neuroendocrine Tumors or Carcinoid Syndrome. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute was something WEEI and the Red Sox did a major fundraiser for–and to whom I had sent a check every year as part of our commitment to a number of charities.
My youngest brother had come out from Seattle to spend the week between Jane’s death and her funeral with me. We had spent the days arranging for flowers and the picture collages and doing the things one does the week before. I was both emotionally numb and raw at the same time.
Just before we left the house that afternoon, I had taken a call from Jane’s cardio-oncologist. He told me Dana-Farber was setting up a national center for research into NET–that they had been thinking about it for a while and now were going to do it. I remember being stunned and mumbling something about doing all I could do to help. I thought I would be ready to do that in January. It would prove to be months before I could even move. And it would be a year before the topic came up again.
One of the first people through the line when the doors opened for the wake was one of Jane’s nurses from Brigham & Women’s. Then the floodgates opened. Hundreds of people came through the line–some driving in from central New Hampshire and New York: relatives, friends, parents, teachers, administrators and former administrators, neighbors, doctors and nurses and office workers, students and former students. I had expected a crowd, but even I was overwhelmed.
There are no crowds here tonight. Instead I will write Christmas cards–though unlike a normal year there will not be a lengthy note to each friend. My heart is not in it. While some good things have happened these past 12 months, they are overshadowed by the gray melancholy of too many sad memories.
A friend congratulated me last night on the progress we have made this year: we have raised $12,000 for the American Cancer Society, Caring for Carcinoid Foundation, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; we have created Walking with Jane and this website as vehicles for carrying the fight against NET and CS forward; we have established a fund at Dana-Farber to support research and education about these two nasties; we have taken the first steps to try to bring more funding from ACS to bear on this particular form of cancer.
Honestly, I do not deserve congratulations for any of this. The people who have earned those congratulations are the people who came when I called–who built the website, who walked at Taunton and Somerset, who designed the t-shirts and the buttons and the bags, who baked the cookies and brownies, found the items for the drawings and sold the tickets, who have researched and written the articles in the Press Kit, who meet to think, to plan and to execute the projects, and who day after day do all the things others only see the results of.
This operation is only as good as the people who do the work–and I am eternally in their debt.
