Tag Archives: Sarah Broom

No good way to grieve

Posted on April 29, 2013 | 16 comments

When Sarah was turning forty, I wanted to give her something special. I found exactly what I was looking for:  seven delicate bracelets carved from bone. I sent three to Sarah, but reserved four to wear myself.

Splitting up a gift may sound odd, but it was not without reason. The white circle holds magic for me; a symbol of protection. And seven was our sum:  Sarah had been number three in the crizotinib trial, and I number four. The bracelets were meant to be souvenirs of travel to strange places; amulets of protection and a testament to our common bond.

Several days ago I received an email from Sarah’s husband. It’s been a difficult time for all of them, Michael and the children. He told me that he was wearing Sarah’s bracelet.

There is simply no way to predict the when or why or even how of grieving. Because life must go on, we do as well. Until those moments when an unbearable sadness washes over us and we find ourselves gasping for breath.

I closed my laptop, drew a hot bath, and had a good cry. And then I put on pajamas and got my copy of Sarah’s book of poetry, Tigers at Awhitu. She had written this inscription on the title page:

Tigers at Awhitu003David and Peter got home when I was half way through the book, my face blotchy and tear stained. David brought me some tea, and I read every last poem once again.

Tigers at Awhitu---Auckland University Press

Tigers at Awhitu—Auckland University Press

I know—I understand, that life is not anything close to fair—and yet Sarah’s passing is such an injustice. Nobody should die from lung cancer at the age of forty. I am grateful that we have her poems to hang on to. In July, a second volume titled Gleam will be published; something that Sarah was really looking forward to.

The particular beauty of poetry may well lie in it’s very spareness and ambiguity. The form lends itself to interpretation, and invites the reader in. We connect the dots and complete the suggested narrative, making the meaning very much our own. I am certain I know what Sarah was talking about in her poem Keep moving. For me, it is confirmation that she is still traveling.

Keep moving

I lumber over the land, knees swollen
and knotted like giant kumara roots.
Who is that child so far down below
who reaches out to me? I can barely hear
his cry, he is simply too far away. I trudge
through drying braided rivers, I step
over tussocky brown hills. What do you say,
you small people waving your hands at me
from beside the lake? You think I should stop,
you want to help, the child needs me?
Huh. No, no, the heat is its own desperate cure,
the creaking legs need to keep moving,
the dry earth knows all about me. The child?
Oh yes, I can see him still, I think he’s
getting smaller — isn’t that strange? Maybe
he’ll disappear — meanwhile, I have my eye
on that razor pass through the mountains.
I think I may have been there before.
— —-
Sarah Broom–Tigers at Awhitu

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Posted in Connections, Death and dying

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The world loses a very bright light: Sarah Broom

Posted on April 23, 2013 | 24 comments
Sarah Broom: photo by Shane Wenzlick (phototek)

Sarah Broom: photo by Shane Wenzlick (phototek)

Last Thursday I was up before the robins, in order to get Peter ready for a 5:30 a.m. departure for Washington DC with his classmates. After rousing our sleepy boy, I quickly scanned through my inbox. There was a message from my friend Sarah Broom, with the subject In memorium. I hoped to hell it was the title of a new poem but my heart was heavy as I opened the email. It had been sent by Sarah’s husband, Michael. Sarah had died.

As I hurried Peter out the door, I kept the news to myself. Already reeling from the Boston Marathon Patriot Day bombings, I felt an intense need to protect Peter from additional sadness and worry as he went off on what was intended to be a holiday.

After returning home, I crawled back into bed and fell right to sleep. When I awakened several hours later, I immediately recalled a dream:  I’d been sitting on the floor of a closet that was not mine. Most of the clothing was gone, but there were some beautiful objects on the shelves, shrine-like in presentation and fashioned from polished brass and ivory colored lace or coral. The door to the closet opened, and a stranger asked me what I was doing there. I gestured to the space around me and said, “I am so lonely, and this reminds me of the forts we built as children.”

For the past few months, I had spent many a night imagining Sarah, Thao and myself running, climbing, jumping, flying. Young and strong again, with scabbed knees and cheeks flushed with pleasure. Invincible.

My special relationship with Sarah began almost five years ago. When I took my initial dose of crizotinib in 2008, I was the fourth person in the world with NSCLC and an ALK mutation to do so. Sarah, who lived in New Zealand, had directly preceded me on trial as number three. Through social media and a common acquaintance (number two in the trial, our friend Kevin), we began a dialogue.

Initially, our communication was infrequent. With time, emails segued into long telephone conversations. A little over a year and a half ago, Sarah came to Boston for treatment, and we were able to spend some actual time together. Although she soon returned home to New Zealand, our sessions over the phone continued with renewed intensity.

Sarah was brilliant; a poet with a doctorate in English from Oxford in addition to a master of arts in English from Leeds University. Hers had been a tough road: Only thirty five years old and pregnant with her third child when diagnosed with lung cancer, Sarah advocated fiercely for the sort of care not readily available in New Zealand. For more than five years she endured the side effects of multiple treatments and a hopelessly aggressive cancer, always with unfailing optimism, courage and devotion to her family.

In our lengthy chats we talked of the things most friends do:  love, life, relationships. Books, creativity, our hopes and dreams. But we also discussed our illness and, of course, dying. In a way that was extraordinarily open and free from pretense.

I loved Sarah and felt intensely connected to her. I knew she was dying. In fact, the afternoon before I opened the email from Michael, I felt a certain shift in the universe and was certain that it had to do with Sarah.

I am devastated. However, my loss pales next to that of her family. Also, I know that Sarah had made peace with what was coming and that she is now free from suffering. She will live on in our hearts and in her own words, and although the earth may now be a bit dimmer, the sky is brighter still.

And when I walked out last night

it was cool, the coldest night this winter,
and when the stars asked me to join them
in the ache of their bareness, I let them
take me, and they carried me between them,
clusters of stars all along my body, and I arched right back and pointed my toes and fingertips,
and was as long as ever you could imagine
and they did not let me go.

by Sarah Broom

 

24 Comments

Posted in Connections, Death and dying, In memorium

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Cover girl and a back story

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 10 comments

I was in Boston on Monday for labwork, and just adjacent to the elevators is a wall rack where they display current issues of the MGH Cancer Center magazine. On the cover was a familiar image, a CT scan of lungs pre and post crizotinib. Although not identified, they are my lungs. So, I guess that makes me a cover girl.

While there I also paid a quick visit to my friend Sarah Broom (a poet: https://lifeandbreath.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/if-the-world/), who has traveled from her home in New Zealand to enroll in a Clinical trial at Massachusetts General Hospital. We had gotten together the previous week for lunch and on Sunday Evening she’d driven to our house in Amherst with her brother Alex, who was visiting from Australia to be with Sarah as she started trial (her husband is at home with their three young children). The meal on Sunday (local lobster) was really pleasant and Sarah’s brother is every bit as charming as she.  Afterward they managed, for the most part, to stay on the right side of the road (which would be the wrong side of the road ‘down under’) on the drive back to Cambridge.

But more about Sarah and that back story. Back in August of 2008, when my oncologist (at that time, Dr. Tom Lynch) told me that as a newly identified ALK ‘mutant’ I was eligible for enrollment in the phase I trial for PF-02341066 (crizotinib), the trial was transitioning from an initial focus on gastrointestinal cancers to lung cancer. Only one other lung cancer patient had been on trial at MGH, and he had died within weeks of enrolling (his lung cancer was responding to crizotinib, but his disease was ultimately too widespread). Although this news did nothing to alleviate my fear, it also didn’t dampen my enthusiasm; possible death (trial) versus certain death (continued tarceva, chemo, or no treatment at all).

It was but a few weeks later that I became aware of Kevin Brumett, after my husband conducted an internet search for information on ALK mutations. Kevin had posted on Inspire, the online site which I soon joined and continue to participate in. I contacted Kevin, also an ALK mutant. He had been on trial at Dana Farber for some weeks and had recently gotten back his first scans, which showed significant improvement. Kevin immediately became my beacon; this courageous and incredibly optimistic young man who was just ahead of me on this path to who knew where.

I started trial on October 1, 2008 and soon thereafter Kevin told me of another fellow traveler, Sarah Broom, in New Zealand.

Unfortunately Kevin developed a large number of brain metastases early in 2006, and it was at that point that it began to be clear that crizotinib might not cross the blood/brain barrier. Several months later, Kevin died and Sarah and I fell out of touch for a time as well.

Perhaps a year and a half ago we began emailing again and eventually spoke on the phone as well. Now, in a curious turn of fate, we are in the same place once more, each enrolled in clinical trials. LDK378, which is a second generation ALK inhibitor for me, and AUY922, an HSP-90 inhibitor for Sarah. There is a good chance I will eventually go on AUY922 and she on LDK378. Talking at dinner the other evening, we figured that we are number three (Sarah) and number four (myself) in the world to have gone on crizotinib–(although I might have to share number four with another individual who went on trial either the day before or after me at MGH).

It’s all rather remarkable. Our friendship, begun in the most unlikely fashion, the distance we have each traveled (more metaphorically speaking when I refer to myself, but in Sarah’s case, coming from New Zealand, the real deal). The fact that we are both still here, trudging forward, looking for sure footing.

As for those liver enzymes; falling. SGPT is 66 and SGOT is 62. And the wine tasting party? So much fun (hosted by the same fabulous friends who made 11/11/11 special for Pete and I). Part of the evening involved a little contest; we were served pairings and asked to distinguish between labels/vintages. Well friends, my fellow contestants were all quite able, but out of a field of twelve, I tied for first after getting them all correct. My secret? Not mere luck, but rather a reliance on instinct (a superior tool in matters of the senses–but I was nonetheless surprised as well as mighty pleased by my little coup).

My prize? A  lovely bottle of sauterne and liver enzymes headed in the right direction. Win win.

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A poem by my friend Sarah Broom

Posted on September 6, 2011 | 17 comments

I have a friend named Sarah Broom who is also ALK positive and battling stage four lung cancer. She lives in New Zealand and is the mother of three boys and a fine poet. Her diagnosis came just before the delivery of her third child, and somehow, someway, she has managed in the time since to complete and publish a beautiful book of poetry. Quite a few of the poems reflect on her illness, and this particular piece regarding motherhood got me right in my heart. Sarah was kind enough to have her publisher authorize reproduction here:

because
the
world
can
do
that
to
you
 

 

 
and
if
the
world
did
do
that
to
you,
 
and
took
me
from
you,
before
the
time
 
was
true
and
right
and
before
we
all
had
time
 
to
see
the
things
and
do
the
things
and
tell
 
the
things
we
need
to
tell,
to
see,
to
do,
 
so
many
things
I
cannot
even
imagine
them

 
because
you
are
only
six,
 
and
your
mind
is
crowded
with
soccer
and
cricket
 
and
deep‐sea
life,
with
knights
and
Narnia
 
and
the
thermohaline
conveyor,
and
when
you
were
five
 
you
cried
inconsolably
for
forty‐five
minutes
 
when
the
All
Blacks
lost,
and
already
when
you
read
 
you
cannot
hear
my
voice,
and
you
are
fierce
 
and
deep
and
I
am
afraid
for
you

 
and
because
you
are
only
two
and
three‐quarters
 
and
your
heart
is
full
of
trains
and
racing
cars
 
and
tigers
and
Tiggers
and
dinosaurs,
and
when
 
you
jump
into
the
pool
with
your
water‐wings
on
 
your
face
explodes
with
surprise
and
joy,
every
 
single
time,
and
you
are
tough
and
resilient
 
and
cheeky
as
hell
but
you
still
need
to
know
 
where
I
am,
about
every
three
minutes

 
and
because
you
are
only
nearly
one
and
your
mind
 
is
full
of
god
knows
what
–
sticky
things,
shiny
things,
 
soft
things,
loud
things,
faces
and
brothers
and
chuckles
 
and
screams,
and
every
time
you
lie
drinking
 
your
bottle
by
yourself
I
think
of
all
the
times
 
I
wasn’t
there,
of
how
they
rushed
you
into
life
 
like
there
wasn’t
enough
time
in
the
world,

 
which
there
isn’t,
sometimes

 
so
if
the
world
did
do
that
to
you
 
and
took
me
from
you,
before
the
time
 
was
true
and
right
and
before
we
all
had
time
 
to
do
the
things
we
need
to
do,
to
fight
more
 
and
laugh
more
and
be
bored
together
 
over
and
over,
to
ease
into
the
big
questions
 
slowly,
not
all
at
once,
not
like
that,
 


like
a
trapdoor
opening
up
 
under
your
feet
 
and
a
sickening
drop

 
but
if
the
world
did
do
that
to
you,

 
I
have
to
think
that
you
would
be

 
all
right

 
after
all

 


 
Tigers
at
Awhitu,
(Manchester:
Carcanet
Press,
2010).
Included
here
with
the
permission
of
the
author
and
the
publisher,
not
for
reproduction.


17 Comments

Posted in Parenting with cancer

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