On Death and Surviving Survivor's Guilt: One Decade Without Zellie

 Late August /early September 2010 was a huge milestone for me. I had survived one year being cancer free after a huge struggle to recover from my cancer-curative-partial gastrectomy surgery (as you all know, I had the rest of my stomach removed in 2019). My partial gastrectomy recovery was ROUGH. I spent 5 months essentially starving as my esophagus did not work. My face spent more time in the toilet than with friends if the visit had anything to do with food. Meanwhile, though, I still somehow got into grad school. But as I recovered, my friend suddenly deteriorated. And then she was diagnosed with lung cancer. And then she died. Her name was Jennifer Wille, but after college, she went by her pen name Zellie Blake. She was 27 years young.

Zellie was a free spirit. She was funny. She was creative. She was happy. She was silly. She was tall 😊(approximately a foot taller than me- in college I called her my “Foot Taller JenTwin). 

She had a child-like innocence. She never stopped playing with toys or stuffed animals. She loved blowing bubbles and making pillow forts. She was just finding her "professional" writing voice before she got sick.

She moved back to her hometown in Northern Virginia during the summer of 2010 to get better medical care than the care she had been receiving in Savannah, Georgia. John and I were on our way down on a planned visit when she went to the hospital for acute pain she had been experiencing. And then she was discharged with hospice. I’ll never forget the fear and despair in her voice when she called me.

“We are on our way down right now. We will not give up. We will get second and third and fourth opinions. We will do this.” I assured her.

Her (what we really were naïve to know) last days were surrounded by love. Her soulmate was there. Another friend from college (she had roomed with Zellie for most of our college years) was also visiting at the same time. And not far away, other college friends were around. We spent evenings playing games, making plans for her book, and getting that book published on lulu.com.

We didn’t do those second and third and fourth opinions because she deteriorated quickly. And she was tired. She had one goal- get Lightning Spliced published- and we made it happen. 

Two nights before her death, her book was finally available for purchase.

You can still buy it here (Lulu.com) and here (Amazon). On the Amazon website, you can read her acknowledgements and her introduction. And you should go and read them. 

All proceeds go to the American Cancer Society. The ACS assured me that the royalties would go to lung cancer research. More proceeds go to ACS when bought directly from Lulu.

One of the best things about this book is that it’s just SO Zellie. Typos and all (though most were caught by dutiful copy editors after the first edition came out- a second edition was published a few months later 😊 )

The night before her death, we were posting the link to her published book all over writing blogs across the web. And engaging in sleep deprived it's 4am and we are still awake shenanigans. 

The postings soon got the attention of her favorite author, JC Hutchins, and he wrote an unbelievably beautiful tribute to her.

"Be the adventure you dream" was her mantra.  

Seeing her get zipped in a body bag was one of the most traumatizing experiences of my life.

I was celebrating surviving. And she DIED. And I felt so…SHITTY. I went down a deep rabbit hole of despair—believing her life was much more valuable than mine. You need to understand this was not the same thing as wishing I was dead. I just could not understand why the universe chose her not me.

I know, even as an early stager, I did not get through this unscathed. But I am here, and others are not. AND THAT IS SO HARD. But I know I am not alone.

I asked my doctor how long I would have had before my staging would have been 4 not 1. He said SIX MONTHS TO A YEAR.

There is SO MUCH HOPE when it comes to cancer survival. But, and sorry for the candidness, but there is also SO MUCH DEATH.

So as I sit here, still grieving over a life that was taken too soon, on this decade anniversary, I want to dedicate this blog to all of you reading this. I want to do this because I want you to know how much you matter. It’s been 10 years and Zellie’s death still hurts. It still matters. Her life mattered. And I want you to know, while you are still alive and able to read this, that if something happened to you, that you ALSO matter. And you will be missed forever. We are all such tiny specks in this giant universe. And each one of you MATTER. And I will say to you what she said to all of us... BE THE ADVENTURE YOU DREAM.

I am only recently realizing and accepting that the reason I am a rare early stage stomach cancer survivor, is to GIVE HOPE. I know there is so much I bring to the table when it comes to surviving, and living, and  advocacy (as I am a “poster child” of sorts for why early detection is SO important). I only got to this point of “forgiveness” for myself THIS YEAR thanks to meeting dozens of friends (in person after only knowing them on Facebook) who have become my stomach cancer family when we went down to DC in February to advocate for more funding on Capitol Hill. 

 This group (not just the ones pictured above) is full of the strongest, bravest people I know. I had been avoiding taking part in any activity, particularly the survivor’s group, because I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it with people who went through worse. But because I am a part of this group, I am slowly able to understand and believe that I am not a shitty person. And that I matter, too. 

In the weeks after her death, I had many dreams about Zellie. Most were of us back in college, but with my knowledge of her death. So I would warn her. And wake up distraught. The last vivid dream I had of her was her telling me to “stay healthy and be awesome”. So I plan to do just that.