Courage speaks in a whisper

The Boston Herald

I met her last August at a party. My husband knew her husband. They'd golfed together a few times. But I didn't know her at all.

We were seated at a table, just the four of us, celebrating a mutual friend's 25th wedding anniversary. But I wasn't in a party mood. I was preoccupied with something, though what I can't recall. My journal shows no entry for that date or for the day before so the details are all forgotten.

I wish now I'd come home and written about that night. I wish I could recall the exact conversation. But I can't and am left only with fragments of sentences spoken, of thoughts shared, of a life just glimpsed, and of a feeling that won't go away.

The music was playing, '60s music, and people were dancing and our husbands were talking and there we were, two strangers, neither one of us eager to begin social conversation, draw our chairs closer and shout over the crowd.

But of course we did. Between songs we eased into talk, cautiously at first, politely. Where do you live? How many kids do you have? What do you do? We discovered that we both had children in college; we both had a young daughter; we both went to the same church; we both knew the same people.

I remember we talked about her brother, but I don't know why; I remember wishing that the music would stop so we wouldn't have to work so hard to hear. But how we got onto the subject of breast cancer, I can't recall. I know I started talking about my friend, Caryn, and her aggressive chemotherapy and her return to good health, but why, what precipitated this, I don't know.

"You haven't heard then," she said.

"Heard what?" I asked.

"That I have cancer, too."

I hadn't heard. I didn't know. I looked at this poised, pretty, interesting and interested woman and was stunned.

She didn't look sick. She didn't act sick. But she was very sick, sicker than she let on. Her cancer had begun in the breast but had spread. She was waiting for a bone-marrow transplant, she told me. She was on massive doses of chemotherapy even now.

The drugs were pumped into her not at the hospital but while she walked around. Tubes were attached to her even that night. "That's why I have to wear loose clothes," she said. "I've already lost all my hair. You couldn't tell this is a wig?"

I couldn't tell. And yet, if I had been wearing the wig, if tubes were attached to me, I would have stayed home from the party. I would have said, "Sorry, I can't make it. I'm sick. I don't want to talk to anyone."

I would have hidden.

But here she was quietly, unassumingly not just living her life, but sharing it in a matter-of-fact way: This is what happened to me, but now tell me all about you.

"Are you scared?" I asked her later in the evening.

"Yes and no," she said. "I don't have a choice. This is something that I have to do. I'll be glad when it's over, though."

It's over now. Charlene Fitzwilliam, died Sunday at the age of 45. I never saw her again after that night. Last week when someone I know said he had visited a woman with cancer, a woman by the name of Fitzwilliam, it didn't even ring a bell. It was only later, when he said Charlene, that I recognized the name.

You see, I hardly knew her. An hour spent with someone at a party barely counts. And yet it must, somehow. For I have thought about this woman's quiet courage again and again ever since.

Once I believed that courage was loud, that bravery was something that required shouts and swords and pistols. And then my friend Caryn got sick and showed me that courage is getting out of bed and putting on a wig and lipstick and sitting down and listening to someone else's problems.

And then I met a man who continues to answer a "How are you feeling?" with a "Not too bad," and a smile, though he knows he is dying.

And then I met Charlene who in just an hour showed me, a stranger, that courage is like love. It quietly stuns. It gently amazes. It uplifts and sustains, but the strongest kind does it in whispers, in ordinary, unheralded ways.