Friends celebrate a life well lived
/The Boston Herald
BEVERLY BECKHAM
They came to talk about their friend. Fifteen women drove from Dorchester to Braintree last Wednesday evening after a day of tending to their children, their homes and their jobs to sit in another friend's home and try to explain to a stranger how special Michelle Kennedy was.
"No matter what was going on in her life, she'd always say, "But what about you? How are you doing?"
"She was always there for me."
"She was my best friend."
"She understood me. She made time for me."
Michelle was wife to Charlie, mother to Brad, 14; Adam, 13; Scott, 10, and Beth, 7. She was a Cub Scout master, a Girl Scout leader, a leader in her church and her childrens' school, St. Gregory's in Dorchester.
If there were a need, she filled it. If something had to be organized, she stepped in. She did everything with flare and with joy.
"What's another kid?" was her attitude. She had kids at her house all the time, her own and everyone else's.
What's another meeting, committee, commitment, obligation? Michelle didn't know how to say no.
She could have said no easily and no one would have faulted her. She was diagnosed with lupus when she was 17. While she was still in high school she had half her stomach removed. But she didn't let it destroy her spirit.
"I'm lucky," she said. "I've got something that can be treated. It could be worse."
That's what she continued to say, even when the lupus progressed, when the drugs she took to control the disease made her legs swell to twice their normal size and deteriorated the bones in her hips. A little surgery, and she'd be like new, she told friends. The doctors insisted she wouldn't walk for six months. But Michelle said she'd walk in weeks - and she did.
That's the kind of person she was.
When she was diagnosed with cancer last October, she said much the same thing. It could be worse. She had a breast removed. She had chemotherapy and lost her hair. She had radiation and because of the lupus, her skin burned and she developed cellulitis.
But still she found the time and energy to attend an American Cancer Society picnic. Later she cried, retelling other people's stories.
"I just can't believe people can live through the horrible things that happen to them," she said.
She cried for herself, sometimes, too. But the tears were followed by a "Hey, I don't like this, but what can I do? I just wish it weren't so hard on Charlie. I wish he didn't have to go through all this."
Charlie came last Wednesday night, too.
"Every morning when Michelle had to have radiation one of these women, and other women who aren't here {tonight}, appeared at my door," he said. "Every night when I came home from work, there was a woman in the kitchen making dinner. This support has gone on for years, between the cancer and the lupus. There was always someone cooking, caring for the kids, cleaning. I still can't find some of the things they put away."
When Michelle was hospitalized for cellulitis last spring, doctors discovered the cancer had spread. She had brain surgery on a Tuesday morning. On the following Saturday night she attended a church dance. Michelle Kennedy was a fighter.
But she wasn't a saint. She gave up swearing for a year, and said she'd pay her husband a nickel every time she slipped. At the end of the year, he'd made just a single dime, but she took up swearing again, right away.
"She didn't forget how to do it, that's for sure," her husband said.
She used to let the priest bless her, not because it made her feel good, but because it made him feel good.
She didn't believe she was going to die. She was planning on taking a cruise with her husband and friends at the beginning of September.
Two days before the cruise, Michelle Kennedy was buried. She was just 35.
"Michelle was humanity at its best," one friend said.
"She could know you 20 years or 20 hours. It didn't matter. She made everyone a friend.
"When she died, I cried because I felt sorry for me."
From her hospital bed Michelle could look out her window and see the new house she moved into only months before she died. "Adam, have all those kids get off the porch," she told her son one afternoon by phone.
"Wow," he said to his friends. "My mom can see everything."
Then she must have seen what this stranger saw: friends who loved her, who love each other, and who live their love.
