I have never met Alicia Parlette but I have been very fond of her since June 2005. I do not email her and almost surely will never talk to her on the telephone. I am not even sure what I would say. But my fondness for her persists.
I know Alicia only from a distance, but I suppose that is not unusual in the age of the Internet/Web pages/email. I once maintained an email friendship that lasted several years and ran to thousands of emails with a woman in Kentucky who came to refer to herself jokingly as my “virtual wife.” I am not sure my un-virtual wife was ever comfortable with that notion, but she knew she had nothing to worry about. It was mostly an email relationship, but I talked to the Kentuckian on the phone a few times; she even talked on the phone to my wife (my un-virtual one-and-only), probably because she liked both of us (I was always emailing her things about my wife) and was intrigued by the strength of our marriage. Her own relationships tended to be lurches in various directions and my wife and I often find ourselves of great interest to those who lurch about. But I never met the “virtual wife” face-to-face, just as I will never meet Alicia.
Perhaps I grew fond of Alicia because she was a copy editor and she was 23 years old when I read the first piece she wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle. I put in some time being a copy editor at just about that age. Perhaps it is the fact that when I was 23 years old I was full of romantic fantasies about not living until I was 30. For Alicia Parlette, death before 30 is not a romantic fantasy. It is a very real possibility. And perhaps it is because I knew from the first that she was not so sure she wanted to be a copy editor. She wanted to write. I knew those feelings too. But when I was 23 I did not have a clue what to write about. Alicia had her subject handed to her.
Alicia writes about cancer. And it is her cancer. And the doctor called her at work to tell her about it in March 2005. “I wondered why he was calling. Bad news didn’t even occur to me. I was too busy for bad news. And bad news doesn’t come when you’re at work.” It was a tough kind of cancer. The bad news came in March and Alicia was writing about it by June, an act that in itself seemed tougher than cancer. And if tough writing could beat cancer, she would have done it by now.
Nearly two years have passed and Alicia's cancer led her finally to replace interferon with chemo, and now the chemo is failing. Her cancer has grown in some places and refused to shrink in others. She has had to quit her job. She has given up writing her story for the Chronicle, but she is still writing. “Obsessing wasn’t getting any writing done,” she wrote in her first blog entry. (Alicia understands the difference between obsessing and writing. Gushy girlies who blog can’t seem to figure it out). Alicia Parlette is no gushy girlie. She writes, “And, just two hours ago, I found out the chemo did nothing.” But still she is capable of writing this: “I am shut off, and shut down; my emotions aren’t fully registering what’s happened, and the renewed hope I had found during chemo feels distant and naïve.” It is tough and honest writing. But there is beauty in it too. Especially when Alicia writes, “So that’s where we’re at: from hope to disappointment, where my worthy battle scars have become pointless wounds.” It is a sentence to move a stranger to tears.
She writes. And where there are good sentences, all is not lost. I believe that. And I think Alicia Parlette must too. I want her to believe it. I want her to keep writing. I do not want her to stop.