"I'm Sorry, It's Pancreatic Cancer": Dava's Battle with Pancreatic Cancer Using Her Journals as My Footstool

by Gary A Doyen

" I'm Sorry, It's Pancreatic Cancer" Is complete at 60,000 words. My memoir follows the fourteen month journey I took with Dava my wife of 40 years, and our four daughters from the moment we heard the diagnosis through how we coped with losing her. My words in telling our story are interspersed with my wife's journal entries as well as a few added journal entries from my daughter's journal and mine. Combined, these journal entries give powerful meaning and reaction to the events as they were happening in the moment. This memoir would appeal to anyone confronting this particular cancer of which there are 57,000 plus cases diagnosed each year.. Any person with a serious illness, as well as those close to the person afflicted, will find a kindred spirit in our story. The main theme that reverberates throughout is the tragedy of knowing the final outcome without spoiling the beauty of our story that still had yet to unfold as we continued the remaining days of our lives together. In addition, there are photographs of specific references in the text to make the story personal for all. This one time journey had no rehearsals. I was beside Dava nearly every step of our fourteen months watching and helping anyway I could as she courageously found the will each day to survive for those whom she loved most. Above all, love abounds all around and comes through vividly inour tragic and beautiful story. Sometimes Dava reveals she felt as a "dot on a wall" even around loved ones. This lonliness of an individual with a terminal illness comes across in dramatic fashion. Much as John Keats, whom I quote in the book, he stated, "A person in health as you are can have no conception of the horrors that nerves and a temper like mine go through." Dava's journals share a story of living with a terminal illness that thousands experience but are unable or unwilling to lay bare their vulnerabilities, the unrelenting lonliness held within, and the struggle to face the reactions to events and people around them. I, too thought her story was worth telling to help the many who might be timely touched by her testimony: to take each day given until there is simply no more to give.

264 pages, Paperback

Published October 21, 2019

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 2008, my mother died at the age of sixty from pancreatic cancer.  The day she was diagnosed, she bought a journal to begin documenting her experience, and she ended up filling four books in her last fourteen months of life.  My father took some of her entries as inspiration and wrote a memoir entitled I’m Sorry, It’s Pancreatic Cancer (by Gary Doyen).  It tells the love story from their first date to the last fourteen months of their life together, and it touches on how he still has her in his life even after she has taken her long journey home. I, of course, know that I am biased, but I think anyone can learn lessons on faith, endurance, patience, and most of all love despite the sadness of the story.