Friends To The End
Joanie Willis met Lisa Pierot in the courtyard of Sanibel's Community Church. It was 1996, and Lisa had been struggling with Stage 4 breast cancer - aggressive cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes and left her a physical and emotional wreck.
Joanie said "Hi" and reached out to shake hands. Lisa fell directly into Joanie's body, nested into her arms and cried: "I'm going to die."
Joanie declared right back: "Oh, no, you are not."
After that, they were best friends, stuck together. Through Lisa's chemo and stem-cell replacement, through baldness and vomiting, through screaming at each other and holding on to each other, through crying and laughing. Through living.
Because Joanie knew Lisa, from that first moment in the church courtyard. Joanie knew what it was like to survive incredible odds. She beat Stage 4 lung cancer. Since that day, Joanie and Lisa helped each other survive.
On Friday, just hours after Lisa passed away, quietly, in her sleep, after the cancer had infiltrated her liver and her bones, Joanie cried - for her friend and for herself.
"Part of this is so selfish," she said. "It's like, no one else will know what it is like to have cancer. Since I have had it, since I still struggle with blood tests and everything, since we did all of that together..."
For them, cancer was the third member of the trio, the uninvited guest who would sometimes leave but always threaten to return. But cancer did leave for so many wonderful moments. And it was those moments that Joanie remembered most vividly on Friday, when she wrote about her friend:
"I met Lisa 10 years ago, years that seem so fleeting now. Years I want back. Today, all I can remember is the good times. And, man, did we have good times: The trips we took, the 'spa days,' the house decorating, book tours, how she loved to cook for me, gardening together, movies, shopping and our 'soul talks.' Thousands and thousands of soul talks. And politics! We spent an entire week in a cabin in the mountains and sat spellbound watching the Gore/Bush election debacle in 2000. That week she cooked and taught me embroidery, while I cleaned up her trail of messes. We both yelled at the TV. It was one of the best weeks of my life.
"She used to keep a journal of 'Joanieism's' - words or sentences I used that didn't mean what I thought. She never corrected me and found them endearing. Only Lisa would find my ignorance precious. If I said 'that little guy has a Hitler complex,' she would laugh and sneak off to add it to her journal. It was years later that my sister finally told me it wasn't Hitler it was Napoleon.
"Who will I call now after Meet the Press on Sunday? Who will come running to hold me close if we have another 9-11? Who will be just as scared during one of my CAT scans as I am? Who will rein in my anger at unimportant things and take the same amount of joy as I do in the silly and mundane? Who will understand the depth of me?
"We raised our kids through the teenage years, we counseled and consoled. We fought and we loved. Mostly we just loved. We shared the fear of having Stage 4 cancer. No small thing that. The tests, the chemo, the surgeries, the uncertainties, the pain of it all. The loss of trusting the future. But when I tell you that when the needles went into one of us, or we were waiting for results for one of us, or we heard good news or bad news about one of us, we laughed. A lot. Much more than we cried."
Candor and comedy, shared with Post readers
Readers of The Palm Beach Post shared much of the laughing and crying with Lisa Pierot, too. Since October 2001, her column, The Metastatic Life, appeared in the Sunday Accent section.
It was apparent from the first that Lisa could pour her heart out with exquisite elegance.
In her first story, she wrote: "I learned from my writing two very important things: First, the only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next. Second - and no one is more amazed by this than me - I'm a survivor. And because I've survived, I have a need to share my story with others...
"My story is just that - mine. It is not a story of profound courage. It is not a story of miraculous healing. It is not a story about a woman who faces death and learns to love and breathe in every precious moment of her life. It's just my story. In sharing it, I hope I might bring understanding and hope into some of your lives."
And she did.
Hundreds and hundreds of Post readers e-mailed Lisa and wrote her letters. When her column would not appear for a week, when she was tired from treatment, readers would call The Post, worried about her. When she wrote about her regrets over her two failed marriages, readers empathized with her. When she shared her grief over the death of her mother, Carolyn, last year, readers cried with her. In the last year of her life, as her daughters Anna and Emily struggled to live without her as she confronted her dependency on painkillers, readers encouraged her.
"There were days that were really tough, and all she had was the e-mails from readers," Joanie said, "and they were enough to sustain her and give her hope."
Lisa wrote to heal, her sister, Cynthia, said Friday. In the process, she helped to heal thousands and thousands of people.
At the end of her first Post column, she wrote: "It was this emotion we call hope that lent me sanctuary from what was otherwise unfathomable - a life without it."
'You are my heart'
Joanie Willis would like Post readers to know two more things about Lisa Pierot: How very witty she was. And, most of all, how much she loved her girls.
Joanie wrote:
"Lisa made me laugh so hard. It made her irresistible. It made her indispensable. We would get on the phone and she would start into one of her funny 'one-woman comedy routines' that left me breathless from laughter. It would last for hours, she was that funny.
"Lisa would walk into a room and command it with her quick wit, her intelligence, her energy, her very presence. She was an eloquent speaker, a determined advocate for those she loved, a caregiver, a sister, a daughter, a romantic, a columnist, my best friend and a mother who adored and loved her children with every fiber of her being.
"Lisa wasn't perfect. Far from it. But today and for always, I will think of only the good, only the best of what she was. Because her best, to me, was exquisite."
Joanie knew that Lisa was declining. She had spent several days at Hope Hospice trying to heal bedsores. Her bladder was bothering her. She hurt, all over. She had decided a few weeks ago to end chemotherapy treatment and she began to talk more about wanting her mother.
"She talked about her mother all the time," Joanie said. "She would say, 'I just want to be with her.' "
On Wednesday, the day before Lisa died, Joanie spoke her last words to her best friend:
"I hope you know how much you are loved," Joanie told Lisa.
"I do," Lisa responded.
"You are my heart," Joanie said.
Lisa gazed at her: "And you are mine."
