Last week, for the second time in as many years, our small community of doctoral students at BC suffered a loss. Kiara had been fighting breast cancer for six years, but, as I learned via Facebook from her family, had spent the last four months in hospice, and she passed last Wednesday.
I didn't know Kiara well, and as such (and as with Ben), writing about her publicly to ruminate on her life and passing doesn't feel very comfortable. At the same time, my sense of public decorum doesn't govern my thoughts, and despite our non-closeness, for the past few years I often found myself thinking about Kiara as I've plodded along in my track towards a PhD.
She was a few years ahead of me in the grad program (or maybe just two? those lines start to blur after the first couple of years), and her terminal diagnosis -- which came after a period of remission -- occurred during the spring of my second year, when I was still taking classes. For her, the news came while she was beginning the last leg of her life as a PhD student, just as she was plunging headfirst into dissertation writing.
Now that I'm at the dissertation-writing stage myself, I understand it to be the most psychically taxing part of earning a PhD. It's not necessarily the most hectic period, but it's the part where you cease to have much, if any, outside support or structure. The pressure to keep charging on, to force yourself to keep working when the project feels daunting and unclear and you feel unqualified and unmotivated, can wear you down. Adding a terminal cancer diagnosis to all that has always sounded impossible to me. But Kiara did it. She defended her dissertation last November.
Kiara found public writing, including blogging, to be a useful way to process her diagnosis, prognosis, and
path ahead. It's thanks to her public writing that I know she had a complicated relationship with the dominant cultural narratives used to discuss cancer and people battling the disease. Kiara pragmatically tolerated the "glamorization" of cancer in TV and films. ("If putting illness in the spotlight raises even $5," she wrote in the fall of 2014, "bring on the bald caps and heavy-handed cigarette metaphors.") But she was impatient with platitudes ("It'll be okay!" or "You're so brave!") and would get annoyed with the expectations of wisdom or stoicism placed on cancer patients. She was an unflagging advocate of honesty. In her blog, she pondered how best to respond when people ask how they can support someone coping with a terminal illness. Her recommendation: "Treat them like normal, except for when they need to be a cancer
patient. Then, let them be a cancer patient, and remove all obstacles to
that reality."
I wasn't part of Kiara's support system and thus didn't directly confront the complicated task of being a Good Friend to Someone with Terminal Cancer. From a distance, though, I still find myself engaging with the issues she addresses in her blog, particularly the way cancer patients are totemized into walking life lessons for the non-sick. I've found myself guilty of mentally using Kiara as a sort of inspiration or motivation tool. When I feel overwhelmed with work or am having trouble working up the enthusiasm to write, I think, "Kiara managed to do this while undergoing treatment for brain tumors," and it helps to put things in perspective.
I also occasionally find myself wondering what I would've done in her position. If I had learned last year that I was facing, generously, three to five more years of life, would I have decided to try to finish the PhD, or would I have quit and opted to dedicate my time elsewhere? Kiara's situation gave a normally hypothetical scenario an unusual jolt of reality. Why am I pursuing a PhD? Why was Kiara? How, if at all, did her diagnosis help clarify this question? What might it clarify for me?
I'm not really sure what Kiara would have to say about my brain's eagerness to use her own very real, very devastating personal situation for the selfish purposes of motivation and thought experiments. It's a natural enough thing for me to do, but there's also a degree of callousness that comes with abstracting and internalizing someone else's experience. Does the naturalness and utility of self-involved thinking undermine efforts to treat others as empathetically as possible?
Not knowing her very well, I can't say how Kiara would have responded. All I can say is that, knowing about her passion for honesty and critical thinking, and her own gift for deep and thoughtful empathy, I have to assume she'd advocate my asking, and continuing to ask, these kinds of questions.
