Missing Chapters

Samantha Harvell’s name recently appeared in the subject line of an e-mail I received from her aunt. My first instinct was to avoid the e-mail. It’s been almost a month since I wrote a story about 14-year-old Samantha and her battle against bone cancer. It’s not usual for someone to send an e-mail after they read a story, especially one that involves a teenager with a relentless disease, but I was convinced this e-mail carried bad news.

Samantha, a freshman at Western High School and an amazing kid, was incredibly easy to interview. For a couple of hours in February, she just welcomed me into her world. Despite the obvious hardships, one message remained clear: Samantha believes in life.

I’m fortunate in that I have interviewed a lot of strong people. Some have experience fighting a life-threatening illness. I leave them vowing to not complain about anything ever again and promising myself that I will live — truly live — each day to its fullest. I fall short but their stories, packed with powerful lessons, have still stuck and I think about them at times like this.

When I met 6-year-old Dennis in Jacksonville in the late 1990s, he was running around a pool at a recreation center on Camp Lejeune dressed in a bathing suit and seemingly unaffected by the huge tumor that insisted on taking up way too much space in his little head.

Dennis was determined to have fun with the friends who gathered for what he told me was his “welcome to heaven party.”

He was dying. There really was no way around it. Dennis knew this. He had big plans for heaven. He said that it was from there he would finally see the pyramids in Egypt.

At the time, I was a reporter for The Daily News in Jacksonville, N.C., and I hurried to take down this kid’s every word. I knew he understood something about life most of us never quite learn. Dennis’ mom also knew her son was dying. She had a simple request: She longed for a rocking chair — a place to cuddle with her son on his last days.

The day after the story ran, a Jacksonville resident called me with plans to send Dennis to Egypt. I had to break the news that the little boy was too sick to travel and was perfectly content seeing the pyramids from heaven. It was a touching offer nonetheless.

That same day, Dennis’ mom found seven rocking chairs on her front porch. She selected one of them, and it’s where Dennis and she spent his last days.

Sherry Smith’s determination to beat a rare form of breast cancer also made me a believer. The 47-year-old, sixth-grade teacher from Jacksonville didn’t think for a minute that cancer would beat her. After I finished her interview, I didn’t think so either.

Smith’s German shepherd, Bailey, actually found the lump in her breast. Smith always had a lot of fibroid cysts so she didn’t pay much attention to the lumps she regularly found.

But one day, Bailey kept sniffing her right breast with great persistence. Her dog, Dakoda, did the same when she moved to another room. She decided to get a mammogram and that’s when she learned she had inflammatory breast cancer. Smith knew that only 20 to 30 percent of people inflicted with the rare form of the disease survive. She planned to be one of them.

“I’ve learned not to listen to statistics,” she told me in November 2002. “You can be that one. Somebody has to be that one.”

Smith died in January 2003. The two loves of her life, Bailey and Dakoda, lost their owner and went to live with Smith’s sister, Angie Cooper, in Swansboro.

When I met 51-year-old Gloria Hamer, cancer invaded her body to the point that her chances of survival were reduced to a mere 2 percent. Her older brother, David Graves of Jacksonville, took in his only sister, determined to be there for her in any way she needed.

Hamer’s body was telling her one thing, but her heart and mind told her something entirely different.

“I’m determined to live as long as I want,” Hamer said during a February 2007 interview. “Nobody can put a date on how long I’m going to live.”

Despite his sister’s stage-four lung cancer, which had metastasized to her brain, Graves stood strong beside Hamer, believing in the power of her experiences and the strength of her faith.

“I want her to sing, teach and minister to those who have no hope,” Graves told me. “Even while she is going through it, she can give hope to someone who has no hope.”

After the story ran, several people battling cancer contacted Hamer for support. A hospice organization in Onslow County arranged for her to spend a week with her family at a beach house on Emerald Isle. A longtime reader of The Daily News sent me a $10 bill to give to Hamer.

She died just a couple of months later on April 4, 2007.

I thought about all these stories when I finally opened that e-mail about Samantha Harvell. Bonnie Langley, Samantha’s aunt, wrote to thank me for writing about her niece, but she also wanted me to know that doctors found spots on one of Samantha’s lungs. She had surgery Friday.

The surgery went OK, but Samantha is in a lot of pain. Doctors found spots on her other lung as well so another surgery is planned for next month.

“I am not sure what, if anything, anyone can do,” Langley wrote. “Perhaps just send out your prayers.”

Initially, my heart sank. Even though Samantha had set me straight that it would take five years before doctors would say she was in remission, I hoped — I believed — she was winning the fight. After I read that e-mail, I couldn’t keep Samantha from my mind. Deeply saddened by her recent setback, I worried that this horrific disease would steal another vibrant spirit from this world.

Since then, I’ve decided to turn to the words given to me by an incredibly wise 14-year-old. It’s during these times that I’m glad I take a lot of notes.

“You can’t think about what’s wrong,” Samantha told me in February. “You can’t say, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m losing my hair.’ Instead, you think, I can’t wait until it comes back.

“You can’t give up. You can’t think, I can’t do this.”

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