Carolyn Choate recently retired from the TV production industry to write full-time. Diagnosed at 45 with stage 3 estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer in 2003, she underwent two radical mastectomies - in 2003 and 2012 - without reconstruction. Carolyn credits Angela Brodie, Ph.D., and her discovery of the aromatase inhibitor, for saving her life and those of millions of women globally. In the summer of 2017, Carolyn and her older daughter kayaked from New Hampshire to Baltimore in tribute to Dr. Brodie. When not informing others about Dr. Brodie and the "living flat" movement, Carolyn enjoys gardening, cooking and RVing with her family and dog.

Carolyn Choate

I’m writing to say how much I missed you this Father’s Day. It’s hard to believe that it’s been eight years since I told you how much you mean to me in person. And to think you were so worried about my breast cancer recurring; the thought that your only child and mother of your granddaughters might suffer a long and painful death — as did your own mother – before you died yourself.

You did so so suddenly. I’ll never forgive myself for not being there with you, but you kept insisting it was a routine procedure and not to fly home. The carotid artery was 98 percent blocked, you said but, you’d “be fine in no time,” and were looking forward to our visit in August.

We’d go to Box Hill for Maryland crab cakes, of course, and eat them sitting in the municipal airport parking lot in Churchville and watch the planes “touch and go.” The girls would sit in rapt attention listening to stories of your wild aviation hijinks and wonder — like everyone else – how you managed to survive. The open cockpit helicopter you built from a kit in your 20s and crashed in a corn field. The ultralights you flew from airport to airport in greater Baltimore with fuel fill-ups and sometimes ran out. The old crop duster Schweizer 300C helicopter you found online and converted into your dream machine. This was all before your first stroke.

See? We just never know when our number is up or why it will be called.

But, hey, I’m still here, dad! And life is good. You’d be so proud of your granddaughters; both of them graduated college and have wonderful jobs. I finally retired from the TV station and am writing a lot. In just a few months, Gordon and I will celebrate our 31

I can still see you waiting in front of the church to help me out of Uncle Bob’s 1937 Chevrolet in my wedding dress. I had only seen you in a suit once, let alone a tuxedo. And when you opened the car door, you started crying like a baby. I lost it. Totally. I figured mom would do all the crying considering she raised me by herself since I was four and I rarely ever saw you even though we all lived in the same small town after the divorce.

Years later I would come to understand that, on Sept. 12, 1987, at the age of 29, I married my husband 

 gained a father. Because since that day something changed so profoundly and completely between us; the painful void of your absence during my childhood and teens and early adulthood was miraculously filled with a love so deep and vast that, somehow, it made our remaining years together that much more precious. Life 

The weekly phone calls from my new home in New Hampshire, the First in the Nation Primary State? Good Lord, could we spar about politics or what? And sports. I know you were deeply disappointed when I forsook the Orioles and Ravens for the Red Sox and Patriots but, duh! You had to admit, I moved to the winningest sports franchise capital in the country. And then there was your endless fascination with earth sciences and astronomy. I swear you’re coming back as Carl Sagan’s clone in your next life — if you haven’t already.

But your biggest joy? Grandchildren. OMG. Never in my wildest dreams would I have guessed that Roy French Choate would be the consummate grandfather. Instead of me calling you a couple times a week, you called me, all the time, asking about Sydney and MacKenzie. It made my heart practically beat out of my chest. In turn, they utterly adored you.

And just when it seemed like I had it all — even the white picket fence – I nervously called to tell you the news about my breast cancer diagnosis. I’m sure you remember, there was dead silence on the other end. I said, “Dad, are you there? Are you OK?” And you coughed and said you needed a drink of water and would call me back. But I knew. I knew the cough was really you choking back tears. I regret not being able to tell you in person, but there just wasn’t time. My surgery was scheduled in a week and Sydney was recovering from a tonsillectomy. I needed to be here in New Hampshire with my family. And with you recovering from the second stroke, I really thought it best you stay home, too.

Dad, I can honestly say that my first year following diagnosis was as hard on you as it was on me, and I want to remind you, once again, how much that meant to me. I’ll even take it a step further. Your blatant and unabashed inquiry about my health status through the whole cancer ordeal was refreshing. You never beat around the bush or tip-toed around the issue. Nope. You cut to the chase every time and demanded answers.

“Are you getting the best care available?”

“Tell me all about the treatment plan.”

“Have you told the girls you could die from this?”

“Are you getting your affairs in order?”

“Will you lose your hair and if you so, will you get a wig?”

“The past is the past, Carolyn. I love you, damn it, and I don’t want to lose you!”

It took some convincing, but you finally came around; you actually began to relax with the knowledge I was heading for the five-year mark. The proof was having a 25-minute phone conversation without cancer

When your friend, Terry, called to tell me she came to the house to check on you the day after you were released from the hospital and found you dead on the sofa, I unleashed a primal wail that seemed to emanate from birth.

With cancer, cardiac issues, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, suicide, drug overdose, the human condition is vulnerable.

All the heartfelt woes a soul can bear, the human condition knows much sorrow.

 precious, dad, not perfect. It seems I’ve been toughing it out pretty much my whole life. But I’m grateful for every moment we shared, and I hope somehow you know I’m better than alright. All things considered, your only kid is great and flying higher than even you ever dared.

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I’m writing to say how much I missed you this Father’s Day. It’s hard to believe that it’s been eight years since I told you how much you mean to me in person. And to think you were so worried about my breast cancer recurring; the thought that your only child and mother of your granddaughters might suffer a long and painful death – as did your own mother – before you died yourself.
 

Ground Control to Dad

Carolyn Choate's Garden - Courtesy of Carolyn Choate

You may have noticed I haven’t posted a blog lately. It could only mean one of two things: I ran out of things to say or, it’s gardening season. As my family is sure to attest, the former is impossible.

For you gardeners out there who live in the northeast region of the country — especially New England – you know exactly of what I speak. We live to garden this time of year – flower and/or vegetable – as our window is short. Strictly speaking, it lasts Memorial Day through mid-October. Halloween, if we’re real lucky.

While the months of April and May are often associated with carefree spring days and nostalgic Victorian images of May poles, we’re out slogging in the damp soil, raking leaves into piles that resemble a mini-mountain range in our yards, unless it’s still snowing into mid-April, which it’s famous for — make that, infamous for – in our neck of the woods.

We’re tilling the vegetable garden and amending the soil with the rich compost we’ve let mature since last year; fertilizing the flower and shrubbery beds with organic, slow-release granules; digging up the specimens we decided we didn’t like after all and replacing them with something we spent a lot of time wracking our brains over like a person possessed. 

Why did I plant a trio of boxwood there when, clearly, fountain grass would look more fabulous? 

Then it’s off to the nursery, list in hand, for vegetable seeds and seedlings and our favorite four-inch pots of herbs. I’m the type who never lays out my vegetable garden the same way twice and revels in experimentation. Still, there will always be some variety of tomato, cucumber, eggplant, pepper and leeks. This year, I added zucchini and rainbow chard. There’s always basil, rosemary, parsley, tarragon, sage, oregano, chives and thyme. I’m foregoing the lemongrass this year. And the cilantro, although tasty, is just too demanding. My blueberry and raspberry borders will be heavy with fruit by mid-July. As much as I love melons, I just don’t have enough room for their prolific vines.

If you’re like me, you’ve redesigned the front yard four times in 25 years and the back yard three. It started with an Americana cottage theme with lots of flowering perennials all around. It has since evolved into a more subdued landscape in the front of the house with flowering shrubs and greenery of contrasting textures and shapes and rhythmic pops of purple and white.

The shady, back lot has a decidedly Japanese sensibility with a traditional Karesansui garden (a dry landscape garden) for raking in meditation, surrounded by a woodland of ferns, viburnum, weeping spruce, umbrella hosta and the occasional eye-popping singular specimen that makes the hair on my neck stand up when seen in a “certain slant of light,” to steal a phrase from Emily Dickinson. A low shasta doublefile viburnum, an Okushimo Acer green Japanese maple and an early blooming wisteria — brachybotrys Murasaki-Kapitan – growing handsomely over a pergola.

I’ve rebuilt the raised vegetable beds on the west side of the house out of real, untreated wood too many times to count. Why? Because I can. Because I’m alive and nothing — almost nothing – brings me more joy than playing artist, botanist, landscaper, God on my little patch of earth.

I’m convinced some people — and I’m one of them – have a DNA-related, primal affinity to our agrarian ancestors. Both my maternal and paternal grandparents were farmers, which bolsters my theory. Or, at least, it sounds pretty convincing.

God forbid my inner farmer be compromised. Again.

Now, as a literature nerd in high school in the early 1970s, then college, and graduate school, I was obsessed with the poetry of American ex-patriot T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), whose poignant images of the disenfranchised soul in early 20

 century London became one of the great masters of the modernist poetry movement. (Eliot’s, 

 (1939) became the basis for the hit Broadway musical, 

As with all great poetry, his tome, “Waste Land,” about the emotional and physical devastation in the wake of World War I, has a universal, timeless message. His genius, the effortless cadence of imagery drawn from the natural world as a metaphor for life:

When I was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer many Aprils ago, the poet who infatuated me from the age of 17 invited me, at 45, to rediscover the deeper truths of his work from a far different perspective.

war. And, who the hell is going to look after my gardens if I die on its miserable battlefield?

It’s a lot to take in. Gardening is secondary to family, of course, but when you are forced to give an accounting of all you love and care for in this life and are suddenly faced with the prospect of the ultimate separation, well, it takes some adjustment. Some 

I can let go more easily knowing I did my level best loving and caring for my family, and they, reaffirm such by not pressuring me to fight beyond my means.

I can let go a little easier confident in the thought I lived life to the fullest when I was able and didn’t let fear of failure stop me from pursuing any imaginable goal. 

I can let go a lot easier satisfied I not only championed causes I believed in — community service and engagement, human and animal rights, environmental sustainability, cultural literacy – but also influenced my children, as well, to be engaged in the community in which they live. 

I can let go so much easier if I can be reassured I won’t be forgotten and buried like a shard of pottery in the garden. Talk about me. Laugh about me. Celebrate me. Cry for me, on certain occasions, but please don’t ever forget me or what I lived to represent.

Needless to say, I conquered the enemy. For now. But sooner or later, something will catch up to me, and when it does, I think I will be more prepared than most, perhaps, to deal with the emotional fallout thanks to my near-death cancer experience. This lover of the soil only hopes the grim reaper will call in the dead of winter. I need to place my order for leek seedlings at the greenhouse up the road by mid-March.

You may have noticed I haven’t posted a blog lately. It could only mean one of two things: I ran out of things to say or, it’s gardening season. As my family is sure to attest, the former is impossible.
 

I've Gone to a Garden Party (And I Never Want to Leaf)

You know the line, “Don’t get even, get even better?”

I have, and I did! After I graduated college way back in 1980, during the nation’s worse recession, I could not find a job in the advertising biz as I had hoped, so I worked instead in custom drapery and furniture sales at a high-end department store in Burlington, Vermont, waiting for my big break.

One January day, there was a flurry of excitement in the lunch room to match the flurry of snow outside. The store management announced that they were auditioning store personnel — women and men – for a spectacular, first-of-its-kind spring fashion show they were staging in late February at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts just down the street – a  fabulous, Art Deco vaudeville theater and movie house built in 1930 and recently renovated and restored to its original grandeur. At 5’5” and 118 pounds, not to mention a boatload of confidence and charisma to go with my knockout bod, I knew I would be a shoe-in.

Only, I wasn’t. I stunk at modeling. My runway strut looked like Frankenstein with hemorrhoids. I was laughed off the stage.

Thankfully, I soon landed a job in advertising and quietly exited the back door of the department store — and any illusions of a modelling career.

But 40 years and 40-plus pounds later — and those once perky 38 Ds surgically removed to save my life from breast cancer – I was invited to try my luck again at the 5

 Annual Seeds of Hope Fashion Fundraiser for Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s Norris Cotton Cancer Center here in New Hampshire, where I previously participated in an extended, five-year aromatase inhibitor drug trial. I was the only flat-chested model among the group of fellow survivors of all types of cancers, as well as loved ones modeling in tribute to loved ones who succumbed to the disease.

This was no amateur hour. We’re talking committed area retailers and cutting-edge, independent fashion designers loaning Seeds of Hope models their finest inventory. It meant numerous fitting appointments and rehearsals and, on the big night, a production company with staging and lighting; full-blown make-up and hair styling with an entire crew of beauty professionals; a floor manager; and photographers.

And then it was my turn. All the shame of 1980 (and all the pain of 2003 and 2012) were transformed into a state of mind somewhere between Nirvana and ecstasy. I walked that catwalk liked I owned it, and when I did the half turn on my walk back? I said in a strong voice so everyone could hear, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am flat and happy, and have never felt more beautiful in my life,” to which I received a standing ovation.

Yeah, I rocked the crowd. And what a crowd it was. There were hundreds of family and friends and local fashionistas “ooh-ing” and “ahh-ing” over the fabulous threads and silent auction items whose financial contributions have amounted to over $100,000 for cancer research and patient services.

According to Jean Brown, Executive Director of the Friends of Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, one of the more unique aspects of the Seeds of Hope Fashion Show fundraiser — and others within the Friends purview – are the seed grants between $10K and $50K given to young cancer researchers at Norris Cotton Cancer Center. Unable to apply for larger federal research grants without the needed data to support their hypotheses, such seed grants enable a new generation of cancer researchers to hire lab assistants, purchase materials and, most importantly, compile needed data.

“We at the Friends are exceedingly proud to note that, over the last 10 years of providing seed grants, a $23 value in cancer research is returned for every dollar invested,” Brown told me.

Additionally, and close to my heart, funds from the fashion show are used for patient services. While gas and grocery gift cards have long been an essential need for those cancer patients struggling financially to make ends meet when receiving chemotherapy, additional services such as art programs and massage therapy are now available to all cancer patients thanks to monies raised by the Friends. To date, Brown said that 1,200 massages have soothed aching, stressed bodies on infusion day.

Seeds of Hope — it’s given so many just that, including me, hope and a sense of belonging as I navigate life without breasts.

I was the only flat-chested model among the group of fellow survivors of all types of cancers, as well as loved ones modeling in tribute to loved ones who succumbed to the disease.

Finally Becoming a 'Model Citizen'

I marked my 15th year of cancer survivorship far from my New Hampshire home, soaking, once again, in the healing, hot mineral springs of New Mexico’s Ojo Caliente — the sacred and storied land of the Pueblo peoples. Miles from civilization, the Georgia O’Keeffe-esque red canyons reached for the clouds, while I was dwarfed in their shadow, up to my neck in the hand-wrought stone pools brimming with the medicinal iron, arsenic, lithia and soda-laced waters. I was keenly aware of life and again reminded of the unexpected detour mine took on April 17, 2003.

In Native American story-telling, concepts of time and space are so different from how we see them in Western culture. Something that occurred long ago in tribal history may be referenced as happening yesterday to have immediate impact on listeners as they seek to make sense of a traumatic and/or confusing event or situation.

Time can be circular, not linear, as we traditionally construe it. While we think of the past as a natural, rational route in molding and understanding the future, Native Americans strongly believe the future is a valuable route in molding and understanding the past. It’s a two-way street.

This idea isn’t lost on me as I recall the first time I came to Ojo Caliente. It will be 15 years in August, just two weeks after completing eight rounds of grueling, dose-dense chemotherapy.

My close friend, Sally, gifted me with a needed getaway to the “Land of Enchantment,” as they call New Mexico. Would the mythical healing mineral springs heal me? I doubted it. Given my prognosis, I already had one foot in the grave. It was just a matter of time.

It’s incredibly edifying, then, from my vantage point now, to look back at the person I was in the trauma of cancer and realize the person I’ve become today through the cancer experience. Glimpsing the epic journey of survivorship through the Native American lens, planting the past in the present as a route to the future, the shell of a woman who came to New Mexico in 2003 — bald, pallid and weak – was, in reality, a maelstrom of determination, endurance and will. And were it not for this thought-provoking contribution of Native American philosophy and culture, I don’t know that I’d see myself for the strong woman I was then.

As to the notion of space, to the Native American, it is far more than a geographical location. Many earthly places — especially land where their ancestors were born or are buried – are sacred and imbued with eternal, spiritual powers.

When I contemplate this latest benchmark in my life, my 15th year surviving stage 3b breast cancer, I confess there are times when I feel like it was just yesterday the Trickster Coyote — the Native American mythical creature of evil and bad omen – blindsided me, bent on taking me down in the one sacred place I felt I could take refuge from the world: my home. At such times, I am struck by the thought that I will never fully recover from cancer’s onslaught. Its emotional tidal river runs deep and far. It rises and falls, and is often log-jammed with old nightmares and new worries.

Most other days, especially after the first three years and after my second mastectomy, and nine years after my original diagnosis, the cancer experience has encouraged me to go places I know would not have gone otherwise, or at my age. These were places within myself I hadn’t taken the time to discern or explore or appreciate.

Given the severity of my condition, I ultimately understood that life has the power to offer the continuum of life, a gift I took for granted before cancer. All else is superfluous. Wow, am I embarrassed by the pile of useless distractions I accumulated. Especially in my mind. I’ve since downsized the meaningless and invested more in the meaningful. It’s been a complete lifestyle change as important as diet and exercise.

So, here’s to the next 15 years of life. And, to you, Trickster Coyote, I’m all the wiser since you ambushed me.

When I contemplate this latest benchmark in my life, my 15th year surviving stage 3b breast cancer, I confess there are times when I feel like it was just yesterday the Trickster Coyote – the Native American mythical creature of evil and bad omen – blindsided me, bent on taking me down in the one sacred place I felt I could take refuge from the world: my home.

Carolyn Choate

Ground Control to Dad

I've Gone to a Garden Party (And I Never Want to Leaf)

Finally Becoming a 'Model Citizen'

Healing Waters: Reflecting on the Lessons of Survivorship

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