Giving Inspired by Grief

The side effects from the treatment were difficult, but Ashley made the best of it, family members said. She and Brian bought a house in Fairfax, where she planted daisies, lilies, clematis and tulips.

They traveled, and Ashley began a career switch from public relations to teaching. She enrolled in a master's program at the Northern Virginia campus of the University of Virginia and got a job as an instructional assistant in a kindergarten class at Wakefield Forest Elementary School in Fairfax.

She loved it, according to her own writings.

"I want to teach," she wrote in an essay. "I want to teach children their ABCs. I want to watch their eyes light up when they realize what happens when you heat sugar."

In January 2001, doctors declared Ashley cancer-free, and the couple began planning a family. "Everything was going fine," said Brian Cole, "until February 2002."

That's when a routine annual cancer scan found a tumor behind Ashley's breastbone, another under her left arm and another on her chest. There were lesions on her lungs, and other internal tumors and lesions so numerous they were inoperable.

The news came as a crushing blow, and meant Ashley faced another round of even more debilitating treatment.

"Can I do this again?" Ashley wrote in her diary. "I am so young. Too young to be dealing with issues of death and diseases. . . . I did my time. . . . Why now when I was finding peace again?"

And yet she tried to see the positive side. Some deathly ill children have to deal with sickness and dying at a much earlier age, she reminded herself.

"I should be grateful for the time I've had and still have and move forward," she wrote.

During her treatment, she went ahead with plans to participate in the 2002 Avon Walk for Breast Cancer and raised almost $8,000.

Doctors tried aggressive chemotherapy and surgery. Ashley and Brian traveled to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York for a drug trial.