'Sister Soldiers,' Bound by Cancer

Upon Chevy Chase Woman's Death, a Writer Remembers How Much She Saw in Life

NEW DELHI Istill have the scratchy gray woolen cap Lisa Flaxman handed me that warm August day. I was just back from Kenya, where I was living at the time and working as a foreign correspondent for this newspaper. I had no car. But I did have breast cancer and needed to get to a wig shop in Wheaton.

It was Lisa, herself a breast cancer survivor, who volunteered to drive me, even though she had three young children and even though she cried as she watched my long dark hair be chopped and fitted for a wig of dark brown Russian tresses.

Outside the shop, Lisa pressed the fuzz-covered hat into my hands. "I know you," she said, her blue eyes squinting at me for what felt like the longest time. "I know your type: You won't wear that fake hair."

I'd met Lisa only a few days earlier. She lived in Chevy Chase with her husband and children. She had launched a string of music schools for toddlers called musiKids, including branches in Bethesda and the District. That's how much I knew about her. But she somehow knew a whole lot more about me, because she was right -- I rarely wore the wig.

"You are edgy and dark, I can tell," said Lisa, who was also an accomplished singer, a published poet and a "fully recovered Georgetown-educated lawyer." She was busily engaged in several charity groups, including music programs for cancer patients. "You have moxie like me," she said. "You will fight it till the end."

On Jan. 14, eight months after her cancer recurred, she died. She was 43. She took her last breath with her family around her. They slept cuddled together in her bedroom, helping her through the night, her husband told me. They made a video together. Her son Benjamin, 11, played the clarinet for her as she drifted to sleep, not long before she died.

Her husband, Jonathan Martel, told me later that adults who have lost their parents at a young age often say their biggest regret is that they can't remember them. "I want to preserve her memory," he told me in a phone call to New Delhi, where I live now. "I want them to remember the Lisa you knew. The person she became and showed the world after she was diagnosed the first time."

Over the scratchy Skype phone connection, we shared all of the chilling moments that occur after someone's death. "Now I was just going to say, 'Let me give the phone to Lisa,' " her husband told me, and we both went silent. Soon after, in front of my computer, I thought of one of her poems from a book she'd written during her treatment. Chemotherapy was physically painful, psychologically harrowing and -- worst of all, as she would have said -- time-consuming.

"New day, no breasts. No shirt, no rest. Life as a unibreast woman," she wrote in her self-published collection of poetry, "Glances at Time: A Young Mother's Journey with Breast Cancer."

"My writings are the spider's thread attaching me to my family and friends forever; they will never have to wonder how I felt, they will know and for that, I am thankful," she wrote in the introduction.

So to her children, Benjamin, Sophie and Zachary, I will write simply: Your mom was so cool. She was a friend who always made herself available. During my chemotherapy, she hosted me and my husband for Thanksgiving. We sat in her living room, singing and playing guitars. She had a powerful, operatic singing voice, surprising for such a tiny woman, a lifelong vegetarian who was wafer thin and slightly taller than 5 feet.

She often performed live at public events and social functions. She had, after all, created musiKids, which serves more than 500 infants and children to age 5, simply because she couldn't find a decent music class for her infant son. Later she started musiKares, a nonprofit organization to bring music to adult and pediatric patients at Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, where she was active in the arts and humanities program and initiated a campaign to recycle CDs and donate them to hospitals to help patients relieve anxiety.