Remembering Ingrid.

Cancer takes the body, sometimes rots the inside while you're still alive. It causes horrible pain and unspeakable mental and physical suffering. But it cannot take the spirit.

A highly educated woman with a great sense of style and a delightful sense of humor, Ingrid hailed from Berlin moving to the US forty years ago when she married an American college professor.

Six years ago she lost the professor as she called him the week before Thanksgiving. Then lost her beloved American Eskimo dog Teddy a month later just before Christmas.

Three months after that she was diagnosed with breast cancer, beat it, and the day she finished treatment was diagnosed with cancer in her other breast. She beat that, too after chemotherapy, radiation, a double mastectomy, and five years of medication.

I met her when she was 83 following her third bout with cancer, in the lungs this time.

She moved into a nursing home and rehabilitation center for 12 weeks during treatment. I met her the day she moved into a private room. She and her son were decorating an arrangement of brilliantly colored silk flowers, framed photos of family members, a special one of her and her dog by her bedside, a basket of fresh fruit, a closet full of clothes, and a big straw hat on a chair in the corner. There were books and newspapers, and music playing from a small radio on her nightstand.

I knocked on her open door introducing myself as a volunteer with the Activities Department assigned to various tasks. Today I was delivering her first newspaper.

She beckoned me into the room with a huge, toothy grin and introduced herself in a thick German accent but with a somewhat breathy voice and deep gasps of air after every few words, sometimes coughing, too. The chemo she punctuated. The treatment is terrible, but it's done the job before, and I expect it'll save the old girl again! She laughed then, and with some ceremonious pomp tossed a bright orange scarf around her neck.

From that moment I knew I would like Ingrid. She was funny, smart, and talked of her cancer treatment like it was annoying, an obstacle in her otherwise busy life.

Yes, at 83 she was busy. And she explained that to me. She is busy living, busy reading, busy writing letters, watching operas on television, listening to music, busy enjoying the sunshine and the birds singing.

Three weeks into her treatment Ingrid is doing well, as she expected. I manage to spend about an hour with her three

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