A Student Dies

A couple former students let me know that Dee-Jade Chock just died from the cancer she had been fighting for 12 years. She was 29. It would be better to say she lived with cancer. I didn't know her well enough to praise her with the thoroughness I would like, but everything I know about her is good stuff, solid stuff, the stuff of everlasting grief for those who were close to her in her life and will now be close to her in absence. That is the way it works.

I met her when she was a student in my News Media class, which disappeared (I think) because of the ramshackle way in which I taught it. I liked teaching it because then I knew everyone going through the department on the media side.

Dee missed the midterm, and she came to office to explain why. I had cancer surgery, she said. That's why I missed the test.

She said it matter-of-factly. I had surgery would have worked just as well. I had no sense she was angling for sympathy or extra consideration or anything. Cancer was what she had. No stigma in that. Cancer was war, and this was school, and she drew the line.

I thought to myself: This child may be exceptional. If that was me, I'd play my disease one way or the other, probably for a little sympathy or a little drama, making a joke to underline my bravery, asking for praise by not seeming to.

She just said: I had cancer surgery. When can I make up the test?

I watched her out of the corner of my eye from then on. It turned out in the copy editing class that she already knew Quark Xpress -- I didn't but faked it anyway -- and was a good tutor, so I brought her back after graduation occasionally to do weekend workshops when I taught editing because she was so gracious and efficient.

Sometimes she talked about chemo, commentary minus complaint. Sometimes I got one of those "big" emails to her friends and acquaintances explaining how something that had shown some promise hadn't kept working, but now she was trying something else.

I will not give up, she wrote. There's always something new. On one of those tutoring trips to USF her boyfriend drove her up from the Peninsula and then came back to pick her up. He was wearing his pajamas when he dropped her off. That seemed to me just the right note, the substance of the kind of ease and companionship that outlives anything, including ....

Well, it does, doesn't it? After that I referred to him as Pajama Boy, which seemed to make her smile. They got married last year.

That was the only advice I ever gave her, gave it without solicitation after the last terrifying email I got from her: Get married. I mean, marry Pajama Boy. Leave as much as you can behind you. Leave your touch on as many people as possible.

Of course, I didn't need to tell her that. I was telling myself. That's what some people do. They remind you of what you already know. Why do we forget?