Honoring Jessica Joseph

6/2/2018

Watch me.

I will go to my own sun.
And if I am burned by its fire,

I will fly on scorched wings.

Segovia Amil

“Warrior”

Jessica Joseph surely felt the fire. She flew intrepidly and fearlessly on scorched wings. That’s just what cancer survivors must do.

Jessica didn’t literally survive cancer, of course. Not by the conventional definition, anyway. With love in her heart and her family at her bedside, she slipped peacefully away last Saturday morning, a day after her brother Jonah accepted her diploma during an emotional moment at Collegiate’s 103^rd Commencement ceremony. She was 18 years old.

Jessica’s road was tough, devious, and fraught with many obstacles and roadblocks. A colon cancer diagnosis is stunning. At 17, it’s virtually unprecedented. She underwent multiple hospitalizations and endless procedures from a simple blood-draw to an HIPEC, the “mother of all surgeries.” Tubes, drains, lines, IV bags, and beeping monitors became her constant companions.

She had it beaten last summer, she thought. It would be clear sailing through her senior year, then off to college, then medical school, then a career as a surgeon like her grandfather, Dr. Jay Joseph.

Her respite was brief. This past fall, the cancer returned, this time more virulent than before. There were more hospitalizations, more tests, more surgeries, more waiting, more emotions.

The struggle continued. Then the vigil. Then…

So how is Jessica a survivor?

She made the choice to be. That’s how. She was at once resolute, philosophical, and eternally optimistic. She adopted a wise-beyond-her-years approach to an unfathomable test of strength, will, and endurance and emerged victorious, the outcome notwithstanding.

She faced steep odds, took each setback in stride, and never, ever backed down. “I’m young. I’m strong,” she said. “Cancer won’t get the best of me.” Then, with each bleak report, she’d quietly respond, “It’s OK. Just one more thing I have to deal with.” Like exams, college applications, and her senior speech.

Jessica never delivered that speech, by the way. Doesn’t matter. No words she would have uttered from the podium could prove more eloquent, more inspiring, and more poignant than the spirit with which she lived each day.

Jessica is a survivor because she considered her discomfort and pain to be mere inconveniences. She never whined. She never complained. She never asked Why me? She truly believed that tomorrow would be a better day.

She's a survivor because she made each moment, unsettling as it might be, a real-time educational experience. She inquired and probed. She indulged her sense of wonder. She quizzed doctors, nurses, PT’s, and EMT’s about every procedure, every test, every medication. She became one with her medical team. She even requested copies of her records and pictures and videos of her surgeries to share with her anatomy class.

She’s a survivor because she smiled even as her strength was ebbing, when simple tasks required Herculean efforts. With strong-willed determination, she asked, on her final day, that a physical therapist help her stand and walk.

Jessica is a survivor because she subsisted for months on intravenous nutrients and sugar-free grape popsicles, her favorite, saying only, without regret, “I’d really like to eat real food.”

She’s a survivor because she attempted to make sense of the senseless, comprehend the incomprehensible, and find meaning in the unimaginable. She focused on living. She considered every day a blessing. She reached out. She nurtured. She ministered to those who stopped by to minister to her.

Jessica is a survivor because she refused to suffer. Suffering, you see, is a choice as well. And even in her toughest days, she summoned inner strength and drew strength from others.

Jack Wysoki, a native of Poland, is Jessica's maternal grandfather. From 1939 when he was 12 until 1945, he was imprisoned by the Nazis in 13 different concentration camps throughout Europe. When World War II ended, he was the lone survivor among his 27 family members who emerged from the Holocaust. Jessica was two years old when he died, but as she grew older, she learned well his compelling story and came to understand the miracle of her very existence. She admired his strength of character, deeply respected his uncommon courage, and always took his experiences very much to heart.

In the early spring, soon after she entered the VCU Medical Center for the final time, she had a dream. In her vision, she called her grandparents. They ascended a flight of stairs to pick up the phone.

“I’m a good person,” she told her grandfather. “Please make things all right.”

Static filled the line. Her grandfather’s words were difficult to discern.

“It’s not that bad here,” Jack Wysoki responded.

Then she awoke. She pondered.

Where is “here”? she wondered.

He was always the jokester. Was he just having fun? Was he serious?

She struggled mightily to understand.

Think about it, though.

“Not that bad here.”

With Jessica, even to the end, it always was.

-- Weldon Bradshaw

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