clear eyes and clear skin and had a sort of shine about her, but the tumor had only receded enough for the skin to close over it; it was still large, and very hard.  To fully heal, Marie probably needed at least two more water fasts of equal length interspersed with a few months on a raw food diet.  But she lacked the personal toughness to confront another fast in the near future.  Nor was she emotionally up to what she regarded as the deprivation of a long-term raw foods healing diet.

So I advised her to seek other treatment.  Still unwilling to accept standard medical management of her case, Marie chose to go to the Philippines to have “psychic surgery.”  She was excited and optimistic about this; I was interested myself because I was dubious about this magical procedure; if Marie went I would have a chance to see the results (if any) on a person I was very familiar with.  Marie had her tickets and was due to leave in days when her lover, against Marie’s directly-stated wishes, called her parents and informed them of what was happening.

The parents had known nothing of Marie’s cancer and were shocked, upset, outraged!  They had not known Marie was a lesbian, much less that their daughter was flirting with (from their view) obvious quackery.  Their daughter needed immediate saving and her parents and brother (the one who had abused her) flew to Oregon and surprisingly appeared the next day in a state of violent rage.  They threatened lawsuits, police, incarceration, they threatened to have their daughter civilly committed as unable to take care of herself.  They thought everything Marie had done for the last three years was my fault.  I was lucky to stay out of jail.  Of course, all of this was why Marie had not told them in the first place; she had wanted to avoid this kind of a scene.

Marie did not have enough personal integrity to withstand the domination of her immediate family.  They put her in a hospital, where Marie had a radical mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation.  Assured that they had done everything that should have been done, the self-righteous parents went back home.  Marie never recovered from chemotherapy and radiation.  She died in the hospital surrounded by her lesbian friends who took dedicated, ever-so-sympathetic turns maintaining an emotional round-the-clock vigil.

Marie’s death was partly my fault.  She was an early case of mine.  At the time I did not yet understand the total effect of lack of ethics and irresponsibility on illness.  Had Marie really wanted to live in the first place, she would have sought treatment three years earlier.  In our counseling sessions she always evaded this question and I had not been wise enough to pin her down with my knee on her chest and make her answer up.  Marie had too many secrets from everybody and was never fully honest in any of her relationships, including with me.  I think she only came to Great Oaks at her lover’s insistence and to the day she died was trying to pretend that nothing was wrong.