You take time to tell people what they mean to you.
“But it is really good to focus again on all of the many, many blessings that are so apparent and that you just really realize when you’re going through that. “Because I do not live my life in fear of cancer anymore, I don’t really give it a lot of thought,” Parman said. But a unique opportunity to travel to Nepal next week to hike to Mount Everest Base Camp with a group of 13 other cancer survivors has given her a chance to revisit the effects that the disease has had on her life. Enough time has passed for Parman to go on living her life without the “C” word dominating her mind. Her girls have since grown into beautiful teenagers and her hair into a charming gray she prefers to keep short for simplicity’s sake. “They were very intent on the job they were doing,” “I had sideburns and all,” Parman recalls, looking as if she might smile, cry or anything in between. That’s the staircase on which her daughters, 6 and 8 at the time, painted her bald head when her hair finished falling out from chemo treatment.
Behind that door is the bathtub she washed dishes in for six weeks while caught in the middle of a remodeling project and radiation therapy. There’s the patch of ground where she fell to her knees and sobbed when the phone call came. Even though it’s been 11 years since she conquered cancer, she recalls them with an eloquent grace that makes it feel as though they happened yesterday. Uncontrollable laughter to unconditional love. Having just pulled an immaculate batch of chocolate chip cookies from the oven, Karen Parman stands in her kitchen and points to memories that seem to span nearly every feeling a person can experience.
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