Terminally Ill Patient Marries

Lung Cancer Patient Finds Love

This is not a sad story. It’s a story of love. Of the possibilities of faith. And the power of friendship. And it’s a story about how none of us is promised anything beyond this moment, and what control we do have is how we choose to live it.

For Jackie Miller, the story began about six months ago with a cough that just wouldn’t go away. Then, shortness of breath. Finally, about a month ago, a cancerous mass was found on her left lung.

Miller, 48, smoked as a teen-ager, and then again briefly about five years ago. The cancer has spread to the lining of her lungs and into her lymph nodes. Doctors are trying chemotherapy to slow things down, but that’s all it will do. Plainly put, she is dying. But that’s not the way Jackie Miller intends to live the rest of her life.

“This is just another leg of the journey,” she said, “and I don’t want it to be about fear.” Instead, she said, she wants it to be about growth, and a testament to the love and friendship she said has brightly bloomed in this otherwise dark time.

June 14 in Greeley, Miller will marry her boyfriend, Jim Newkirk, whom she has been with for about two years and who she has lived with in Johnstown for about a year. Friends at North Colorado Medical Center, where she worked as a nurse, are organizing the event, which will include a bridal shower this weekend. Guided by love

Jim Newkirk, 46, has lived in Johnstown since 2002. Three years ago, his first wife, Dianna Ward, died at their home after dealing with breast cancer for about two years.

Dianna died May 2, 2005. This year on that same date, Jackie was diagnosed with lung cancer. “I knew it was the anniversary of my wife’s death, but I was mostly thinking of Jackie,” Newkirk said on a recent Friday night, sitting on the couch holding her hand in their Johnstown Center home.

Newkirk asked Miller to marry him that night. The two had been talking about marriage, they said. This just made it that more important that they do it.

“I guess I feel like this was meant to be,” Newkirk said. “What I’ve gone through before with my first wife, I know I can go through this now with Jackie.

“The first thing something like this does is challenge your faith,” he said, “and from the very first moments after the news, I’ve never felt like I’ve had a stronger sense of faith in my life. This is the right thing to do. I’m ready for it.

“If I think I’m going to miss anything, it’s that I won’t have the time to learn all the things that Jackie could teach me,” Newkirk said, holding his bride-to-be’s hand. “Now, all the sudden, you’re open to all these experiences. It’s a sense of doing as much as we can, and experiencing as much as we can, with the time we do have.”

Love Overcomes

Miller admits she is scared sometimes.

“I’m not scared to die,” she said. “I guess I’m scared of suffering. The process of dying. I have some pretty strong beliefs about death, and what will happen.

“I think you come here to learn lessons, then you go back up to heaven and see if you have more lessons to learn, and if you do, you choose another life.”

Asked what she thinks she’s learned in this life, Miller said, maybe forgiveness. And letting go of fear and its malignant cousin – anger.

“At points in my life, I’ve had an incredible amount of anger,” she said. “That got to be a burden, and I was able to let it go and move on.” Now, even faced with this, she said, she’s never been angry, or thought, ‘Why me?’

“I don’t want to spend my time being angry or scared,” she said. “I want to spend it with the people around me.”

“I’m not scared,” Newkirk said. “I think that has a lot to do with Jackie’s lack of fear. Anyway, I’d be afraid for her, not me.”

“It’s easy not to be afraid with all this love around you,” Miller said, finishing the thought. “Jackie has spread her caring and love to so many people,” Newkirk said. “It’s like a tidal wave now coming back.” . This story originally ran in The Johnstown Breeze