Megan Estey described herself best.
“I’m a strong-willed teen whose life has changed and I don’t know what is going to happen. But everyone’s life is really like that. It would drive me crazy when I’d hear someone say, `I hate my life,’ or `My hair looks like crap,’ or `I hate school.’ I wish I could hate driver’s ed. I miss getting into trouble at school. I miss talking too much in class. I miss eating lunch with my friends. I miss going to the hair salon.”
And now we’re going to miss her.
Megan was on the cover of the December 11 Jewish Times. She told me her story, about living with brain cancer as a 15-year-old.
When I went to visit her at her home in Finksburg, where she lived with her mom and dad, Joanne and Jerry Eisenstadt, I didn’t know what to ask her. “So how’s it going or How do you feel?” aren’t questions really measuring up to the reality she knew.
But what Megan did was step in and ask me if she could just tell me what she was going through.
She gave us all a look at what cancer was in both a physical and mental sense.
Yet in December, in the remaining weeks of her life, she didn’t want pity. The cancer took her from her family in a physical sense. But the cancer didn’t win the battle of spirit and soul. Megan, through her poetry and her photography and the love of her parents and relatives, in her own way beat the disease.
She showed us how to live, how to make sense of things, how to look for even humor.
Indeed, she hated the fact that she was losing her hair to chemotherapy. But in that came an idea to write a book called “The Wig Diaries.”
She wore her Chai necklace and she loved to listen to music by artists such as Jack Johnson, John Mayer and Jason Mraz.
She photographed colorful humming birds in flight, flowers, ocean scenes and children, plenty of children.
Megan was a Westminster High School sophomore and a Baltimore Hebrew bat mitzvah. Most of all, she was her parents’ daughter. The three of them made for an unbeatable team. When many teens want little association with mom and dad, she called them her best friends.
Her parents, Joanne and Jerry threw themselves and every resource they had at the disease. They called doctors, and cried, and laughed, and spent hours in hospital rooms, and treatment centers or in their daughter’s room. They hugged their child, putting on a strong face and sometimes letting go into tears.
On the night I interviewed Megan, I found her house in a snow covered Finksburg neighborhood. The night was dark and clear with the moonlight reflecting off of the crystalline snow. It was like driving onto a postcard scene, stark but beautiful.
When I left the Megan’s home I thought that she’d love to photograph the snow against the rural sky.
Her funeral is scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 3.
The landscape Wednesday will once again be bright white with forecasted accumulations.
Kids will be off from school, playing outside in the snow.
Making snow angels.
Megan would have taken their pictures.
Maybe she still is.