So says Jan Livingston, an Orillia, Ont. college professor and an original member of the cast of Handle With Care?, a play exploring the issues and emotions of women dealing with metastatic breast cancer.
Livingston lost her own battle with the disease last fall but her sentiments sum up the message of a new documentary video that delves deep into the subject of living with metastatic breast cancer – cancer that has spread to other parts of the body and is no longer considered curable.
How Can We Love You: Behind the Scenes with the Play, Handle with Care? follows Livingston and fellow original cast member, Mary Sue Douglas, another victim of metastatic disease, exploring their experiences in presenting the play to audiences across North America while they and their families deal with the day-to-day challenges of living with the terminal illness.
There are few diagnoses more devastating than that of metastatic breast cancer, not only for the women who must hear the words but also for their physicians, their families and their friends.
But, through the documentary, Livingston and Douglas clearly tell us that they are living with the disease, not dying with it.
"I hope it shows that your life isn't defined by the disease and that you're still you," Douglas says. "I hope people see that. And that, even with what isn't the greatest diagnosis or prognosis, there can be joy and laughter and hope, no matter what."
It's a message that's important for everyone to hear says Laura Sky, award-winning Toronto producer-director who shepherded the documentary through her company Sky Works Charitable Foundation.
"These women don't want to be in death. They want to be in life," Sky says. "That's part of our listening and hearing, so that we don't get overwhelmed by our feelings to the point that we can't see and hear that they have life in them."
She says the documentary's title says it all.
"It really is about how we can love them … They really need us to stay connected with them – even if we get it wrong, even if we don't know what they need – and to respond to their needs by listening to them and hearing them. It gets really hard and scary when you know that you're dealing with the prospect of losing somebody. At times it feels you can come up with all kinds of reasons to stay separate from them or to protect yourself. But ultimately, they need us and they need us in ways that include us, that needing us doesn't diminish them. That doesn't include pity."
The genesis of the documentary was Sky's seeing the play and being intrigued by how the cast, in particular Livingston and Douglas, were reaching out, in the midst of their own challenges, to try to make a difference for other women. And as she travelled with the play, filming footage and interviewing the women at various times through the process, her admiration for them grew.
"They're very honest about their own experience of the illness, about their feelings and the risk of dying. They're honest and they're also full of life at the same moment. I really love that about them."
As the documentary begins, Douglas had just received news that cancer has been found in her liver. In interviews, she talks candidly about receiving that news, giving it to her husband Peter, on the eve of his 60th birthday, and telling her three adult sons, Trevor, Graham and Scott. It follows her as she gets starts yet another round of chemotherapy, loses her hair again, and waits for and reacts to results of a catscan (cancer in the lungs had responded to treatment and no more had appeared in the liver).
But the North Toronto resident says she didn't feel an intrusion and had no qualms about letting her feelings loose either on stage or on film.
"I didn't find it hard. I'm a bit of a blabbermouth, so I guess it's easy for me to talk about stuff ... and I had thought that if this is helpful for anybody, then it's worth doing."
As the film closes, the audience is allowed into the most personal moments of Livingston's battle, as she and her daughter Nadine face the inevitability of death, as she struggles with the decision whether to undergo more chemotherapy, and as she deals with the fear and the sadness of letting go.
"Jan wanted very much for us to deal with the feelings of dying," says Sky, adding that in those portions of filming she let her subject take the lead in determining the direction of the interview. "Death and dying are not discussed a lot on the breast-cancer agenda. In the whole effort to keep women hopeful and positive, there's not a lot that's on the table about that part of it. Jan wanted very much to be able to talk about it and to help women put it on the table. It was a gift to us and very gutsy of her to take us in that direction."
Her subsequent death gives those portions even more poignancy, Sky says. "We can't dismiss for a minute what she's thinking and feeling because, at the end, we know that she did die and she wanted us to have this legacy."    
Sky hopes to take the documentary on the road with a team of presenters that Douglas hopes to be a part of.  It premiered with two Toronto screenings in January 2001