Bonnie appears on the "50-foot billboard" near Baltimore's Penn Station in a memorial tribute on the second anniversary of her death. Her photographs were streamed between commercial ads on the digital display for a week in 2017, and rerun -- along with images of her -- at her husband's request by the advertising company Shanklin Media on March 11, 2023.

 The Final Journey

(This blog entry was the last written by Bonnie J. Schupp before her life was taken by pancreatic cancer on March 11, 2021. It was found in March 2024, as the lone post residing in her other blog where it evidently had been published by Bonnie on Jan. 16, 2021 -- rather than here on her Journeys blog. It is now posted here by Bonnie's husband, David M. Ettlin, who continues to manage her literary and photographic legacy.)

January 16, 2021

 Numb. I seem to be entering the final stage of my life full of numbness. Last night I awoke from a deep sleep, unable to determine how I was feeling. Was I too warm or too cold? Was I bloated or did I just need to roll over to the other side? Was I in pain or feeling empty?

This is the fourth day since I learned that my body has been invaded with cancer. Sitting calmly in the examination room with Dr. Wolf, his PA James and David, it did not hit me like the proverbial  ton of bricks. Instead, it hit me with a flick of a feather.  

I had been in MedStar Harbor Hospital at the end of September, admitted through the ER because of abdominal pain. After a plethora of tests, it was determined that I had gall bladder stones and needed to say goodbye to my gall bladder, which I did in two weeks. After that surgery, for a while I was good again, riding my bike and walking.

Then the symptoms and pain began again. Constipation, lower intestinal pain, fatigue. I saw Dr. Wolf who sent me for more tests. Did I mention that when I was in the hospital in September, besides a bad gall bladder, there was a spot on my pancreas? The doctor compared three scans from the past year. The first showed no spot. The second showed a foreign spot. The third showed that the invasive spot had grown rather quickly. Diagnosis—aggressive pancreatic cancer.

While gastroenterology Dr. Wolf and James told me about the new status of my body, I remained calm.

“What do I need to do next?” Of course I was thinking about how can we fix this but, at the same time, understanding it may not be able to be fixed.

“Well,” I smiled behind my Covid mask. “I can’t complain about my life. We’ve traveled to every state in the country and many other countries including Japan three times, once on a Fulbright. We’ve raised two wonderful daughters. I’ve had a good ride.”

Dr. Wolf said gently, “You have a rough ride ahead of you.” He arranged for me to see an oncologist at the Tate Cancer Center at University of Maryland Baltimore-Washington Medical Center, a short drive from our house.

That first hour of the news, I calmly accepted it. In fact, I knew it was serious when both James and Dc. Wolf were in the room with me. This feeling was fortified when I asked if David could come in the room (which was not allowed during these Covid times), Dr. Wolf immediately volunteered to meet him at the front door and bring him back to the room.

It’s interesting that since I turned 76, I’ve been thinking about death a lot, partly in remembering Mom’s death when she was 76. I was with her when she took her last breath. I thought that if I could make it beyond age 76, I might have a chance to go on more adventures from my bucket list.

And lately, I've felt strange sensations. While in my bedroom, often stretching and meditating, I would feel a clump of my hair move by itself, with no help from wind or me, or the shifting of light and shadow on the wall.  It almost felt like a ghostly presence trying to comfort me. Call it what you will—an altered state or imagination or something beyond my ability to understand—I felt it and thought of my father and his last journey with Parkinson’s Disease.

My life has been full of journeys and I am about to embark on the final chapter of mine!

 

(David's note: About the time Bonnie was working on this post, her desktop computer had a meltdown. Our computer savior, owner of Odyssey Computers in Glen Burnie, Maryland, had a new custom computer assembled in a few days so that Bonnie could finish work on a two-year project that now had the grimmest of deadlines: Her memoir.  She finished writing it just three weeks before leaving us. She included among her last wishes that I edit, select and add photographs, and publish through Amazon what turned out to be a 219-page book, "Curious Possibilities."

Months later, I found in her computer five diary-like notes written in the first days after her diagnosis that included her views on mortality, and what comes after; how she was not ready to die, but at least had a wonderful life without regrets. She said nothing about fear... not in those notes, not ever to me. And we talked a lot over the course of five weeks, about our 42 years together and about her last wishes, before Bonnie's physical strength noticeably diminished. There was nothing left unsaid between us. 

The other wishes were for a party rather than a funeral (held seven months later, attended by some 165 friends and family), and that I continue selling her photographs. One of them was subsequently accepted for a national juried show of women photographers, and others have been exhibited and sold in area art shows. Bonnie's web site  bonnieschupp.com displays many of her photos. Costs for the domain and site are covered by royalty earnings from sales through Getty Images and its iStockphoto subsidiary, where Bonnie has a portfolio of some 2,300 images.

Although I was the professional writer in the family, having been a newspaper journalist for four decades, when it came to blogging it was Bonnie who was most prolific. Her Journeys blog has hundreds of posts here, preserving many moments in time. And there are her other books, notable among them "Dog Tag Poetry" (2012, Blurb Books) and "365 Gifts on Turning 70" (2016, Amazon).

Contact me at david.ettlin@comcast.net.  I also monitor Bonnie's Facebook page and her email at schupp9@comcast.net )