| Name | Menya Ruth WOLFE |
| Birth Date | Sep 14, 19641 |
| Birth Place | Hamilton, Barton Twp, Wentworth Co. ON Canada |
| Death Date | Feb 13, 20011,15 |
| Death Place | Toronto, York Co. ON Canada |
| Death Memo | St. Michael's Hospital, cancer |
| Education | U. of Toronto (B.A., Anthropology and Celtic Studies; M.A., Museum Studies)1 |
| Father | Morris WOLFE |
| Mother | Carla Anne McKAGUE |
| 1 | Peter Courtney Frank BEVIN |
| Father | David Courtney BEVIN (1917-1992) |
| Mother | Patricia Mary BIDDLE |
Obituary:
"After a heroic, almost-five-year struggle with a rare breast cancer that spread to the brain and involved numerous surgeries, chemotherapies and other treatments, Menya Ruth Wolfe died in the Palliative Care Unit at St. Michael's Hospital on February 13, 2001 at the age of 36, surrounded by love. She leaves behind her remarkable husband, Pete Bevin, who shared the emotional roller coaster ride of her last years; her parents Carla McKague and Morris Wolfe; her siblings Jennifer and Benjamin; their partners Brad and Felice; and the nieces and nephews she so treasured: Noah, Emma, Graeme, Hannah and Paul. Menya began to tell her own story on her web site www.menyawolfe.com. As well, she and her husband established a help page for other women living with inflammatory breast cancer: www.ibcsupport.org. Menya's family is enormously grateful to the team of friends, volunteers, homemakers, nurses and doctors who lovingly cared for Menya at home for five months. A memorial service will be held at Hart House at the University of Toronto on Sunday March 4, 2001 at 1 p.m. In lieu of flowers, contributions in Menya's name can be made to the organizations listed below.
"Donations:
"Trinity Home Hospice was a large part of our life in Menya's last few months, and it would have been impossible to care for her at home for so long without their unwavering support and care. Please consider making a tax-free donation so that they can continue their work. Their address is:
Trinity Home Hospice
PO Box 324
Commerce Court Postal Station
Toronto ON M5L 1G3
Canada
"Menya also requested that donations be made to support research into Inflammatory Breast Cancer. In Canada, please donate to the Saunders-Matthey Foundation for Breast Cancer Research, 13 Partridge Drive, Kanata, Ontario K2M 2P6. In the USA, the address is: Bunny Wing-Fernhall, Director, Development and Alumni Relations, The George Washington University Medical Center, 2300 Eye Street, NW Suite 615, Washington, DC 20037. See http://www.ibcresearch.org/ibcregistry for full details."15
Toronto Star, Feb. 15, 2003.
"A father's words of love, sorrow and wisdom
"JIM COYLE
"There's apparently an old Hasidic teaching about the three ascending levels of how we mourn — the first with tears, the next with silence, the highest with a song.
"I am thinking this week, after reading writer Morris Wolfe's tribute to his daughter, that a better way still of mourning a loved one is by telling their story.
"It was two years ago Thursday that Menya Wolfe died. She was 36. For the last five years of her life she had battled a virulent cancer. In a book to be launched on Tuesday, Menya, An End Of Life Story, her father tells of his daughter's life, of her courage in dying, and of the love of those who rallied to her care.
"Menya Wolfe, named for a great-grandmother who died in Auschwitz, sounds to have been a unique spirit, at once cerebral and earthy. She loved the culture of the Middle Ages, played the harp, made money with it busking. She earned a degree in museum studies, and claimed to have paid her way through university by standing on a beach in a bikini, telling men she had a birthmark in a place they couldn't see, and offering to reveal it for $5. (It was on the bottom of her foot.)
"If her disease was especially savage, its course and timing were particularly cruel.
"She had moved to London in 1995, found a job with an antique dealer, met a man with whom she fell in love.
"But the next spring she was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer, a rare and deadly form of the disease. She and Pete came back to Canada for her treatment, the mastectomy, the chemotherapy, the radiation.
"At first, Menya seemed clear of cancer, began regaining her strength. She and Pete were engaged on New Year's Eve 1997, planned to be married the following October.
"But 10 days before the wedding she learned the cancer was back, that it had metastasized to her brain.
"The couple married and honeymooned before Menya had surgery to remove the growth. She began to recover, though she had lost some of the use of her right hand.
"In the summer of 1998, they bought a house. And the day before they moved in, Menya learned that the cancer had returned.
"From the beginning, her father writes, Menya had insisted on researching and choosing her treatment options.
"'Her feistiness and tenacity, which had not always been easy for family and friends to deal with, made her a powerful advocate on her own behalf.'
"For two more years, there were surgeries and chemotherapies. In 1999, she again thought herself free. But it was relentless. Over the next year, her symptoms worsened.
"In August, 2000, Menya and her husband contacted the Hospice Palliative Care Network in Toronto to learn about available services.
"'Menya hated the word "palliative",' her father writes. 'To her, it meant failure and surrender. She was willing to accept some of the services they could provide, but wouldn't allow the word to be spoken in her presence."'
"It's a word, her father tells us, that entered the English language in the 15th century; a word considered to be synonymous with compassion. The word 'hospice' didn't enter the language until the end of the 19th century."
"It was to Trinity Home Hospice that Menya's inquiries eventually led. Trinity had grown out of an informal initiative in Toronto in the mid-1980s, when men and women from the congregation rallied around a friend, a single woman who had no family but wanted to die at home.
"Writer June Callwood has told that story in her book, Twelve Weeks In Spring . She has also written an introduction to Wolfe's.
"'It is not only the very sick person who is the recipient of the spiritual peace which intermittently accompanies skilled and generous palliative care,' she says. 'Caregivers find themselves deeply and forever changed in ways that sweeten all other relationships.'
"Wolfe tells the story of his daughter's final months through the diaries of her team caregivers. It's plain, in their chronicling of Menya's anger, pain and frustration (not to mention her insistence on being in charge), that 'sweetened' relationships are not easily won.
"Still, her dying was a celebration of her life, at times marked by song and laughter. And her gift to those who helped her was at least as great as what they gave her.
"A week before Menya's death, her father wrote in the journal of what the experience meant to those around her.
"'Some of us were rehearsing our own deaths, or making up for deaths past, when we felt we hadn't done enough. In caring for Menya, we were working on ourselves. The emptiness of so much of life makes us hunger for meaning and for meaningful things to do.'
"There is, along with a father's love and sorrow, the wisdom of the ages in Morris Wolfe's book.
"It was Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, in her landmark On Death And Dying , who said that, for the patient, 'death itself is not the problem, but dying is feared because of the accompanying sense of hopelessness, helplessness and isolation.'
"And it was Abraham Heschel, in whose work I first learned of the three levels of mourning, who said: 'The deepest wisdom man can attain is to learn that man's destiny is to aid, to serve.'
"In Menya's story, in her father's telling of it, destiny was served. Menya, An End Of Life Story is published by grubstreet books. A share of the proceeds from its sale will be donated to Trinity Home Hospice. It is available through the Internet at http://www.grubstreetbooks.ca/menya ."16