Faith, Hope and Love

They buried Patricia Hall on Thursday in the Spanish Lace casket she picked out nine months ago -- the one with dainty roses embroidered onto a lavender bedding.

Her casket offered a full viewing to show off her legs and the classy cream dress she'd chosen. Her lips were painted crimson red to match her long nails, all just the way she planned.

She picked the casket and a vault in August, a month after she learned that she had an especially vicious kind of cancer. She told her pastor exactly what she wanted her funeral to be like -- a real praise party. And no tears.

Except for the tears, that's what it was.

Her journey seemed much longer than the 10 months that had passed since Dr. Allan Rashford walked into her hospital room, sat down beside her and told her she had a cancer that would kill her.

He pulled out a piece of paper.

"Do you have fate?" he asked, and wrote F-A-T-E.

"Or, do you have faith?" and wrote F-A-I-T-H.

They prayed.

She just didn't imagine it would be when she was 38.

Rashford sent her to an oncologist, Dr. David Ellison, who explained the cancer was born in her pancreas and had spread to her liver. It couldn't be removed surgically, and radiation wasn't an option.

The doctor's tool bag held few tools, only chemotherapy that might keep the cancer from growing for a while and experimental drugs that didn't offer much hope.

At a time when cancer is prominent in medical headlines, pancreatic cancer is a small player. It accounts for fewer than 3 percent of cancers -- but it is among the most deadly.--

It rarely causes symptoms until it's too late. Patricia's husband, Thomas, brought her to the hospital after she collapsed, out of breath from climbing some stairs -- certainly nothing to make her expect this.

As she struggled to absorb Ellison's words, she asked the only question on her mind: "How long will I live?"

On average, a person with this stage of pancreatic cancer lives eight to 10 months.

Half of her fake nails have fallen off. She doesn't care. She wears a scarf on her head, but not because her hair is falling out. She just doesn't want to bother with it.

She's making funeral plans.

Barely a month after her diagnosis, she has already talked to her preacher: "Don't do one of those sad funerals," she warns. "I want it to be jammin'!"

She drags a girlfriend to Harleston-Boags Funeral Home, where she picks out the Spanish Lace model. She likes how it is a little more lavender than pink.

This is one part of her life Patricia still can control. And she doesn't want Thomas burdened with funeral planning.

"I worry about this one," she says, poking a finger toward Thomas, who's scooting eggs around a skillet.

"I don't want you to have that on your mind," she says.

"You want salt and pepper?" Thomas asks.

"We've all gotta die sometime," she says.

A week later, Thomas pores over the morning newspaper in the funeral home's office. Patricia ties up loose ends with Chardale Murray, the apprentice funeral director.

When her body is prepared, she wants her own beautician to perm her short black hair, her own manicurist to paint her trademark talons and her stocky body garbed in the simple dress she's already chosen.

Patricia ticks down a list of details as if planning a wedding.

Oh, she remembers, she'll need two limousines for family members.

"Y'all gonna have to do the driving," Patricia teases. "I'll just be..." and sticks her legs and arms straight out, laughing.

Murray casts her a funny look.

Thomas keeps reading.

Patricia has been pestering him to handle his own funeral plans now, too. Might as well, while they're here.

The trio heads upstairs to look at vaults. Patricia wants a cheaper one.

"This is too pretty to put in the ground," she says. "See what I'm saying?" She opts for a more basic silver and gray model.

Thomas wanders off silently.

As happens more often these days, Patricia's legs hurt, so she plunks down behind a desk and flips through a casket catalog.

She stops at a $30,000 model, a solid gold one with royal blue or red bedding.

"You gotta be Puff Daddy or Donald Trump to be buried in that! God won't see none of that." She laughs. "I can see my family now: 'Who does that child think she is?'"

Thomas walks up. Off-handedly, he mentions he likes the Ocean Blue model for himself. It's a simple, elegant model with a cross.

"You want a full couch?" Patricia asks.

"Half is fine."

"You ain't vain like me. Are you gonna handle it today?"

"I reckon so."

And she wants lots of children.

She and Thomas tried to have a baby of their own, but her injuries from a car wreck a decade ago that made it impossible.

In December 1999, they tried in-vitro fertilization. From a file she pulls out a picture of the microscopic embryos she calls "my four babies."

They didn't implant. If they had, she'd be eight months pregnant today.

Maybe God figured she couldn't handle it now.

"I love children so much," she says. "I want someone to say, 'Ma, he hit me!'"

Despite the cancer, she hasn't given up on that dream. Patricia was adopted, and now she wants to adopt a baby. So does Thomas. She wonders if anyone will let her.

"I'm not going to believe I have eight to 10 months. I've got longer than that," she declares.

Besides, if she does die soon, "they'll have a great father and a huge family and be spoiled to death."

Patricia and Thomas arrive this Thursday as they have for two months now. Waiting in an exam room, they chat about houses they looked at that morning.

"God said that it's time for us to get a house," Patricia explains. "I'm tired of living in apartments, wasting money."

It's two months after her diagnosis, and they're waiting for Ellison to make official what Patricia learned over the telephone just hours earlier -- news that left her in tears and promising, "I'm gonna give God some praise."

The oncologist, a studious-looking man, walks in reading Patricia's file and sits down. He glances over the result of her CT scan from two days earlier.

"Your scan has shown some improvement, especially in the liver," he says.

"I thank God for that," she answers calmly.

Since it's working, she will stay on the chemotherapy.

"I know we have to be real here, and things can change. Even with the Gemzar, can it still metastasize?" she asks.

It already has, he reminds her. But the largest tumor in her liver has shrunk by half, and her pancreas has improved slightly.

What Patricia really wants to know is whether it will spread more -- and, mostly, whether she'll live longer.

But she doesn't ask, and Ellison doesn't offer.

Instead, Patricia tells him she's applied for disability benefits and has quit her job as a hotel sales agent. When she applied for benefits, the woman who helped her promised to speed her application "because of the nature of your illness."

"I'm not dead yet," Patricia replied.

When Thomas gives her a noogie, more falls out. Soon, it covers her pillow and clogs the shower drain.

A few days later, Thomas looks at her and laughs, "There's no help for this."

It was time to shave her head.

"I had to cut it," she says. "Child, it was looking like Fire Marshal Bill."

She's used to wearing her hair short "but not looking like one of the fellas!"

One day, her mother came in a vision and warned her to find God. "I wasn't being fed,' she recalls.

She joined Thomas at his church, today called The Life Center of Charleston but then named AME Zion Abundant Life Tabernacle. That's where she met Pastor Brian Moore, a man she calls "our shepherd."

Moore has this way of preaching reality, of preaching to what his people are going through. Patricia chuckles every time he starts out with, "The fact of the matter is..."

The pastor also was close to Thomas, a gentle bear of a man who worked so hard at church that Patricia and Moore took him off its board to protect his health.

That's why Thomas, who ponders going into the ministry himself, delights in bringing Patricia back. The pastor just grins widely when asked about her return. "When she came back, she came BACK!"

Patricia attended The Life Center's three-hour services faithfully and sang in the choir until she became too weak. She plans to rejoin when her strength comes back. She'll stand in the back using a cane.

You see, theirs isn't a sit-down kind of church.

The church is packed by the time Thomas eases their Camaro into the congested parking lot. Despite the muggy morning, Patricia wears a long dress with brilliant African oranges and reds.

Unsmiling, she rises slowly and, with Thomas holding her arm, trudges up the steps. Once she's in the door, Patricia is enveloped in hugs and kisses.

She sits on the front pew clinging to a white hand towel and tissues. From here, she can make an easy escape when the service takes its toll.

"Praise the Lord everybody!" a woman hollers from the pulpit.

A cacophony erupts, a thunder of clapping and dancing and singing that shakes the pews, that's way too loud to shout over.

Patricia stays sitting. In time, she claps a bit.

She clutches her Bible and a white program. Inside, on the prayer list, are two names. The first one: Sister Patricia Hall.

As the congregation rejoices, the heat outside mixes with the rhythmic frenzy inside. It's downright hot, and a woman passes Patricia a plastic fan with the funeral home's name on it.

The church belts out, "I Love You, Lord," and Patricia closes her eyes. She may be jamming inside, but her body ain't grooving this Sunday.

Pastor Moore steps to the podium. "There's one person who will never leave me or forsake me. His name is Jesus!"

Patricia raises one hand, and the tears come.

Moore asks how the Lord has blessed each person today.

"He woke me up," Patricia whispers to herself.

A woman stands to tell how God blessed her with triplets that she believes represent the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The church erupts in cheers. Patricia looks down and Thomas pats her forehead with a small towel.

He stands, and a woman in a white nurse's uniform walks to his side. They lead Patricia down a hall behind the pulpit and into a small room with a bed. This is where she hears the sermons as they echo almost inaudibly down the hall.

She grimaces and pants as she lies down. The nurse wraps a blood pressure cuff around one arm. "Are you just tired?" the nurse asks, jotting down notes on the back of a receipt.

Patricia lies motionless, eyes closed, breathing slowed. The stuffy, barren room feels oddly still and quiet.

Thomas grabs her hand, and a single tear slides down her cheek.

Another nurse arrives to check Patricia's faint pulse.

It's dropping.

A nurse turns to Thomas, "Do you want to go to Roper?"

"I'm always weak, but never this weak," she mumbles.

At the sight of a needle, Patricia cringes and puts a hand over her face. She yelps when a nurse sticks her.

"That's the last time they're going to stick me!" she yells to Thomas. "Take me home. It's the last time."

Minutes later, she glares mockingly at nurse Steve Wilson when he mentions the needle's size.

"She's laughing now," Wilson grins.

She doesn't feel it when he sticks her again. "Y'all getting better," she says."

She warns him that her veins can roll but grins when he finds "a big, fat, juicy one" and pokes into the blood vessel on the first try.

"Thank you, Lord," Patricia says.

Ellison arrives before long and assures Patricia this episode probably is nothing. Turns out, she didn't eat breakfast because her stomach was queasy.

"You weren't quite up for what you tried to do today," he says, gently warning her to rest more.

In a few hours, she's back home with Thomas tucking her into bed.

She also reads the Bible each day, along with her favorite books about Queen Elizabeth, "a true bitch -- my kind of woman!"

She fusses at Thomas, mostly to get out of the house while he has time off from his job supervising bridge construction.

She stews. Is her doctor giving her all the information? She frets. Why doesn't pancreatic cancer get more attention? About Congress, she seethes, "they're too busy worrying about who's sleeping with who."

And she prays -- mostly for an end to chemotherapy next month if her scan shows improvement. Maybe she'll get back to the gym.

In several weeks, she plans to return to work part-time.

As her first day back at work approaches, she walks on her own, earrings dangling, fussing that her left leg is sore from cruising in her stick-shift car.

"I don't need my wheelchair!" she declares.

Patricia arrives this early November morning with her wig on, swollen feet tucked inside white lace pantyhose and baby blue satin slippers. She's happy. She returned to work yesterday and relished the hero's welcome.

She messes with the nurses, shivering dramatically at the thought of looking in a mirror, complaining that chemo is causing her to break out in bumps. "I look like a leopard, a Dalmatian!"

And she complains how her body's scent has changed. She knows the smell - when an aunt was on chemotherapy, Patricia always noticed it. "I thought, 'Oh Lord, here we go.'"

Finally, her moment comes with Ellison.

Again, her scan has shown improvement.

"We just don't want to see growth," Ellison says.

This time she asks: Will she live longer?

"Probably."

"Thank you, Jesus."

She arrived on a Saturday, got a morphine drip and didn't wake until the next Monday. She could hit the morphine pump every 10 minutes. And she did.

A tumor had grown at the intersection of her bile duct, pancreas and bowel. It's too big, in too precarious a place to remove without killing her.

As December arrives, Patricia sits in her fifth-floor room at Roper, the midday light streaming in as she watches the "Teletubbies." It's an episode she's already seen.

Thomas leaves only for a few hours each day for work. He nudges her to eat and drink. It's ticking her off.

After he leaves, she explodes.

"I am not going to kill myself to fill my stomach for you or nobody else. No way!"

They've been stuck in a hospital room together for two weeks now.

"I don't need you here, bye!" she hollers after he's gone. "I just need you here for major decisions."

Six months after her diagnosis, they don't talk much about the reality of this cancer. It's hard with nurses and doctors coming and going, the phone ringing. Their frustration sparks in tiffs, not deeper fights.

She complains about the lack of help for couples going through this.

"I've always been a person who's got to be real. Now he's not being real," she says, breaking down in tears. "I love him too much."

She thinks for a moment.

"To tell you the truth, I don't know what's going on with him, if he's scared or what."

Thomas desperately wants to protect her, to take the cancer away.

"But it doesn't work that way. This ain't Star Trek," she says.

She winces and hits the morphine button.

She and Thomas spend Christmas alone together in her room. He gives her a new wedding ring, they watch TV.

On New Year's Day a girlfriend stops by, and they watch the Outback Bowl. Patricia cheers when USC, her team, wins.

When she finally goes home in late January, she weighs 159 pounds, down from more than 200. Her pants fall to her knees one day. She cries and cries and falls to the floor. She'd wanted to lose weight, but not like this.

When she picks herself up, she thinks, "I'm mad now. I'm ready for this to stop."

Three months have passed since she was able to attend church. Instead, she prays a lot. "I thank Him for life every day -- but I'd like him to cure me. I want my life back."

She also prays for what she never imagined she would -- to go back on chemotherapy. Ellison took her off the drugs to salvage her strength in the hospital.

Each day, Thomas counts how many days have passed without chemo, days he imagines the tumors thrive untreated: 73, 74, 75...

And gone is her hair scarf. Her curly hair has sprouted again. Also tucked away is her wheelchair.

She's back at home, surrounded by new furniture -- an Oriental rug, mahogany table, mauve recliner.

Bent over slightly, she steps gingerly toward the couch. The pressure of food or gas as it passes by the tumor near her bowel throbs painfully.

But she'll make it to that couch. Pastor Moore is coming.

She last saw him on her 38th birthday more than a month ago, when she finally was able to return to church. She felt better then.

While she waits, she flips through TV channels, anxious because Moore is late. Outside, a furious spring rainstorm pounds.

He arrives dapper as always. He sits down beside Patricia and asks how long it's been since her diagnosis. She counts out loud on her fingers. Almost nine months.

Smack in the middle of Ellison's estimate in the beginning.

"We've seen miracles take place," Moore assures her. "But whatever is God's will, we accept it."

Patricia says she feels the Lord come into her home now, the way she used to feel only at church. She talks out loud when He arrives.

Sometimes they fight and she cries. But then she feels better.

The pastor recalls his grandmother, who died several years ago after struggling with an illness. He was angry with God for not healing her despite his most fervent prayers.

Then he heard a message: "I did heal her."

Patricia feels so close to the Lord these days that she declares she's not worried about her scan next week.

"God is going to heal me."

Patricia has hit the end stage of this disease.

After hearing the news, she can't talk, can't discuss losing such an important battle.

"I'm sorry," she mumbles weakly. "My brain's not working."

She spends the next weekend enduring back pain so severe that even the opium derivative patches barely help. She sleeps for short stints, sitting up, legs crossed Indian style.

"It's different this time," Thomas says quietly, struggling to explain how.

She shakes and rocks and carries on, the pain is so bad.

Aftr six bleary days, Thomas helps her off the toilet -- and notices the blood.

"I'd have noticed yesterday, if I'd have looked," he says with a pang of guilt. He'd been trying to protect her dignity.

By the time they reach Roper, the nurses can hardly feel Patricia's pulse.

A day later, Patricia is downright irritable. Her ailing liver is causing her stomach to balloon, pulling the skin drum-tight. Just one thing is on her mind: Get this swelling down.

"I have no idea what's going on," she grumbles. "I want them to fix everything, and then we'll talk about details."

She slept three hours the night before, better than in recent days. But that doesn't cut it. "I want my eight hours back -- eight wonderful, glorious, peaceful hours."

Going for so long without sleep has forced her to think, to pray, to search her soul about what's ahead. She describes the peace she'll find "in the bosom of the Lord."

"I'm not going to fight the situation by keeping it in my head that I'm not going to die, I'm not going to die," she says. "I've got to be real. We're all going to die sometime."

But she adds quickly, "I'm not going to quit either."

There's so much to fight for.

Her wedding anniversary is coming in a few weeks. This year, it falls on Easter, and Patricia hopes to attend the Sunday service, to refuel her soul in the hope of Jesus' resurrection.

But mostly, she wants to celebrate 18 years married to Thomas. "God picked him for me," she says quietly.

They met at a college dance 20 years ago. He kept tugging at her long hair, and she liked his persistence. They eloped two years later. "Boy, my mamma was upset," she recalls.

Thomas became the sort of husband who took her to look at caskets because that's what she wanted, who rubs her back at every request, who cooks her meals, helps her bathe and held her hand during endless hours of chemotherapy.

"We've been getting on each other's nerves a long time," she laughs before turning serious.

"We've been to hell and back."

A week into her stay, the room has taken on a look of home, with his shaving cream on a counter, his suit hanging in the closet.

They pass the time dreaming about the house they've found, with its four bedrooms and 3.5 baths. He figures they're about 10 days from buying it. It's prefabricated, so they're waiting for a Realtor friend to find land in the country.

Patricia wants to add an enclosed sunroom with a Jacuzzi for her back and a fenced area for her dog.

Upbeat as the conversation is, she wears a weary grimace and rubs her swollen belly, fixated on it like a pregnant woman. Her face has shrunk to an unhealthy gauntness; her teeth and eyes look strangely big.

But the old Patricia still pops out when the haze of pain medicine wears off.

Nurse Kimberly Capers walks in, and Patricia glares at her. "You can't have no blood," Patricia declares.

The nurse needs her to sit up. Thomas helps, and Patricia hollers when they set her down. "Y'all meant to do that," she teases.

Her room has become a hangout for the unit's staff, and it soon fills with several of her favorites. As they joke around, Patricia suddenly needs to use the bathroom.

There's blood again. GOOD AND BAD DEATHS
Patricia watched her father succumb to cancer, hooked up to machines in a hospital, dependent on a morphine drip.

He died at midnight the day after Hurricane Hugo. Patricia wasn't at his side. She was stranded at home without a telephone.

A year later, she watched her mother die a different sort of death. At 81, her mother suffered a bedsore in the hospital. She had a colostomy and a feeding tube.

Patricia took her home to die. It was comforting and peaceful.

That's how she wants to go.

She clutches a gray button that summons a pain medication that keeps her comfortable, but lethargic. Most of her days are spent asleep now, her mouth hanging open, eyes half closed. Thomas gently lowers her eyelids so it doesn't look so eerie.

He rubs her swollen feet and softly says, "I want to see her skinny little legs again."

It's a rare moment when his sorrow emerges. Thomas has spent a lifetime taking care of sick family members. He's learned to stuff his feelings down deep, to look composed when people are around. "I seem like it, but I ain't," he admits.

When the hurt grows too strong, he drives to a quiet place like the patch of trees at Brittlebank Park, a place where he won't bother anyone when he hollers to get it out.

But Thomas is a devout man, and he finds hope in visions from God.

He's seen too many of Patricia's visions come true, like the one where she saw a friend's pregnancy before anyone else knew.

He especially believes in the vision Patricia had where they lived in a country house with a black truck and matching Mercedes. He bought a new truck in November. From the hospital room, he works out financial details to buy the house.

Patricia also had a vision of their church's new building. She saw lots of purple and big mahogany doors. Thomas believes she'll see the new building, even though the church hasn't broken ground on it yet.

Thomas has never had as many visions as Patricia. But he had one recently.

He was standing at the pastor's podium giving his first sermon. Afterward, he and Patricia strolled outside together.

Someday he will preach. And he believes Patricia will be with him.

Such simple words from Ellison the next morning, they were the ones Thomas was waiting for before he lost hope.

"I just wanted to hear it," he says. "It's out of the doctor's hands. It's with a higher power now."

Patricia might live another week, not more than a month.

After Ellison leaves, Thomas lies on the bed beside Patricia and cries. Patricia spends the day writhing in pain.

That evening, Thomas drives to their North Charleston apartment to check the mail and phone messages. On the drive back to Roper, he hollers in his truck where nobody can hear him.

But soon Pastor Moore and an endless stream of church family arrive to pray and sing and read Scripture. A half-dozen ministers and church family circle Patricia's bed, holding hands, their voices rising in soulful harmony as Patricia mouths, "Oh, Lord."

The next morning, Thomas sits alone with her as she sleeps fitfully, waking every few minutes to moan or flail in pain. Each time, Thomas hits the pain pump button to bring her relief. She stopped eating on Palm Sunday, three days earlier.

"You're more spirit than flesh now," Thomas whispers gently. "If it's time for you to go, it's OK with me."

Thomas was sitting on the foot of her bed, reading a letter from her cousin. His prayer partner had stayed the night and sat in a chair beside him.

For some reason, Thomas looked up and saw Patricia take two last breaths. Then she was gone.

It was peaceful, the way she wanted.

"She got her healing. I know where she's at," Thomas said several minutes later.

At her wake, mourners streamed by to see Patricia in the casket and the dress and the jewelry she picked out last summer.

Thomas rose with his family to circle her body. As the tears flowed, he looked heavenward, his words drowned out by the song of praise and clapping around him. He leaned over, kissed her forehead once and slowly closed the casket.

Patricia didn't want a sad farewell.

She didn't get one.

At her funeral Thursday morning, the choir she loved rose and belted out, "We've come to give you all the praise and glory!"

The sanctuary erupted. People swayed. Sang. Clapped. Arms waved.

Finally, through the tears, even Thomas rose, arms high in the air, grooving his praise. Just the way she wanted.

Jennifer Berry Hawes is a feature writer at The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., where for the past three years she and another writer have shared a job to balance roles as mother and reporter. Before that, Jennifer spent four years covering healthcare. Her husband, Alan, is a photographer at the newspaper and a two-time S.C. Photographer of the Year. They often work on projects together, including this story.