By Catherine Litt
Daily News Staff Reporter
(originally published April 20, 2009)
He was nervous; there was no getting around it. Ron Kopytko knew this moment was coming for days and had gone over it a million times in his head, sorting out all the steps, playing out every possible angle.
In the fantasy run-through in his mind, he pictured how the emcee that night would say a few words before introducing him to the crowd, how 300 pairs of eyes would land on him as he stood there on the stage.
He would read his speech and charm them, insert a couple of jokes off the top to lighten the mood, flash that killer smile of his. Then, calmly and purposefully, he would tell the crowded ballroom at the Delta Grand Okanagan Resort in Kelowna how a young man like him was dying of prostate cancer.
It would all go well, Ron figured, if he could just get a handle on those nerves.
“You’ll be fine,” said Aidan Cole, a Canadian Cancer Society worker who had helped him rehearse his speech earlier that day.
“Just be yourself. You’re great, your story is amazing; just tell it how you want.”
It had been almost three years since Ron Kopytko’s story began.
Most medical professionals working in the cancer field in B.C. — indeed, many patients, too — had heard about the young father in Kamloops diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer.
His saga had been well publicized through a series of feature articles in the local newspaper. His ongoing journey with cancer had been read and shared not only in his own community but throughout the Internet where the first five chapters of the series continued to reach a global audience. The Kopytko story was heartbreaking, there was no other way to describe it, and it pulled people in.
It wasn’t so much about the cancer – people die of the disease all the time – as it was about larger, universal themes of life and death. Cancer reaches into families, exacting its price without rhyme or reason, without explanation or prejudice, leaving those in its wake to wonder the most niggling of questions: whether there is a destiny that shapes ours lives or whether cancer is simply a matter of chance, no more predestined than a paper cut or a stubbed toe.
“I’ve wondered ‘why’ or ‘how’ many times,” admitted Ron. “Why me? What have I done to deserve this?”
He was only 39 at the time of his diagnosis.
Maybe it was the thought of his children losing their father too soon, the thought of a family having to struggle with the unfairness of it all, but people didn’t have to live his tragedy to feel it. In Ron, men saw themselves. In his wife Leann, they saw their own wives. In his children, they saw their young families.
And so everywhere Ron went, and as each installment of the series was published, strangers would stop him and thank him for being brave enough to tell his story. Men asked their doctors for PSA tests and prostate exams.
“Maybe some good comes of it, talking about prevention,” thought Ron.
He began to think maybe there was a greater purpose to all of this, all that he was going through. There had to be.
The summer of 2008 was, in many ways, Ron’s best since the diagnosis.
He’d been told in June his cancer had slowed – enough so that he was “in as close to remission as possible,” as oncologist Chris Coppin put it,
It had been 18 months since he’d learned he was dying of advanced prostate cancer and by all accounts he should have been gone by June ‘08. His team of doctors had all declared remission an impossibility. Death, they had told him, was 12, maybe 18, months in. So Ron had spent the first year of his diagnosis preparing for the end; putting his affairs in order; accepting his fate.
Now he had extra time. After so many months courting death, he was, if only temporarily, courting life again.
Still, that summer, Ron’s body felt as though the cancer hadn’t disappeared at all. Some mornings the pain in his ribs and back was so bad he couldn’t get out of bed without Leann’s help. Pain came and went, came and went, a persistent reminder he was sick.
Only on visits to Sitivana Birken Forest Monastery did the worries of the world fade away. His wife had introduced him to the Buddhist monastery shortly after his diagnosis and it continued to play an increasingly important role as his illness progressed.
Ron loved the monastery and he would go often, minding little the rough drive to get there. Birken was about an hour’s ride south of Kamloops, half of which was spent off the main highway on a narrow, winding gravel road and then a narrower, muddy logging trail that dipped and climbed precariously for seven kilometres.
For a man in pain, it was an unpleasant trek, but those visits had become too important to Ron to miss – particularly his meetings with the monastery’s abbot, Ajahn Sona.
If anyone had helped Ron face death and make sense of what was happening to him, it had been the abbot.
“When you think of what kind of special advice to give to a dying person,” said the monk, “it’s exactly the same advice you give to a living person, because living and dying are two sides of the same coin.
The monastery was a serene place, both inside and out, a good place to find answers. It had a large meditation room with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over a vast landscape of trees and hilltops. In the basement, visitors seeking peace and solace walked back and forth along marked meditation pathways as they sorted through whatever thoughts tangled their minds.
Behind those pathways was another set of painted lines on the floor, a special walking meditation area for the monks. Ajahn Sona spent hours there each day, meditating on many things but particularly on four photographs on a mantle at one end of the path – photos of people who faced illness. Ron’s picture was among them.
“I just radiate, every day, meta,” said the abbot, “loving kindness. That’s my kind of radiation therapy.”
Upstairs, in what was known informally as the monks’ room, Ajan Sona and Ron discussed life and death, love and fear, all the issues and emotions his cancer had forced to the surface.
“The first thing I get people to understand is that nothing abnormal is happening. Everybody is dying. . . “ the monk would tell him. “The moment you are born you’re moving towards death. That’s your normal condition. We’re all moving towards that; what we don’t know is when.”
During long talks steeped in Buddhist philosophy and monastic faith, Ron and the spiritual leader discussed heady subjects of fate and destiny. If terminal prostate cancer wasn’t abnormal then what was Ron meant to learn from it? How was he meant to spend his remaining days, this gift of extra time?
Focus on the moral dimensions of your life, the abbot told him. Focus on the positive emotion of loving kindness and forget about this fear of dying.
“There isn’t going to be an experience called death,” he said.
“There’s no sense in preparing ‘not to be’ because it’s never going to happen, just by definition. Nonexistence is never experienced, not by religious doctrines but just by reason; we’ll never be in a position of nonexistence, so there’s no point in preparing for that.”
Death was a voyage, he said, and the only thing anyone could pack for that voyage was character.
In October of 2008, Ron sat in his living room, sipping coffee and sorting through the day’s mail.
There was a letter addressed to him from a woman in Quesnel.
Hi Ron,
I came across your articles online. I hope this letter finds you in good health . . . .
He didn’t think much of it at first; he was accustomed to getting the occasional letter or phone call from a stranger wishing him well.
But as Ron read on, it became clear this was no ordinary letter.
She told him her name. She was 30 years old; married with two children; they all lived in Quesnel; she had a 34-year-old brother there, too.
Then she dropped a bombshell: she mentioned her father’s name.
I believe that makes us half-siblings.
Ron’s biological father had been out of his life since he was a toddler. He knew he lived somewhere in B.C. but was unaware his father had remarried and, until that letter arrived, had no idea he had a half-sister and a half-brother.
But Ron’s sister knew there was a son from a previous relationship and she had searched for Ron for years, not learning until recently his last name. When she found his stories on the Internet, she decided there was no time to waste; they had to meet.
A few days ago, Ron scrolled through some photographs he hadn’t yet uploaded from his digital camera. He stopped on a picture of Ron and his sister, standing side by side and smiling.
“That’s us together,” he said.
“My son says we have the same nose.”
Meeting his sister got him thinking about things, about life and how strange it can be sometimes. Here he is dying of cancer and he learns he has other siblings. Imagine that.
Maybe this was part of the greater purpose to his cancer? he wondered.
“Maybe, on some level, it’s a way of putting all these pieces together in my life before I die.”
After all, he’d hoped these months of pain and struggle held a greater purpose than just pain and struggle. There had to be some larger meaning to it. Had to be.
But how could a person ever know? The doctors continued to tell him they didn’t know why he was still alive. Sometime he wondered the same thing.
By March 2009, Ron’s PSA was climbing again.
He was out of remission and back on familiar turf, the reprieve over.
Two tests within 10 days confirmed it. The amount of prostate specific antigen in his blood stream had climbed from 2.5 to 3.2.
“The reality is I probably will die from this disease,” said Ron. “I’ve already lived longer than they said I would.”
The ballroom at the Delta Grand Okanagan Resort was packed on the night of April 11, the largest crowd in the five-year history of the Canadian Cancer Society’s Gala of Hope.
It was a major fundraiser and 330 people came from all over the Okanagan to attend, dressed in tuxedos and gowns.
Ron got a call a few days earlier, asking if he’d be a guest speaker. They’d heard about his situation and thought he could talk about the importance of early detection. He was eager. After all, it was the reason he’d gone public in the first place, getting men to go to their doctors.
He was nervous that night, for sure. Staring out at the ballroom, beyond the bright lights, he could see the faint images of faces staring back at him.
Ron reached into the breast pocket of his rented tuxedo pulled out two type-written sheets of folded paper.
“Like the men in the video we just watched,” he began, “I have never given a whole lot of thought to my prostate either. I should have.”
Ron went on to explain his story, how in October of 2006 he’d been given a death sentence and how he’d so far managed to survive it.
“Tonight, I’m 42 and, as my beautiful wife said, I’m looking pretty good in this tux. If you passed me on the street, you wouldn’t know I had cancer.”
But the fact was he did have cancer, and his rapidly rising PSA meant it was getting more aggressive.
“I will die from this disease,” he told the audience.
“Although I have lived longer than they had expected, I will not will this battle.”
What he wanted that night was for the audience to get the point. He could have soft-shoed the part about dying, maybe talked a little more about hope and faith and of conquering a monster. Said what he thought people wanted to hear. But that only avoided the message he’d been trying to give all along: take control of your health; see your doctor; get checked before it’s too late.
Back at his home in Kamloops a week later, Ron thought about the gala. He thought about the people who came up to him afterward and urged him to hang on to hope. Don’t say you will die from this disease; there’s always hope.
He understood their concern. He hadn’t abandoned hope, by any means, but he was realistic. In another two months he would probably start chemotherapy again. In his heart he really didn’t believe this was the end but he wasn’t the same man he was a year ago; his outlook had changed, subtly but significantly.
Conversations a year ago rarely mentioned death. Now Ron was inserting the word into speeches.
“By wording it and saying ‘I am going to die from this disease’ or ‘I will not beat it’ it kind of drives the point home; it makes it real,” he said.
“I feel that I have to say that on some level but at the same time I’m not giving up.”
Posted on April 29, 2009
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