Remembering Mena 5 years later

I'm sharing this note to honor the memory of someone I never knew but has impacted my life 5 years after her passing. I think this website is an amazing, living, dynamic monument to the human spirit. The beauty of the internet is that it lasts forever and makes a difference in the lives of people both with cancer and without cancer years down the road.

I do not have cancer. I am a 53 year old woman doing a random, shot in the dark google search last night on "how to get my mojo back" due to menopausal challenges. I was just looking for any spark of help that might be on out there. The first search result on the google search was Mena's message board thread with that exact same title. I clicked on it and got hooked. It was a thread with hundreds of pages, and I felt like I got to know Mena by reading it. I totally got her sense of humor, her positive attitude, her desire to help others, her love for her family and her fellow "sisters." I felt like she was someone I could really relate to and I liked her so much and it's evident that so many others on this site felt the same way.

As I kept reading into the wee hours of the morning, I learned that her once loving and understanding husband had left her for another woman about a year after her original Mojo post, during this terrible struggle she was enduring, while she was valiantly trying to keep their sex life alive. Then I learned that a couple years after that, her daughter tragically died at only 13 years old. I was sitting at my computer crying, wanting to reach out to this stranger on the internet. Then I learned that she lost her struggle with cancer in 2009. I felt like I had lost a friend.

I have been thinking about Mena again today, trying to find the lesson and the meaning in all of this. I think it's that we're all going to die of something and none of us knows when the bell will toll for us -- whether we currently have cancer or not. We're all subject to the whims of fate, getting seriously ill, having a husband who leaves us, suffering the tragedy of the loss of a child. Poor Mena suffered all three but even with those terrible cards all being dealt to her at once, she still had such an amazing soul that made everyone care so much about her here.

She was totally open with her struggles, her pain, her good days and her bad days, always authentic. That's the lesson for every human being -- be that special spirit that makes others want to be like you -- not in a frozen smile, fake sort of way, but in a totally honest way. I'm going to try to be like Mena today and will remind myself of that every morning.

Best wishes to everyone here!