Mary Lundeen
Obituaries
Eagle Valley Enterprise page 17 - August 18, 1983
Mary Lundeen died a courageous death.
Her doctors diagnosed the 17-year-old's condition as leukemia. What made the news more difficult was the Mary Lundeen's mother lost her life to cancer just two months earlier. A few months after the diagnosis, Mary died.
"It seemed like she had no fear, and that's really amazing to me," her father remarked.
Mary's nightmarish ordeal began with chemotherapy, which slowed the cancer's growth, but caused her to vomit and lose her hair. For a while, she tried wearing uncomfortable wigs to school. One day she courageously stood up in class, removed the hairpiece and said, "This is what I look like without the wig." From that day on, the wig stayed off. She wore scarves and looked pretty even without her hair.
Then came immunotherapy which left red marks and scars. Then skull irradiation. Then a bone marrow transplant, a process requiring extreme chemotherapy and irradiation to destroy her own bone marrow. Her brother, Joe, donated healthy marrow for the transplant. The procedure left Mary with a mouth which looked like a scab, so sore she could hardly talk or swallow for months, and an abscess on the thigh requiring surgery.
Yet courage never strayed too far from Mary Lundeen. She joked with the nurses by wrapping a blue scarf over her afflicted mouth because the nursing staff all wore blue surgical masks.
Finally, the dreaded news came--her disease could not be cured. She would live only a short time.
But courageously she lived. Her doctor exclaimed, "She faced death with dignity more than anybody I have ever seen. It was a joy to be around her. It's a remarkable thing for someone to go through, what Mary went through and still manifest that quality."
Though sick, she visited children with leukemia throughout the hospital.
Though ill, she dressed up and took Halloween candy to patients in a nearby children's hospital.
Through dying, she remained courageous.
Informed that she might have two weeks left, at first she felt down. Then she bounced back and said that she wanted to go to Hawaii and get married, but wondered how to find someone in two weeks.
It was at her own home in Arvada, Colo. that Mary left this life.
"It's too bad you have to die to realize how much your friends mean to you." she lamented shortly before death.
One of her friends spoke up, "No Mary. You lived."
If it can be said that Mary lived those last few months, then the reason is because she found the courage to face death with dignity. And in courageously facing death, she somehow found life.
