Their blogs chronicled love and loss

Their blogs chronicled love and loss
Wife, husband each shared saga of her lung cancer death
By Matthew T. Hall, SAND DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
Sunday, August 15, 2010 at 8 p.m.

By her 52nd birthday, Sheila Wheatley had nearly run out of wishes.

She wanted to stay at a beach bungalow with her husband, watch the sunset, restore order through Sudoku. She wanted to wear shiny gold earrings and not be tired. So on Sept. 10, she and Ken Wheatley checked into the Hotel del Coronado.

The next day, on her birthday, they checked into the ER. She ate cake in the hospital. A friend brought her a kite and ocean water.

Sheila Wheatley did not smoke. She ate healthy and played tennis. She had no family history of the disease.

Within days of the hospitalization, she could no longer speak. She, who had wanted so much to win her fight against lung cancer that she shared the battles with family and friends in 103 blog posts over 20 months, could only communicate on paper now.

In the small hours of Sept. 14, a day before she died, her wants were down to one. She wanted to hear her husband’s voice.

“Tell me a story,” she said.

He told her theirs.

It’s a story that survives on Ken Wheatley’s blog, where he mourns, reminisces and maps out the tennis tournament he organized in her name to raise money for lung cancer research.

“The planning for the tennis tournament is coming along,” he wrote July 23. “We’ve had our first players sign up. Only need 78 more. … I miss you, Sheila. Every day, several times a day, I wish you were here. Love you …”

Blogs about dying are nothing new. Patients use them to keep loved ones informed and to avoid a series of draining conversations. What made the Wheatleys unusual is that they both kept blogs.

“People became dependent on it,” Ken Wheatley said. “It was like a soap opera unfolding, but more importantly it was a love story that most people don’t experience.”

He and Sheila agreed not to read each other’s words during the treatment, though he has since read about 10 of her entries, starting with her last.

Nearly a year has passed since his wife’s death, but Wheatley, 56, an executive in charge of security at Sony Electronics, can’t steel himself to put her pink slippers, sneakers or favorite shoes out of sight. They’re still neatly lined up under the love seat in the hallway of their Ramona home.

He hasn’t moved her wig from the side of the bathtub or her clothes from the walk-in closet. He hasn’t removed the orange Post-it note he left inside her medicine cabinet — “Hello beautiful! Love you.” — or the reminder she left on the fridge to go to the store for half and half.

This is what he has done: He sold his Porsche and began driving her older BMW; it has three times as many miles but also has her mascara and her sour candies close enough to touch.

He merged their Netflix queues. Now he sees movies like “Tristan & Isolde,” films he would have watched only with her. At times like these, he picks up her urn and sets it on a table in front of the TV. He makes popcorn from scratch, the way they always did.

He’s also channeling his grief into the doubles tennis tournament.

The competition, open to anyone, will take place Sept. 18 at the La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad. He has never done anything like this and is a bit nervous about the slow pace of registrations. People who know better tell him the word will get out.

“I know that I have not cornered the market on grief,” Wheatley said. “I don’t want to be one of those people who mourn quietly about my wife and not take that and help others.”

At the same time, he’s seeing someone new. She’s helping with the tournament. She has been to his house.

“What woman would really tolerate coming into someone’s home and seeing all this?” Wheatley said, referring his wife’s pictures, jewelry, radiation positioning mask.

Yet Sandra Crane understands. She told him she lost someone too, 14 years ago, in a car accident. She told him she still keeps the man’s favorite braided ficus tree.

The Wheatleys’ story is online for all to read. Her account is at sheilawheatley.wordpress.com. His is at kenwheatley.wordpress.com.

“Ken is there to hold my hand and distract me,” Sheila Wheatley wrote on Feb. 1, 2008. “He is a tremendous comfort and support every step of the way. I worry about him shouldering so much.”

Her former oncologist at the UCSD Moores Cancer Center, Dr. Lyudmila Bazhenova, doesn’t know how many of her 200 to 300 patients keep blogs because her time with them is limited. But she knew about the Wheatleys’.

“It gives you 180 degrees, a different view, of how the patients look at you and look at the disease,” Bazhenova said.

Mike Stevens, state chairman of the Lung Cancer Alliance and a survivor for five years now, said technology has changed how people cope with cancer. They’re more likely to seek online support groups than in-person ones, although it’s still rare for patients to write blogs, Stevens said.

Lung cancer accounts for almost one-third of all cancer deaths. Many tire too easily and die too quickly to maintain a blog.

“Blogs for me or reading about people gets really hard to do,” Stevens said. “I get close to too many of these people and become friends and soon they’re gone.”

For the Wheatleys’ support network, the blogs were emotional but essential reading.

Darlene Budd, one of Sheila Wheatley’s 10 siblings, still reads her blog a couple of times each week.

“Since she’s been gone, I find it more comforting,” Budd said.

Monica Way Seitrich, who knew Wheatley since grade school at Saint John of the Cross in Lemon Grove, found that her friend’s blog freed up their conversations.

“When you were with her personally, you didn’t want to talk about that stuff,” Seitrich said. “You wanted to grab life.”

Wheatley’s blog kept you current on the treatments, Seitrich said. Her husband’s made you weep.

“I don’t want her to suffer,” Ken Wheatley wrote on June 23, 2009, a day after the couple’s first wedding anniversary. “I don’t want to lose her. We still have adventures to do.”

They were just business acquaintances at first.

When they met in 1992, he was a manager at Sony Electronics and she owned the vending machine company that served it. They began dating in January 2004. They had both been married before, he twice.

That first Valentine’s Day, she might have been happy with dinner and a movie. What she got was a 10-day Outward Bound trip in Big Bend National Park in western Texas. She carried a 75-pound pack over 20 miles, rappelled off 80-foot cliffs, slept in the open on the ground.

They did things together that neither would do alone.

The couple became engaged in June 2007 and were choosing a wedding location six months later when she was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. That gave her a 5 percent chance of living for five years.

They made do, made plans, made a life together.

They traveled around the world, slapped magnets on the fridge of every place they went. The mosaic remains, surrounding Sheila Wheatley's final grocery list.

That day, she wanted cherry Jell-O, Mott’s original apple sauce and chocolate instant breakfast.

She had been gone nine months when Ken Wheatley wrote on his blog: “Things are a bit of a blur these days. I guess because I think of Sheila constantly, the days just run together. Every day seems like ‘the day.’”

Standing in their bedroom recently, he said, “My attention is obviously on Sheila and the tournament and I’m not trying to move on. I’m just taking it one day at a time.”