In 1988, an extraordinary Scottish woman named Maggie Keswick Jencks was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was a mother, a scholar who wrote and lectured about Chinese landscape gardening, a world traveler, and the wife of designer and critic Charles Jencks, not to mention an accomplished landscape designer in her own right. After surgery, and a five-year period of remission, the cancer returned. This time an aggressive strain attacked her bones, bone marrow, and liver. Maggie was also outgoing, articulate, and an often-published writer who was willing to try an extraordinary range of treatments and strategies as she fought for her life. She won a second period of remission, but finally succumbed to her disease in 1995.
Toward the end of her life, one of Keswick Jencks’s doctors invited her to write an article about what she experienced for his medical journal. Her essay, “A View From the Front Line” (downloadable at maggiescentres.org), is a highly personal account of her life with cancer, coping with surgeries, confusion over the efficacy of treatment options, and the despair of life coming to an end. Not the least of her concerns was her experience that the cold, sterile institutions where cancer patients receive treatment could not give people the warmth and support they need in these challenging times.
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