Easton —Jeanne McCrorie was deep in meditation two years ago when she felt her body lighten and she heard an inner voice say “don’t worry.”
It would be months before those words held any meaning for her.
She now talks about her deadly illness and her good fortune in the same breath.
Settled in a favorite armchair, her brown hair falls naturally around her face and her fingers touch the air as she speaks.
She is full of grace.
“To live with the awareness that your life is not going to last forever puts you in an immense state of gratitude,” she says.
A former Mansfield resident, McCrorie, 50, was in her prime and enjoying music, adventure and a new career in 2010 when she learned she had pancreatic cancer.
A few years earlier, as she approached the half-century mark, she had been considering what to do with the rest of her life.
She has been workingas a mortgage loan underwriter for two companies but found herself unemployed when they both downsized within 16 months in the subprime lending scandal.
Ironically, joblessness provided fertile ground for growth.
McCrorie took her severance money and flew with her husband, Mark McSweeney, to Tanzania in East Africa where their daughter Ellen was teaching music.
Here, they spent three weeks exploring a new culture and fossil craters, climbing mountains and heading out on safaris.
It was the trip of a lifetime.
“It was really phenomenal. We experienced life in a country where everything can’t be taken for granted,” she said.
The real estate market was no better when they returned home so Jeanne pursued a longtime passion for yoga. She earned her certification at the Kripalu Yoga institute in Lenox and started teaching at her own studio in Mansfield, supporting the practice with Vipassana meditation.
Then, the first medical crisis struck.
After developing a severe migraine, Jeanne was diagnosed with Lyme disease, a tick-borne disease that shut down her immune system.
In March 2010, she faced even grimmer news.
An initial diagnosis of acid reflux quickly deteriorated and McCrorie was told she had Stage III, locally advanced, pancreatic cancer.
The odds were not encouraging. The majority of patients die within the first year of diagnosis. Only 6 percent survive more than five years.
McCrorie was not eligible for a potentially life-saving surgery called the Whipple procedure due to the location of the tumor.
“At first you feel as though you’ve been hit by a truck. I never felt so angry and bitter,” she said.
She started chemotherapy and CyberKnife radiation.
And she tapped into her yoga to heal body and soul.
“I was told to be bitter if I wanted to – just let it come and let it go,” she recalled.
By September, her blood tumor markers were down to normal. Feeling well enough to travel, she and Mark flew to Seattle to visit his sister and brother-in-law.
The couple hiked together through the wild trails of the Pacific Northwest.
“Therapy gave me the gift of time. I felt so alive in that very alive place,” she says.
McCrorie attended a pancreatic cancer conference in Chicago where she met survivors and she was hopeful.
With June came another reason to celebrate. Daughter Ellen, a violinist, was married.
In June, more good news. Jeanne and Mark prepared to buy a new house in West Mansfield.
But the month of such promise also brought bitter disappointment.
Jeanne’s tumor markers suddenly soared and the deal on the dream home collapsed.
The couple moved into a townhouse in Easton as Jeanne headed into her second round of chemotherapy.
The ongoing treatments have stabilized her disease and reduced the severity of her symptoms.
She says she feels “pretty good, but the scale is sliding.”
She longs to indulge in her favorite foods again. But that will have to wait.
“If I can eat breakfast, I’m off to a good start,” she says.
She goes for chemotherapy once a week. Mark, a landscaper and baritone with Emmanuel Music, is always by her side.
“When I go into oncology, I feel that everybody receiving chemo is a member of a family. It’s one big - too big – family,” she said.
Fortune, she says, led her to her doctors, Rebecca Miksad, Jeremy Warner and Mark Callery, a pancreatic cancer specialist and chief of the Division of General Surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
They like to theorize as to why their patient is responding to her latest treatment. They haven’t given her an end date but she says with a shrug, “I may give them an end date.”
She feels very lucky.
Eighty percent of people are not around a year after they are diagnosed.
“When I say I’m fortunate, it’s that I’m still here,” she says.
She recalled lying in a hospital bed for days with a serious infection during her first treatment and feeling blessed for “every breath, every sunrise, every baseball game and every nurse that came into the room.”
Her children, Ellen, Molly, and Daniel, call her every week. Cards flood in from people she hasn’t seen in years.
Her yoga reduces stress and enhances the flow of healing energy. The meditation allows her to hear that inner voice.
“I don’t know how I could have gotten through Lyme disease and cancer without it,” she says.
She remembered one session during a yoga retreat when a gravely ill man asked the teacher how to approach the end of life.
“He said, ‘every one of us will be engaged in an end of life practice. It opens up the possibility of what life can be in the interim,’” she said.
So McCrorie has decided to live with, not die of, pancreatic cancer.
“I’m trying to stay on the board and ride the waves,” she says.
Meanwhile, Easton has provided her and Mark with a home in the woods where Cody, their beloved longhaired Dachshund, can roam.
Through her spiritual practice, Jeanne has come to understand that disease and death are part of the progression of life.
She lets her fears come and go. She wakes up every morning wondering what the day has in store for her.
“I have a terrible disease but I can still connect to a life force. When there’s a diagnosis, there’s a sense of what really matters.
“What really matters is love,” she said.
And paraphrasing the late David Servan-Schreiber, author of “Anticancer: A New Way of Life,” she says on beating the odds, “The bottom line is nobody knows what’s going to happen.
“Just aim for the far end of the bell curve,” she says.
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