Cancer’s toll: Two friends, too young, too soon

By Darrell Laurant

Published: June 18, 2008

(Second in a series)

One of the responses I received to the column that ran Monday was this: “There is more cancer today than 100 years ago because cancer is a disease of old age. (Yes, younger people can get cancer, but it is statistically much, much rarer than in old folks). 100 years ago, the average life span was such that many people didn’t live long enough to get cancer.”

There is no doubt some truth to that statement, but that was small consolation to the families of Jeff Schwenn, 51, and Steve Mirabella, 52, this month. I knew them both, Steve perhaps better than Jeff, and nothing about their deaths seemed natural.

“There was really no warning,” said Mike Schwenn, Jeff’s brother. “What symptoms he had were easy to attribute to something else.”

Like back pains, which could have been the result of a recent strain. Eventually, though, they became so severe that Jeff went to the emergency room. By the end of the night, he had been moved to the oncology floor. Four months later, he was dead.

Jeff Schwenn had cancer of the esophagus, even though he felt no throat discomfort whatsoever. It had spread to his lymph nodes, and from that beachhead, throughout his body.

He died on Friday the 13th, which Jeff would have found funny. He and I are — were — part of a Monday afternoon “happy hour” ritual at Mudpuppy’s, where he was known for his sardonic sense of humor and his dogged support of the misbegotten Cleveland Browns. At Areva, where he worked for more than 30 years, he was known as a genius at sorting through complicated chains of data to find numbers gone wrong. His sister, Susie Stepp, told me that.

The group at Mudpuppy’s became involved in his illness in a way that surprised me, paying frequent visits to him in the hospital and at his home. During that hour or so on Mondays, we generally discuss sports (it is, after all, a sports bar), or share jokes we’ve heard, or maybe argue about politics. Rarely are jobs or personal lives mentioned. Yet when Jeff Schwenn was diagnosed with cancer, that became the major topic of conversation thereafter.

As for his family, they found themselves bouncing back and forth from northeast Ohio as hope for his recovery waxed and waned.

Similarly, Steve Mirabella was a refugee from Long Island who had moved to a former farmhouse in rural Amherst County near Lowesville with his wife, Sigrid. He was, hands down, the most talented person I’ve ever known.

As a sculptor, he created formidable bronze figures that are found homes in museums throughout the Northeast, including the Museum of American history. As a writer, he published a textbook on the Middle Ages and won prizes for fiction and poetry. As an educator, he became one of the most popular teachers at James River Day School and St. Anne’s of Belfield. As a musician, he played blues guitar with enough flair to have made that his living.

Among other accomplishments, he taught a course on the Renaissance at the American Academy in Rome and was chairman of the Friends of the Sweet Briar Library board.

The cancer didn’t care.

“Both Steve and his sister had been former smokers,” wrote Sigrid Mirabella, “and while quitting improves your odds, it does not take the risk of cancer away. My mother also died of small cell lung cancer … a horrible and aggressive cancer. (She) died within a few months. Steve’s sister was diagnosed in June and was buried in January. Steve was diagnosed in October and was buried in June.”

I knew Steve Mirabella from a writers’ group we both joined, and our paths crossed occasionally after that. Once, I went out to the house near Lowesville, where he and Sigrid had adopted a succession of injured and abused animals — many with various missing parts — and called the place “Misfit Acres.”

The tributes to him on the Web site of the Long Island funeral home that handled his services numbered more than 50. One woman wrote: “When we lost Stephen, we lost part of ourselves.”

Just as the friends and family of Jeff Schwenn lost part of themselves. Just as everyone else who has lost a loved one or a friend to cancer is left drained, the hope squeezed out of them. Young or old, it’s always too soon.

We can help ourselves, to be sure — quit smoking, eat healthier, etc. — but sometimes that just makes us the butt of a bad joke when cancer wins, anyway.

Sometimes, it happens on Friday the 13th.