Former B.C. cabinet minister Sindi Hawkins in Vancouver, March 5, 2004.John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail
Only a few short months ago, she put down her salad fork, looked across a restaurant table and declared that she was not prepared to go - not yet.
"There is so much I still want to do," said Sindi Hawkins, nurse, lawyer, politician, cancer patient. "So, you know, I'm just going to keep fighting. What else do you do? I'm not giving up, that's for sure."
And she wouldn't. In the end, however, her fierce spirit was no match for the cancer discovered in her body more than six years ago. And so it was on Tuesday, the province of B.C. lost a remarkable soul who used her battle with leukemia to raise millions for cancer research and draw attention to the desperate situation minorities often face when looking for a bone-marrow-transplant match.
And for me, selfishly, I lost a fun, witty and always intellectually engaged lunch companion whose cancer allowed her to expand her already formidable circle of friends to include the likes of Lance Armstrong.
"We're tight," she liked to joke about the relationship she struck up with arguably the world's most famous cancer survivor.
I first met Sindi in April of 2005, in the middle of a provincial election campaign, where she was hoping to keep her job as the MLA in the Okanagan riding of Kelowna-Mission. We sat down at a favourite restaurant of hers and she told me the story about the unlikely sequence of events that led to the discovery of her cancer 15 months earlier.
She had been on a Hawaiian holiday when she noticed some small bruises on her back. She thought nothing of it. When she returned to Vancouver, she cut her finger on a sliver at a Japanese restaurant and could barely stop the bleeding. A former nurse, she thought it was odd. The next morning, she was involved in a fender-bender and felt some pain in her back and neck so she thought she would get checked out by a doctor the next day. In the morning, she woke up and there was blood everywhere. On her pillow case. Her sheets. All from the tiny cut on her finger.
A blood test would confirm that she had leukemia.
Her chance of survival depended on a bone-marrow transplant. Luckily, one of her four sisters, Seema, was a match. She had a transplant in March, 2004, and along the way she discovered that people of South Asian heritage, as she was, were particularly disadvantaged when it came to fighting leukemia because so few were on the country's bone-marrow registry. So few members of minorities period.
While Caucasians stood a 70-per-cent chance or better of finding a match through national registries, the odds for minorities stood at 30 per cent or less.
So, Sindi being Sindi, she set out to change the situation, calling in markers with friends in the media to bring national attention to the issue. She organized fundraisers for cancer research, which is how she persuaded Lance Armstrong to come to B.C. to ride his bike and help raise millions.
After cancer, Sindi dedicated her life to helping others who also had the disease.
It was some time in 2008 that Sindi informed friends that doctors "didn't like her blood work." That Christmas, there was a second transplant. In 2009, it was discovered the cancer was back.
"Can you believe it?" she said over lunch. "Damn."
Damn? I could think of a few other words at the time to express my dismay and upset. But if damn was the order of the day than damn it was. As stoic as Sindi often was in public, the façade would drop when she was alone or with close friends, she would confess. Sometimes she was petrified about the future. She cried long and hard. She had so much she wanted to do. And often seemed to have the energy of an army with which to do it.
I'd admired Sindi for so many things but maybe most of all for her honesty, especially about her disease. She never saw cancer as a gift, as others sometimes say they do. "I wouldn't wish it on anyone," she told me. And how could that not be the only truth about the disease?
Sindi turned 52 six days ago.
On Tuesday it was announced that the BC Cancer Agency for the Southern Interior would be renamed in Sindi's honour. Meantime, she was hailed by Premier Gordon Campbell for being an advocate, role model and great community leader. She was those and much more.
For some of us, she was a wonderful friend whose perfect smile, bewildering courage and relentless optimism could often leave us in awe.