After learning that cancer had spread to her brain and no treatment could stop it, cartoonist Miriam Engelberg shared the prognosis with readers in a blog entry headed "Bad News." Then she promised them another comic strip.
"While my other scans were stable, my brain MRI was not," Engelberg wrote Aug. 22. "I'm going into a home hospice program. I'm taking steroids to make me feel better, but so far no luck. Meanwhile I'm going to try to put up a new comic of the week .... "
At every stage of her fight with cancer -- from the diagnosis, to the good days and the bad news -- Engelberg shared her experiences through deeply honest, funny and poignant comics.
Engelberg died Oct. 17 from complications of cancer at her home in San Francisco. She was 48.
Her book, "Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics," resonated with readers and, many said, left them feeling less alone.
"We just don't think anyone else is thinking those things," said friend and photographer Lynnly Labovitz, who is also a cancer patient. "She thought them and drew them and put them out. No matter what happened to her, she'd make a cartoon about it.... Sometimes you just have to laugh. She put her finger on that."
In 2001, Engelberg, then a 43-year-old wife and mother, sat in the hospital waiting for the results of a biopsy. As she waited, she drew her first cancer-related comic. In the years that followed, she continued drawing, "just trying to document what was happening in my life for my own sanity."
The diagnosis of breast cancer, the reaction of others, the chemotherapy all gave Engelberg much to write and draw about. Her work was a meditation on the absurd and the humorous, culled from real life.
"We'd get into these conversations," said Labovitz, who has metastatic breast cancer. "Do you ever think: 'Will I outlive these parking warrants?' "
Cancer may make some people more noble, but Engelberg did not see herself or the illness that way. Rather than meditate, write in a journal or "go inward," as some do, she preferred "pop culture distractions," she said -- bad TV and horror movies.
"Have I really become a shallower person since cancer?" she wrote. "Some of my friends beg to differ and state unequivocally that I was already shallow before cancer."
Engelberg was born Jan. 7, 1958, in Philadelphia but grew up mostly in Lexington, Ky. She earned a bachelor's degree in Russian from Indiana University, a master's in philosophy of education from Claremont Graduate School and a master's in theological studies from the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley.
