FINAL BLOG POST of B.C. writer who died of cancer

A B.C. blogger died on May 3, but not before leaving a final message to his family, friends and readers.

Derek K. Miller lost his battle with cancer in Burnaby, B.C. at 41. His final request to his family and friends was for them to publish this blog post - 'The Last Post' - and allow him to be the one to notify his readers of his passing. Miller wrote:
"Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive."
Miller's final post went viral the same day it was posted, May 4, drawing three million visitors to his website. The message was prepared weeks in advance of his passing, as he and his family both knew his battle with colorectal cancer was not going to have a happy ending.
In the blog entry, he writes about his love for his family and friends, particularly his wife of 23 years, Airdrie and his two daughters, Marina and Lauren (or 'Lolo' as he calls her in one paragraph).
The final posts leading up to his death detail his struggle with cancer and the daily challenges he faced. He describes the importance of voting and the slow, pained walk he takes from his car to his local polling station. He extolls the wonders of Kraft Easy Cheese and Diet Cherry Coke, and is met with an outpouring of both products, typically available only in the U.S.
Miller's father, Karl, described his passing as an intimate and private moment at home, spent with those Derek loved. "He was proud of his blog and now it is his legacy," Karl Miller said in an interview with The Province.
"It connects him to the world and to his family, forever. We were there for him but Derek was comfortable sharing his thoughts with a worldwide community."
While 'The Last Post' was a message to all of the readers he had amassed in his 10 years as a blogger, the final words of the entry were to the woman who he calls his best friend and closest connection:
"I loved you deeply, I loved you, I loved you, I loved you."

Derek K.Miller

The last post

                                           

By Derek on May 4, 2011 7:51 AM| 143 Comments| No TrackBacks

 

Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.
If you knew me at all in real life, you probably heard the news already from another source, but however you found out, consider this a confirmation: I was born on June 30, 1969 in Vancouver, Canada, and I died in Burnaby on May 3, 2011, age 41, of complications from stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. We all knew this was coming.
That includes my family and friends, and my parents Hilkka and Juergen Karl. My daughters Lauren, age 11, and Marina, who's 13, have known as much as we could tell them since I first found I had cancer. It's become part of their lives, alas.

Airdrie

Of course it includes my wife Airdrie (née Hislop). Both born in Metro Vancouver, we graduated from different high schools in 1986 and studied Biology at UBC, where we met in '88. At a summer job working as park naturalists that year, I flipped the canoe Air and I were paddling and we had to push it to shore.
We shared some classes, then lost touch. But a few years later, in 1994, I was still working on campus. Airdrie spotted my name and wrote me a letter—yes! paper!—and eventually (I was trying to be a full-time musician, so chaos was about) I wrote her back. From such seeds a garden blooms: it was March '94, and by August '95 we were married. I have never had second thoughts, because we have always been good together, through worse and bad and good and great.
However, I didn't think our time together would be so short: 23 years from our first meeting (at Kanaka Creek Regional Park, I'm pretty sure) until I died? Not enough. Not nearly enough.

What was at the end

I haven't gone to a better place, or a worse one. I haven't gone anyplace, because Derek doesn't exist anymore. As soon as my body stopped functioning, and the neurons in my brain ceased firing, I made a remarkable transformation: from a living organism to a corpse, like a flower or a mouse that didn't make it through a particularly frosty night. The evidence is clear that once I died, it was over.
So I was unafraid of death—of the moment itself—and of what came afterwards, which was (and is) nothing. As I did all along, I remained somewhat afraid of the process of dying, of increasing weakness and fatigue, of pain, of becoming less and less of myself as I got there. I was lucky that my mental faculties were mostly unaffected over the months and years before the end, and there was no sign of cancer in my brain—as far as I or anyone else knew.
As a kid, when I first learned enough subtraction, I figured out how old I would be in the momentous year 2000. The answer was 31, which seemed pretty old. Indeed, by the time I was 31 I was married and had two daughters, and I was working as a technical writer and web guy in the computer industry. Pretty grown up, I guess.
Yet there was much more to come. I had yet to start this blog, which recently turned 10 years old. I wasn't yet back playing drums with my band, nor was I a podcaster (since there was no podcasting, nor an iPod for that matter). In techie land, Google was fresh and new, Apple remained "beleaguered," Microsoft was large and in charge, and Facebook and Twitter were several years from existing at all. The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity were three years away from launch, while the Cassini-Huygens probe was not quite half-way to Saturn. The human genome hadn't quite been mapped yet.
The World Trade Center towers still stood in New York City. Jean Chrétien remained Prime Minister of Canada, Bill Clinton President of the U.S.A., and Tony Blair Prime Minister of the U.K.—while Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, Kim Jong-Il, Ben Ali, and Moammar Qaddafi held power in Iraq, Egypt, North Korea, Tunisia, and Libya.
In my family in 2000, my cousin wouldn't have a baby for another four years. My other cousin was early in her relationship with the man who is now her husband. Sonia, with whom my mother had been lifelong friends (ever since they were both nine), was still alive. So was my Oma, my father's mom, who was then 90 years old. Neither my wife nor I had ever needed long-term hospitalization—not yet. Neither of our children was out of diapers, let alone taking photographs, writing stories, riding bikes and horses, posting on Facebook, or outgrowing her mother's shoe size. We didn't have a dog.
And I didn't have cancer. I had no idea I would get it, certainly not in the next decade, or that it would kill me.

Missing out

Why do I mention all this stuff? Because I've come to realize that, at any time, I can lament what I will never know, yet still not regret what got me where I am. I could have died in 2000 (at an "old" 31) and been happy with my life: my amazing wife, my great kids, a fun job, and hobbies I enjoyed. But I would have missed out on a lot of things.
And many things will now happen without me. As I wrote this, I hardly knew what most of them could even be. What will the world be like as soon as 2021, or as late as 2060, when I would have been 91, the age my Oma reached? What new will we know? How will countries and people have changed? How will we communicate and move around? Whom will we admire, or despise?
What will my wife Air be doing? My daughters Marina and Lolo? What will they have studied, how will they spend their time and earn a living? Will my kids have children of their own? Grandchildren? Will there be parts of their lives I'd find hard to comprehend right now?

What to know, now that I'm dead

There can't be answers today. While I was still alive writing this, I was sad to know I'll miss these things—not because I won't be able to witness them, but because Air, Marina, and Lauren won't have me there to support their efforts.
It turns out that no one can imagine what's really coming in our lives. We can plan, and do what we enjoy, but we can't expect our plans to work out. Some of them might, while most probably won't. Inventions and ideas will appear, and events will occur, that we could never foresee. That's neither bad nor good, but it is real.
I think and hope that's what my daughters can take from my disease and death. And that my wonderful, amazing wife Airdrie can see too. Not that they could die any day, but that they should pursue what they enjoy, and what stimulates their minds, as much as possible—so they can be ready for opportunities, as well as not disappointed when things go sideways, as they inevitably do.
I've also been lucky. I've never had to wonder where my next meal will come from. I've never feared that a foreign army will come in the night with machetes or machine guns to kill or injure my family. I've never had to run for my life (something I could never do now anyway). Sadly, these are things some people have to do every day right now.

A wondrous place

The world, indeed the whole universe, is a beautiful, astonishing, wondrous place. There is always more to find out. I don't look back and regret anything, and I hope my family can find a way to do the same.
What is true is that I loved them. Lauren and Marina, as you mature and become yourselves over the years, know that I loved you and did my best to be a good father.
Airdrie, you were my best friend and my closest connection. I don't know what we'd have been like without each other, but I think the world would be a poorer place. I loved you deeply, I loved you, I loved you, I loved you.

 http://www.penmachine.com/2011/05/the-last-pos

 ORBITUARY from "The Province"- a Vancouver, B.C. Newspaper:

'Derek doesn’t exist anymore': The last post from Vancouver’s Derek K. Miller

 

By Suzanne Fournier, The Province May 5, 2011

Derek K. Miller was a very private man, even if his own “last post” left his loved ones grieving along with thousands of people who knew him only through his highly public persona as “penmachine.com.”
Miller wrote on an entry posted Wednesday: “Here it is. I’m dead and this is my last post to my blog.
“In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote.”
Miller died at 6:40 p.m. May 3 as he wished, at home, in the Burnaby duplex he shared with wife Airdrie Hislop Miller and their daughters Marina, 13, and Lauren, 11.
A close friend published his last blog entry, as requested.
Miller wrote: “I was born on June 30, 1969 in Vancouver, Canada, and I died on May 3, 2011 of complications from stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer.
“We all knew this was coming.”
His parents Karl and Hilkka Miller share the duplex and a porch but respect Derek’s family’s privacy so strongly they always phone before dropping by.
Karl Miller told The Province Wednesday his son’s death was both deeply intimate and widely shared, as Derek had wished.
He died with family and dear friends present just before his eloquent self-penned obit went viral.
“He was proud of his blog and now it is his legacy,” said Karl Miller. “It connects him to the world and to his family, forever. We were there for him but Derek was comfortable sharing his thoughts with a worldwide community.”
Online visits to Miller’s blog, Twitter and Flickr were so heavy, despite his careful advance planning, that those Internet sites kept crashing.
Friends and followers posted new copies of his “last blog” over and over.
Celebrities Ashton Kutcher and Conan O’Brien read Miller’s posthumous post.
“This wouldn’t have been possible even 10 years ago, there was no Facebook or Twitter or blogs,” said Miller.
Derek started as a child to play in computer labs with his father.
A musician, writer and “passionate geek,” Derek started a blog more than a decade ago, while Jean Chretien was Prime Minister, Bill Clinton the U.S. president and the World Trade Towers still stood.
“I haven’t gone to a better place, or a worse one,” he wrote. “I haven’t gone anyplace, because Derek doesn’t exist anymore. As soon as my body stopped functioning, and the neurons in my brain ceased firing, I made a remarkable transformation: from a living organism to a corpse, like a flower or a mouse that didn’t make it through a particularly frosty night.”
Still, Miller found joy in life. “The world, indeed the whole universe, is a beautiful, astonishing, wondrous place. There is always more to find out.
“I don’t look back and regret anything, and I hope my family can find a way to do the same.
“What is true is that I loved them. Lauren and Marina, as you mature and become yourselves over the years, know that I loved you and did my best to be a good father.
“Airdrie, you were my best friend and my closest connection. I loved you deeply, I loved you, I loved you, I loved you.”
Miller spun off his blog into a chronicle of the cancer diagnosed in 2007, although he kept up his interests and it never became just a medical blog.
“I’m at the point with my cancer now that the car has finally bumped down off the pavement and we’re driving on gravel now,” Miller wrote in April. “The end of the road is somewhere up ahead, not too far, and I’m not going back to smooth, speedy travel, ever.”
He and his wife hosted a “living wake” at the Waldorf Hotel.
Soon he was confined to bed although on May 2, federal election day, he wrote: “If I can freakin’ physically drag myself out of the car to vote, then you can too.”
By 5 p.m. Wednesday, Derek Miller's own obit, his "last blog," was trending as a Twitter topic in Vancouver.
CBC paid tribute to Miller at 5:40 p.m. on Stephen Quinn's radio program "On the Coast."

Read more:
 http://www.theprovince.com/Derek+doesn+exist+anymore+last+post+from+Vancouver+Derek+Miller/4728571/story.html#ixzz1M0gMtcsE