In Erika Heller's room, three rosaries dangle from an intravenous pole. A container with stickers, paper and other material for making scrapbooks sits nearby. In the book she made for her parents, she wrote: “I love you both to the sky and back.”
The 31-year-old newlywed and indefatigable colorectal cancer patient – who planned to go to Las Vegas, despite suffering seizures – died just before 4 a.m. Thursday.
“She was a warrior princess,” her father, George Heller, a former chief executive officer of the Hudson's Bay Company, said in an interview in his home Wednesday, hours before she died.
Ms. Heller attacked life like a student cramming for an exam, after receiving news more than four years ago that would seal her fate.
I can't live my life like I am going to die tomorrow, or I would never do anything
In March, 2005, doctors discovered a golf-ball-sized tumour in the mesentery, the tissue that anchors the small intestine.
With her cancer inoperable and a cure impossible, chemotherapy held the only hope of extending her life.
Willful and determined, she packed all she could into the time remaining to her, marrying Ryan Cornell, a devoted man with Boy Scout charm, in a blissful wedding on June 14, 2008.
Ms. Heller provided intimate access to wedding preparations for stories published in The Globe and Mail, inspiring many with her ability to live a big life in the face of a big diagnosis.
“I can't live my life like I am going to die tomorrow, or I would never do anything,” she said after the cancer was found to have moved to her lungs and liver in the fall of 2008.
Things took a further turn for the worse on a visit to her parents' cottage on Lake Simcoe during the Victoria Day weekend, when she was found in a room, limp like a “rag doll,” according to Mr. Heller.
Due to the cancer's spread to the brain, Ms. Heller had apparently suffered a seizure. She was taken to an Orillia hospital that Saturday, May 16. When she regained consciousness, a defiant Ms. Heller told her husband: “We're going to Vegas.”
The trip to Las Vegas, which was to have been taken on May 24, was to be a belated birthday present for Mr. Cornell, who turned 32 last month.
Still, Ms. Heller realized the fragility of her health when she told her mother: “I'm so scared.”
“She had a special sparkle,” said Linda Heller, who noted that her daughter never left the room without saying, “I love you.”
Family physician Howard Seiden arranged for a Catholic priest to baptize Ms. Heller at that Orillia hospital and give her the last rites.
Last week, Ms. Heller was taken by ambulance – without the siren, as she insisted – from Orillia to the leafy, manicured Toronto neighbourhood known as Lytton Park, where she grew up with her brother, Ben.
There, she went downstairs to her basement bedroom – what she fondly dubbed the bat cave – put on her pyjamas and grinned from ear to ear, happy to be home. She received 24-hour nursing care, while her husband, Mr. Cornell, slept on the basement sofa.
Although she was lucid only some of the time, he would tell her stories about their wedding, trips they had taken and the unfortunate flatulence of a pet dog, which prompted a rolling of her eyes.
“As a wife, she was phenomenal,” said Mr. Cornell, recalling that each day she would pack a new love note in his lunch, all of which he kept.
Rev. Larry Marcille, who married the couple two weeks shy of a year ago, will preside at Ms. Heller's funeral tomorrow. Visitation is later today.
“I don't understand it either,” Father Marcille said in an interview. “We were all given time on the Earth here, we just don't know the time we are given.”
Visitation Friday from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Trull Funeral Home & Cremation Centre, 2704 Yonge St. A funeral service will be held at Blessed Sacrament Church (Yonge Street south of Lawrence Avenue) at 11 a.m. Saturday. After the service, friends are invited to the Sunnybrook Vaughan Estate for a reception.
