Yuen: When cancer struck a second time, she found ‘euphoria’

No one could fault Lisa Kirkbride if she cursed the stars for her wicked diagnosis: a rare and inoperable brain tumor usually found in children, one that doctors have approached with scientific intrigue. Most people with this type of cancer have only a year or so to live.

The fact that Kirkbride is speaking to me in her living room nearly three years after receiving the bad news, overlooking a tranquil lake on a spring Minnesota day, is something the 60-year-old artist can’t take for granted. She has oddly come to accept that death is near.

“I’ve traveled the world, I’ve had an amazing life, so I’m not particularly sad,” Kirkbride says.

Her acceptance of winning the unique-cancer lottery was punctuated by what she now calls her “euphoria dream.” About a month after the diagnosis, Kirkbride dreamt that she was trading high-fives with family and friends as she strode down the street. She can’t explain what was behind the dream, but the experience strangely settled her heart.

“I woke up at 2 in the morning, just smiling,” she says. “And I’m like, ‘What the f—? I have brain cancer.’ "

Kirkbride knows she’s fortunate (so please, she says, don’t bring her flowers or lasagna). She’s spending her borrowed time by helping others, especially the kids who share her disease, known as diffuse midline glioma. And she’s asking us to care about especially lethal cancers like hers that often fall between the cracks for necessary funding and awareness.

So she paints. Pictures of tulips in bloom. Seaside cliffs in Italy. Lotus flowers, whose ability to sprout from muddy waters have become a personal metaphor for resilience.

When her cousin, Patricia Chinander, visited Kirkbride’s home studio in Prior Lake brimming with paintings, she thought: “This is perfect.” The images, like Kirkbride, were peaceful, adventurous and bright.

That began a collaboration between the two women that will steer money toward cancer research. Chinander is founder and CEO of Love From USA, the company that launched several Minnesota stores selling locally inspired knickknacks and apparel, from Paul Bunyan bottle openers to trucker hats that say “Ope.”

Now you can buy makeup bags, hoodies and writing journals bearing Kirkbride’s art. Fifteen percent of the proceeds will go to the Cure Starts Now, a Cincinnati-based foundation focused on pediatric brain cancer research.

I can’t comprehend Kirkbride’s grace while knowing she doesn’t have much more time to live. Her husband, Dave, says she’s always been this way: optimistic with a side of humor. “It makes us laugh. It makes us cry,” he says.

Maybe her perspective is different because it’s not her first bout with a devastating diagnosis. The first time it was breast cancer, back when she was 39 and her two kids were still young. She wanted to live long enough to see them cross the stage of their high school graduations. Kirkbride attended not only their graduations, but watched them grow up entirely and launch their careers.

“I can’t imagine losing a 5-year-old,” she says. “I’ve been blessed. I’ve had all that.”

In 2022, she felt a tingle in her nose, like a fly was swimming in it. Then her lip went a little numb. Her daughter told her to get it checked out. That’s how doctors detected the tumor. The family visited three hospitals to get different opinions. There was no cure, Kirkbride was told. Doctors advised her to go home and do what she loved. The lack of promising treatments baffled her.

“In this day and age, it’s hard to believe there’s no hope,” she says. “I’m not going to go home and do what I love. There’s got to be something.”

She found hope through cancer-fighting organizations that introduced her to resources and relationships, including those with families of children with diffuse midline glioma. (Fewer than 300 Americans are diagnosed with it every year, most of them kids under 10.)

She’s lent her story to the local foundation Humor to Fight the Tumor, which honored her at last year’s gala. She’s also mentored people with rare brain cancers. Kirkbride shares with them more about her own treatments, which have included radiation therapy and a number of clinical-trial drugs.

Mostly she assures these newly frightened patients that she’s been there, too. “The c-word is the worst word in the world. You need people to support you and say you’re not alone,” she says.

Kirkbride says she knows it will get harder, for both her and her family, as the cancer progresses. She’s gotten wobblier on her feet, and she recently started to have double vision. But it’s not about her, she says.

She does cry sometimes. It’s when she thinks about the grandchildren she’ll never meet. So on her travels or trips to the store, Kirkbride buys a toy, a book, a superhero cape. Even decorations for the baby shower.

They’re all wrapped in a big box, assembled with love, from a mom who expected to have more years on this planet but made a difference with the time she had.