CREVE COEUR, Mo. (AP) - Kelly Friend had one final lesson for young children, especially for her first graders at Ross Elementary School near Creve Coeur.
If your teacher has cancer, she might feel queasy and skip a meal. Her hair may fall out. She might come to school wearing wigs and scarves. The medicine she takes will fight the bad cells but might fight the healthy cells as well.
And she will always love her students, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.
Friend was 29 when she died on Sept. 1, 2014, of a rare form of cervical cancer. Before she died, she had a tough time finding resources to help her explain to her students what she was going through and what changes they might see in her.
“I had a stack of books about grandmas dying of cancer,” said Carol Austerman, who worked as a school counselor at Ross in the Parkway School District. “Kelly was like, ‘No, no. These won’t do. This isn’t what I want.’”
Before her death, Friend gave her blessing and direction to her friends, family and colleagues to write a book about a teacher with cancer. The book, “Miss Friend on Sunshine Dr.,” was published in the spring, and copies arrived in late January.
Now, the group would like to give copies of the book to schools, organizations and anyone who might benefit from it.
Friend lived in a tidy brick home on a street called Sunshine Drive, in the Princeton Heights neighborhood in south St. Louis. Denise Ford, who taught gifted students at Ross and then moved to Kirkwood North Middle School, teased her good-natured colleague.
“You are like a walking storybook character, because your name is Miss Friend,” Ford would say. “And then she bought this house on Sunshine Drive.”
Friend exuded happiness. She and her roommate threw themed movie parties for friends with an outdoor screen they set up in the backyard at Sunshine Drive. Her brightly decorated classroom was a happy place, and she welcomed former students and troubled students with open arms.
As a child, she set up a classroom in her family’s basement in Ballwin, said her mom, Chris Friend. She’d teach the younger neighbor kids and set up a schedule, complete with snack time and recess.
“It was set up in the back of our basement forever, and she never changed her mind about being a teacher,” Friend said.
She got her teaching degree at the University of Missouri-Columbia and taught in Crystal City for a year before moving to the Parkway district.
“She always had a calm, soft voice and a calm demeanor,” said Lisa Luna, Friend’s principal at Ross. “All of her kids, she was able to meet them where they were, academically and emotionally. You could tell that teaching was not only her gift, it was her destiny.”
When she was diagnosed, friends and colleagues rallied around her. Ford wrote a poem about Friend for a fundraiser trivia night in June 2014 and sold spiral-bound booklets of it for $5. The poem focused on Friend’s good nature and ability to spread joy throughout her classroom.
Friend loved the poem. She asked Ford to write the rest of the story: Friend would have to take medicine. She might feel tired and want to sleep. Some cells in her body help her think and speak, but cancer cells make her sick.
Ford went home that night and finished the poem. “I emailed her that night and said, ‘What do you think?’ She emailed back right away and said, ‘Yes, this is it. This needs to become the book.’”
As Friend was undergoing chemotherapy, she learned of a legend that says peacocks eat plants that are poisonous to other animals, and that is what makes their feathers beautiful. She got a tiny tattoo of a peacock feather on the inside of her wrist and focused on that during treatment. She practiced yoga and comforted herself with the mantra: Breathe in peace, breathe out love.
Friend continued the treatments, but her health deteriorated.
After she died, her colleagues shelved the project, at least for the time.
“It was just too hard and too raw and too difficult for several years to make it happen,” said Ford. Friend had asked her mother to draw the illustrations, but the group didn’t want to impose on her. “We just let it go,” Ford said.
Austerman, the school counselor, retired. Ford continued teaching in Kirkwood. Still, they talked about the book.
Chris Friend, who used to encourage her daughter’s creative nature, picked up her colored pencils. She colored the cover’s background in orange, her daughter’s favorite, and incorporated personal details, like rings her daughter crafted from vintage buttons or the bright yellow Nissan Xterra her daughter drove to work. She drew hidden peacock feathers throughout the book for children to find.
Friend’s friend and roommate, Lauren Schurk, laid out the pages. Her first grade teaching colleagues, Caroline Reither and Jessica Pope, gave feedback. They called and emailed publishers and people in the business to figure out how to raise money to publish and print it.
“We’re a small team of educators and quite bright,” Austerman said. “But we have no experience getting a book published.”
The group dubbed their efforts “the peacock project,” knowing they, too, could turn poison into beauty.
They established a Kickstarter campaign and raised more than $15,000 to print the first shipment of books and pay fees.
The group gave copies to people who donated. Just as Friend wanted, they placed copies in every elementary school counselor’s office in the Parkway School District. They gave some copies to the group Friends of Kids with Cancer.
They want to give copies away and let people know they can buy the book on Amazon or through Archway Publishing. Any profits will go toward postage or to buy more books to give away.
Friend would be “so, so happy” about the book getting published and into the hands of kids, Ford said.
“If it helps one little person get through a tough time, that would mean a lot to her.”
Friend didn’t want the book to end on an overly happy or sad note, or talk about death.
The story ends like this:
Because no matter what’s inside
Whichever cells will win today,
Miss Friend loves all her first graders
That love will never go away.
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