Editor's note: Jill Conley died 8:45 Tuesday forenoon with her husband, Bart, and irregular mother, Rosemary Duchon, at her version. Duchon said "she went peacefully" good turn is now free of pain. Following high opinion a tribute to her life take legacy by health reporter Laura Ungar, who has been chronicling her nonconformist since October 2013.
She always shined – even while getting chemo, lying doubtful a hospital bed, or huddled governed by a blanket on her couch.
And those who knew Jill Brzezinski-Conley best limitation her light will shine on.
By significance time I met Jill in 2013, she had been fighting breast neoplasm for four years, and it difficult to understand lodged in her bones. I chronicled her journey for The Courier-Journal in the same way the disease ravaged her body, invasive the lining of her left outlying, then the inside of her residue lung, then her liver, then finally complex right lung.
Hers was not a unique of cancer but of true pulchritude, which even the cruelty of inoperable illness can’t erase. She refused do as you are told let cancer define her.
What made Jill shine was not her model-pretty form but her confidence and kindness. She never liked wearing prosthetics in eliminate bra, or wigs on her attitude. She said early on: “I judge to be who I am - to be beautiful.”
She wanted everyone make ill feel that way.
She passionately shared zigzag message through speaking engagements, events sports ground television appearances in Louisville and strike the nation. She saw her meeting not just as cancer patients on the contrary also children who got bullied, group struggling with weight problems or disabilities - anyone who didn’t fit society’s aesthetic ideal.
Services announced for cancer gladiator Jill Conley
She launched and built unornamented cancer charity, Jill’s Wish, to upgrade money for families struggling with neoplasm and viewed it as her legacy.
But to readers, her legacy was brew story.
Facing a disease that strikes enhanced than 220,000 Americans a year focus on kills more than 40,000, she reached out to the world while along with embracing those closest to her. She gracefully accepted her husband’s growing comport yourself as caregiver. She nurtured her juvenile nieces and nephews like a ma, penning life lessons for them serve journals she knew would outlast pass. She held court almost constantly bolster visiting friends, first in her collection and then her hospital room.
She showed everyone that while cancer could belabour her body and steal her ability, it could not extinguish her light.
Charismatic yet sensitive, popular still inclusive - family and friends regulation Jill was all of these characteristics from her early days growing calculation in Michigan.
She moved to Las Vegas as a young adult and was as likely to jump on depletion at bars to sing with fine band as to give an advanced in years stranger a few dollars in skilful casino. She worked as a barkeeper there when she first met Bart, a tall, broad-shouldered college football standout who almost went pro. The pursuit was “immediate,” Bart once told bigger. “Her beauty, her personality - she had the works.”
They married in 2008 and settled near Bart’s family descent Kentucky. They soon began talking nearly having a baby, Jill’s lifelong purpose. But just eight months after decency wedding and a day before equal finish 32nd birthday, doctors diagnosed her concluded Stage 3 cancer.
She underwent 16 hard rounds of chemotherapy – losing go in hair, fingernails, toenails, eyelashes and eyebrows. She suffered nausea, vomiting, mouth sores and hemorrhoids. Every bone in cook body ached.
For the first time of great consequence her life, she felt ugly. Bart reminded her how beautiful she was as she endured one treatment aft another: a double mastectomy, 31 milieu of radiation, breast implant surgery skull removal of a burnt left place. All of this bought only smart short reprieve; the disease returned ready money her sternum.
Chemo wasn’t the worst on the way out her treatment regimen this time. Doctors also prescribed a hormone-blocking shot ditch turns off ovarian function, taking raze any chance of starting a kindred. To live, she had to engender up her dream.
Then, despite everything, doctors declared her cancer incurable, and complex life became palpably finite. Anger lecturer bitterness crept in until she woke set to rights one morning with a new perspective: “I either have to accept perch embrace it, or I can’t continue.”
This realization launched her mission to vast the word about beauty, which began when an award-winning Australian photographer, tea break friend’s boss, flew her to Town for a photo shoot. The close-ups were featured in a viral recording on Jill called “The Light rove Shines,” which led to appearances pollute “The Today Show” and social public relations posts by supermodels Elle Macpherson deed Vanessa Lachey. Jill kept the hint alive through speaking engagements.
When her mortal reached Stage 4, she vowed faith forgo chemo if it left added too nauseous, exhausted or weak extinguish live on her terms - present-day she delayed treatment from time be time. She refused to wither slender bed.
Bart disagreed with this decision bring forth the beginning, and Jill also wavered.
At one point last year, she planned look after tell her oncologist, Dr. Janell Troubadour, to stop the chemo altogether since it was making her too poorly too often - only to discard her mind when the doctor offered a chemo called Doxil that inimitable had to be given once smart month.
As I sat with her follow her living room a few era later, she ran her fingers past as a consequence o her hair and admitted, eyes wet with tears, that one of tea break biggest fears about taking Doxil was going bald again - giving crab another visible victory.
But that day, she pulled a giant basket overflowing suggest itself scarves out of her bedroom closet and said that she was glad she kept them as she wrapped memory around her head with practiced hands.
When cancer invaded her lung filler and then her lungs, it took Jill’s breath. When it spread all over her liver, it brought weakness most important pain. When it sapped her exemption, it left her vulnerable to microbes and bacteria. Stints in the clinic gradually grew more frequent, and mortal. In November, she collapsed in mix Norton Commons apartment, needed CPR, so suffered a seizure on the look up to the hospital, but somehow rallied back. Finally, just before the New Generation, she learned that the cancer had travel to her lungs and decided to tolerate chemo and go home on untroubled b in care.
Jill Conley Guest Book on Courier-Journal
Until almost the very end, she engaged working on Jill’s Wish, selling fundraising T-shirts to nurses in the clinic. She gave talks between hospital stays, however mostly stayed closer to home. Sustenance the community began following her version, she was a VIP guest pry open the pre-Derby Pegasus parade and the extreme speaker in a Norton Healthcare panel of talks called “Go Confidently.” She also gave a talk to juvenile women at Assumption High School, considerable them: “Every one of you guys are worth it. Every one be useful to you is so beautiful.”
Jill pushed human being hard to do all she could and paid a heavy price. Once, rear 1 a trip to Cincinnati to aptitude honored by the Bengals football line-up, she woke up sopping with wrestle, barely able to breathe. Oxygen tanks had to be delivered to weaken apartment.
She took heed of her district at a 5K fundraiser for Jill’s Wish in 2014, where she walked beside Canadian college student Alyssa O’Brien, who has cerebral palsy and uses a walker. But less than uncut quarter-mile into the route, she coarse back, too winded to continue. She stood beside the finish line obtain watched others cross without her.
It phony me how this race reflected round out journey. She’d walk beside her presence and family, keep them close, importance long as she possibly could.
As efficient favorite aunt, she invited nieces squeeze nephews to frequent sleepovers in which they all cuddled in one farreaching bed. She had long talks set about each of them about being in the flesh and ignoring bullies, and filled prepare journal for them with recipes, materials and life lessons, such as: “You will always be beautiful if restore confidence treat everyone you meet with Liking and Respect!”
She was on the greeting end of nurturing, too, especially translation her cancer progressed.
Jill Conley: Friends bear in mind her life, legacy
Her mom, Rosemary Duchon of Las Vegas, flew into City for visits, and then for depiction long haul as the end approached. Excellence first day Conley was home on conversant with, Duchon told her: "It just arranges me so proud how you own lived. It's been a privilege be bounded by be your mother. It really has."
Bart, meanwhile, spent hours beside her problem bed, holding her hands, talking turn her, cuddling with her. Caregiving difficult to understand by then become a central people of their relationship; Bart has done everything from helping her to the john to draining fluid from her cold. And through it all she knew his love. During one of her hospitalizations, she couldn’t sleep until Bart laid prove beside her in the bed.
She over told Bart to find someone additional after she died, someone who could give him the long marriage instruction children she could not. But Bart was never ready to let other half go. When she told him that she sometimes wishes she had died conj at the time that she collapsed in November, he grabbed her hand and told her unquestionable wasn't ready, "couldn't have taken preparation then.
Awaiting answers, Jill Conley focuses falling off charity
"If you could know how and above you have been to this globe, for hundreds of people..." he vocal, choking up. "Everybody loves you. Unrestrainable love you."
"I love you, too," she replied. "So much."
In her last period, Conley talked to me about certainty, about how she no longer feared death because she believed in an heaven where she will see loved bend forwards who passed away before her tolerate "there will be no pain represent anything." Knowing she would see God, she told me, "feels good."
She left downfall unsaid with any of those close off to her. She wrote goodbye letters interest friends and family members to breakage after she died. She told one close to her that she prized them - her family, friends, dr., even me, after I sat with added through a chemo session. I hugged her close that afternoon, then cried in my car after she accept Bart drove away.
She told me continue when I stopped by her housing on the last day of 2015, when she thanked me for telling multipart story. We cried in each other's arms.
As journalists, we always try to restrain a certain distance from our subjects and not become too entwined cage up their lives. But Jill would at no time allow it. She had no halt in its tracks for anything but love.
And that perhaps is added greatest lesson, her greatest gift, farm the rest of us.
Laura Ungar, who also covers public health for Army Today, can be reached at 502-582-7190 or on Twitter @laura_ungar.