Fastpitch Softball
for Girls
ages 5-14

Sun, Jul. 27, 2003
11-year-old's inner strength an inspiration

By Scott Herhold
Mercury News

Emily Coyne died last Tuesday. She was 11 years old and loved zebras, her pet guinea pig Sunshine, and anything to do with Hawaii. And somehow she touched a city where neighbors are often strangers.
Before she succumbed to the leukemia she had fought for the last decade, her story inspired more than 100 people to help send her and her family on a long-delayed trip to Hawaii.
The Stanford women's softball team contributed $650. The Fairmont Hotel's Lina Broydo got them hotel rooms. A Hawaiian travel agent who didn't know the family arranged for a luau, a helicopter tour and horseback riding. And dozens of friends and acquaintances chipped in for extra expenses, like the zebra-patterned puka shells she bought in Maui.
When they hold the memorial service for Emily at 1 p.m. Monday at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Saratoga, her family expects an overflow crowd of more than 500. How did a dying 11-year-old girl touch so many people? As her friends tell the story, it wasn't just that her life was cut short, or that she underwent a series of difficult operations. It wasn't just that she came from a well-regarded San Jose family (Her dad, Butch Coyne, is director of marketing at the San Jose Rep).

Standard for courage

It was that Emily herself set a standard for courage in the face of an unforgiving disease, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, that made a normal life all but impossible.
"Emily was the first one to go to another kid who was facing the same thing and say, `You know, it'll be OK. I went through that, and this is what it feels like,' '' said Shannon McDonnell, a family friend. "People would have given limbs to try to make her happy.''
In a short autobiography titled "I Know How it Feels to Fight for Your Life,'' Emily described how she bounced in and out of hospitals throughout her brief life, defying odds that took her close to death three times.
There was no hint of self-pity in her matter-of-fact prose. Here's the way she described her bone marrow transplant at Stanford last year, a risky operation that could have killed her:
"I was sad because I couldn't have takeout food when my family did, so I had to eat hospital food. . . . The day of my BMT, I got nervous, but all it was that they put the bone marrow into an IV bag and ran it through my tube. It looks like blood."

Joy in the mundane

Even now, her father, Butch, and mother, Kris, marvel at Emily's ability to find joy in the mundane tasks of life toward the end, like taking out the garbage.
"Anytime she got out, she was so happy,'' said Butch Coyne, describing how his daughter would go to the plate at softball practice. "She'd go through a whole day of chemotherapy, she'd walk with a limp, she looked pale and sick, and here she was participating with a smile on her face.''
In late May, the family got the news that Emily had suffered another relapse and might not live more than two months. The Coynes, who have two other daughters, Katie, 12, and Molly, 8, decided they could no longer postpone the Hawaii trip Emily had yearned for.
A group of friends led by Barbara Greni -- herself the mother of a leukemia victim -- organized an e-mail chain to raise money for the trip.
Before she died, Emily went boogie boarding off a Maui beach. When she returned, she hugged her bone marrow donor, David Torgersen of Duluth, Minn. And on her 11th birthday, she and five friends went to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.
Yes, Emily Coyne died last Tuesday. But while she lived, she touched the best and most generous instincts in the people around her. That's an epitaph that any of us who live seven times longer should envy.
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Scott Herhold's column appears on Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail sherhold@mercurynews.com or call (408) 920-5877.
July 23, 2003