>>'I will never forgive myself' - Cancer patient spends final days warning children not to smoke
Robert Remington
National Post
Thursday, December 19, 2002
CREDIT: Jeff McIntosh, National Post
CALGARY - Ten minutes into her anti-smoking plea yesterday to 350 schoolchildren, Barb Tarbox, a six-foot-tall, 41-year-old former model, removed the fuzzy electric blue cap that matched her stylish sweater.
"When you receive radiation to your brain, this is what happens," she said, revealing a stark bald head. Her audience winced.
"Yes it is gross. Yes it's uncomfortable. Yes I hate it. This is what smoking got me. Look at it."
Ms. Tarbox, an Edmonton woman and mother of a nine-year-old girl, has repeated the dramatic scene to nearly 8,000 children since being diagnosed with Stage 4 terminal cancer in September. Though she will be lucky to live through Christmas, she has devoted her remaining days to speaking to school groups about the dangers of smoking.
Her presentation has brought tears and hugs from students and hundreds of letters from children moved by the experience.
"We have 535 students and 40 staff and the only noise you could hear was tears hitting the floor," said Eleanore Commodore, principal of Fort Saskatchewan High School, near Edmonton, where Ms. Tarbox spoke on Dec. 4.
Yesterday, Ms. Tarbox brought her presentation to students at Father James Whelihan Catholic school in Calgary. Several approached her privately afterward, hugged her and cried. Earlier, the assembly in the school gym offered a prayer after her speech -- "Thank you, God, for bringing Barb into our life. Give her the strength to carry out her quest."
During her 60- to 90-minute presentations, Ms. Tarbox gives her audience the blunt medical facts that are the result of her two-pack-a-day habit. No detail is spared -- failing eyesight, seizures, weight loss, the smell of burning flesh from radiation to her head and the three tumours that are growing in her body.
She asks for a volunteer to hold her cold hands, comparing her blackening knuckles and mottled skin to theirs. "You have such beautiful skin. Keep it that way," she told one boy.
When diagnosed three months ago, Ms. Tarbox said, she didn't even realize she was sick, which is the case for half of all cancer patients.
Throughout her talk, she pleaded with children who smoke to quit and offered constructive advice so students can help their friends stop; Ms. Tarbox herself began smoking in Grade 7.
The impact of her speech appears to be greatest on image-conscious girls, the demographic most prone to start smoking.
"Forty-one years of hair, girls. Gone in 10 days. Gone. Wiped out. Zero. I loved my hair."
Yesterday, her voice quavered only once, when she spoke of her husband, Pat, and nine-year-old daughter, Mackenzie: "I will never, ever forgive myself for putting them through this."
Rhae Lyn Lashmar, 12, whose grandfather died from smoking, said the talk hit home for a lot of students. "It's important to see the physical evidence. They have to see what happens to you and the people around you," said Rhae Lyn, who hugged Ms. Tarbox during a question period.
Ms. Tarbox told the students how she has planned her Catholic funeral, picking out her music so her husband and daughter are spared the anguish. She wants to live at least through the Christmas season. Ms. Tarbox lost two sons around Christmas. Four years ago, Michael, 8, died of a heart attack. Twelve years ago, her baby, Patrick, died suddenly in hospital.
She ends the presentation with an inspirational message.
"You are filled with such incredible power and strength that possibly you didn't ever realize it was within you, but it always was in you, always. Never allow anybody to stand before you and say, 'Come on, be cool. Try this. Try it.' Planning your own funeral is not cool. The pain that occurs in your body is not cool," she said.
"I want to give new hope and new beginning to someone and I can't give it to me. I'm dying and it's going to happen very quick. I can't change what's happened to me. I'm down to weeks. I have my own nurse now coming into my house, but you know what? I am not going to allow it to stop me from telling the most intelligent people we have what [smoking] can do to you. I refuse, I just flatly refuse, to let smoking take another life before its time."<<
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