Winter 2011 Issue

Every Day is a Gift

By Shannon O’ Brien

Peggy Dunn in her home with her dog, Nutmeg Photo by Shannon O’Brien

Many people keep a list of activities they’d like to do or places they’d like to visit before they die. This is often referred to as a bucket list because it organizes the goals one would like to accomplish before “kicking the bucket.” Peggy Dunn has one of those lists. She started it during treatment for stage IV cancer and before knowing whether or not she would live long enough to do any of the things she listed. When she finally left the hospital in 2000, she had 125 items on the list; 10 years later, she has only seven goals left to accomplish.

One of her goals was met in May of 2010, when she walked across the stage during the UIS commencement ceremony for her master’s degree in history. She also has three degrees from Southern Illinois University: a bachelor’s in biology and botany; a bachelor’s in administrative justice and social welfare; a master’s in rehabilitation counseling. She earned her teaching certificate through UIS as well as a master’s in education. Her quest for knowledge has taken her to the Urbana campus, too, where she’s completed coursework for her PhD in education. In response to the question of what kept her returning to school, she said, “I probably had a lifetime of questions that I just wanted the answers to. And one of the ways I was able to get those answers was by going to college.”

Dunn has always been inquisitive and smart, but she grew up believing there was something wrong with that. “Girls weren’t supposed to be smart because people wouldn’t like you,” she said. “I was also a very overweight kid, so here I was an overweight, smart kid, and when they [teachers] asked the questions, I did the homework, so I always had the answers. I was not popular at all.”

She recalled an incident where boys in her class unscrewed the bolts from her desk, so when she sat down at the desk, it fell on her. She shrugged off the incident as part of the experience of growing up. “Bullying, it didn’t just arrive last week,” she said in the matter-of-fact manner that characterizes her approach to most situations.

Over time, she grew into herself and became more comfortable with the fact that she was an intelligent woman who had a desire to learn as much as possible. Her family helped her in this growth. She said her mother, Helen Dunn ’72 EHS, had expectations of her children. “It wasn’t that you were supposed to be a successful person; it was that you were supposed to be able to achieve to the best of your ability, and that you had to be responsible,” Peggy said, “So if somebody said you were supposed to this for homework…nobody had to yell at you to tell you to do it. We ate dinner, the table was cleared, dishes were washed, everybody sat down. You didn’t have homework to do tonight? Go back and read what you did during the day.”

“We only have this day to live within. Why waste it? Because you don’t get it back. You don’t get a redo. There are no do-overs in any of this. So, if you live the best you can for a day, you go to sleep at night, what do you have to regret?”

Peggy said her mom had wanted to be a math teacher, but was told she wouldn’t be able to get a job teaching math because she was a woman. “The closest thing my mom could find to math and science was home economics. So she got a degree in home economics from Illinois State and is one of their oldest alumni and then taught until she married my dad,” Dunn said. “At one point my dad went back to school and became an engineer. Everybody has always been learning stuff.”

Her mother also has a history with UIS, and was honored in 2009 with the Alumni Association’s Distinguished Service Award. When Sangamon State University opened in Springfield, Helen Dunn took the opportunity to go back to school and was one of the first students to attend classes at SSU.

When it was time for Peggy to go to college, she went to Carbondale to attend Southern Illinois University and study biology and botany. Though her first degree is in the sciences, most of her professional experience has involved working with people, and that started with her first part-time job in Carbondale. “I worked at Synergy, which was the drug crisis center on campus,” Dunn recalled. “The jobs in southern Illinois are few and far between, so once you get them, you hang onto them. I don’t think I expected to work with people who were drug addicts. We had a lot of people who tried to kill themselves and Synergy was there at night when students needed to talk to somebody because they wanted to die.”

It was stressful and surprising for a young college student. The training was primarily on the job, and she counseled people over the phone as well as face to face. “You saw a lot of stuff. And I was pretty naïve. So I saw a lot of things that I don’t think I understood. But that opened my eyes to a great deal. That allowed me to become a part of a community within southern Illinois that was a little bit underground,” she said.

“Probably the most important thing I learned from them [the people seeking help at Synergy] was shut up and just listen. And that was the first training we got,” Dunn said, “Let’s see how long you can keep your mouth shut and just listen. And it worked really well because a lot of times you don’t have the answer for something, but that person really needs to be able to say what’s on their mind. And just by acknowledging, yes I understand what you’re talking about, or not even that you understand but, yes, I can hear you, would allow them to continue talking. Then a decision could be made later in the evening or in the middle of the night, what do we want to do to help this student so they don’t come back?”

Peggy Dunn (far right) with her mother, Helen (center), and Nancy Chapin (left) on the night of the 2009 Alumni Awards Dinner. Dunn's mother was honored with the Distinguished Service Award that year.

Her interest in helping people was kick started by this experience, and has lasted throughout her life. Dunn said she still loves biology and botany, and she’s taught both, but she’s most interested in helping people. One of her outlets for this has been through teaching.

She has a love for teaching that shows in the creative ways she finds to present material; she wants to make learning fun. When she taught history to elementary aged students, she recreated the Civil War for two days. Students chose people they wanted to portray from the war and did presentations on those people. Dunn said she has current college students who remember her for these types of lessons from their youth. She knew she could get the kids’ attention when she combined something they had to learn with something they enjoyed.

When Peggy was 52, she was told she had stage IV cancer. It was a rare type of cancer and the same kind that had taken her dad’s life. In fact, he had been the same age when he died. At the time of diagnosis, she was given six to eight weeks to live. “I just figured I was going to die. It’s that simple. I told the kids at school. I told my principle. They let me go,” she said.

During this time she met Dr. Mokenge Malafa, who became her surgeon during this experience. They formed a strong bond, and he was very supportive of her. “What he told me was he would stick with me, until this was done,” she said. They remain in touch to this day. “I’m one of his few patients who are still alive from that type of cancer.”

Dealing with a cancer diagnosis and all the medical procedures it entails took its toll. Peggy said she nearly lived in the hospital for over two years. “It took a good two and a half years to recover from all of this, and then to find later that I was having radiation-induced cancers because of the massive radiation that they had to do and that radiation went into my spinal cord,” she said. During the chemotherapy she lost her hair, she lost her teeth, and tasks that had been easy before became exacting. Describing the experience as difficult is a severe understatement. That’s where the bucket list comes in.

“Dr. Malafa at one point, when things were really, really bad, he just said ‘let’s try to make your list of what you’re going to do if you live. Even if you live only a week, what do you want to accomplish today? What do you want to do? Let’s make a list.’ And he put a whiteboard in my room, and everyday I had things on the whiteboard,” Dunn explained. “By the time I finally left the hospital, I had a list of 125 things I wanted to do before I die. I have seven left.”

The first thing she marked off her bucket list after she left the hospital was dyeing her hair. “I wanted to dye my hair. Well, I didn’t have a lot, but I dyed my hair red. We undid it pretty quickly. It was bad. It was bad,” she laughed.

Additional accomplishments marked off her bucket list: she wanted to write a book; she’s written five. She wanted to replace the teeth she lost during treatment, and she did. She wanted to work with kids again, so she helped write the grant that got the public policy high school initiative started at UIS.

Accomplishments yet to be marked off the bucket list: She wants to go to Scotland again. She wants to take a hot air balloon ride (“when it’s not going to kill me,” she said). She wants to see a great-grandchild. She wants to go on a cruise.

And one accomplishment will be marked off by the time this story is published: she wants to move to Arizona, and she’s in the process of doing that now. She’ll join her mother and sister, who already live there.

Though she’ll miss the UIS community, she’s looking forward to what life in Arizona may offer. “This has been a remarkable place for me to be and when I’m not here anymore I always think, gosh, I’m really going to miss this place [UIS],” she said. “I’m going to go have a new place. And there’ll be a different place to go; a whole new group of people to meet, but it won’t dampen any of the thoughts I have about wanting to learn because I’m a lifelong learner. I think until I drop dead, I’m still going to be learning.”

Peggy has advice for staying optimistic in the face of adversity. “You know, it’s really easy to be a negative person. It doesn’t take a whole lot of thought to do that. It takes a lot more energy to be positive. The joke in my family is that every day above ground is a bonus. And it really is for me,” she said.

Dunn does not dwell on the idea of cancer, or the possibility of its return, “There’s going to be a day when I’m going to be told I’m going to die again,” she explained. “Well, big deal, I already know that. They can’t surprise me with it. They can’t upset me with it because I haven’t met anybody who got out of this alive.”

“If I get up everyday, and I’m having fun with life, then it doesn’t make a difference where I go or what I do, it’ll just be okay,” Dunn said. “We are all going to die and the day you figure that out, you stop worrying about the fact you’re going to die because then you start to live. And that’s all I’m doing is that I’m living. And that’s my legacy to myself. I am alive and I am living every day with as much joy as I can.”