Linda DeNearing Woods
Age 60
Rest In Peace Linda
Patti Varney, 30, and Linda Woods, 60; mother and daughter die of cancer
At the end of each day, Patti Varney and her mother, Linda Woods, high-fived each other and recited what they called their mantra: “We survived.”
Patti, 30, was battling colon cancer. Linda, 60, was fighting ovarian cancer. They endured surgeries together, toughed their way through chemotherapy treatments together — sometimes on the same day — and planned Patti’s wedding together.
“All our thoughts,” Patti wrote last February in her blog, were about “cancer, life, death, and weddings.”
Linda died Sept. 24 at Inova Fairfax Hospital. Patti died seven weeks later, on Nov. 11, at her home in San Francisco. Their deaths were confirmed by their family.
By all accounts, the mother and daughter were exceptionally close, even before cancer brought them closer. A Navy wife and former Navy nurse, Linda looked after Patti; her sister, Lisa; her brother, Jacob; and her half-brother, Jaime, during their father’s long deployments at sea.
Patti, too, developed an interest in business and went to the University of Virginia to study commerce. She was partway through a graduate program when her disease was diagnosed in the fall of 2008. For some time, her family said, her colon cancer symptoms were mistaken for an eating disorder.
With major surgery and chemotherapy, Patti beat the disease into remission and returned to graduate school the next year. She met her future husband, Eric Varney, received her master’s degree from U-Va. and returned to Northern Virginia to work as a business analyst for the defense contractor Northrop Grumman.
In the winter of 2011, Linda began to feel short of breath and went to the doctor, never anticipating how sick she was. She learned on her 59th birthday that she had ovarian cancer. “We surely are on a physical, emotional, and spiritual roller coaster,” she wrote in her journal that day.
Linda began a chemo regimen, but she and Patti did not let cancer dominate their lives. Weeks after Linda’s diagnosis, Patti’s boyfriend whisked her off on a surprise trip to Paris and proposed to her. Mother and daughter began planning Patti’s dream wedding.
Midway through the planning, and with Linda still in the throes of chemo, Patti began to develop pain in her elbow. Linda took her to the doctor. When she heard the results of her daughter’s scans, she fainted, Jacob recalled. Patti’s colon cancer had returned and metastasized to her bones and lungs.
Jacob became a primary caregiver to his mother and sister. He calls them “my girls.”
“My mom and I still felt awful,” Patti wrote on Sept. 5, 2011, after difficult chemo treatments for both of them. “I think the most productive thing I did was pick out bridesmaid dresses and turn oxygen into carbon dioxide.”
But, she continued, “we survived. . . . We may have worse weeks, we’ll hopefully have better ones, but we keep fighting the good fight. Because we’re survivors and this is what we do.”
Diane Lamb, one of Linda’s longtime friends, sometimes took wedding books to the hospital so that Patti could pick out favors and finalize other details. One of her bridesmaids, Kelly Shields, was planning her own wedding at the same time and recalled how, despite her illness, Patti developed the usual “bridal neuroses.” The friends would talk about Patti’s treatment, and then move on to what flowers they had chosen.
On April 7, 2012, Patti and Eric were married at the U-Va. chapel. Linda had been in the hospital in the days leading up to the wedding but managed to be released a few hours before the rehearsal dinner.
Patti had told Eric that she wanted two things on her wedding day: to marry him, and to have her mother there to see it happen. “She got both of them,” Eric said.
Patti and Eric honeymooned in the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador. About a week after they returned, she learned that the cancer had metastasized to her brain. After another surgery, she moved with Eric to San Francisco. She wanted, her sister Lisa Kovacevic said, to “start the life that she always dreamed of with her husband.”
Three weeks after the move, Patti’s new doctors in California told her that her cancer was terminal and that she had two weeks to two months to live. She and Eric flew back to Virginia to tell her parents. Linda continued to decline, and so did Patti — so much that she was not able to attend her mother’s funeral.
Judy Morgan (Jackson) (1970)
What a troubling but somehow beautiful story. They had each other and didn't need to go it alone. Linda I remember you from ORHS and watching your cheerleading skills at our pep rallies and our games. You were quiet but always sweet and nice to me and everyone as far as I could see. I look forward to seeing you and meeting your daughter Patti one day in heaven. You and your daughter are a shining example of what we all should be down here on earth. Test in God's loving arms.
Judy Morgan Jackson