Best medicine e
After finding out she had terminal cancer, a 90-year-old woman skipped chemo to take the road trip of her life
TWOdays after her husband died, in July 2015, Norma Bauerschmidt was told she had endometrial cancer. But the 90-year-old refused to go through chemotherapy. She had a better plan for living.
Five months later, Normawas flying in a hot-air balloon above Florida, a long way from her homein Michigan.
“She was not scared at all,” Bauerschmidt’s daughter-in-law, Ramie Liddle, told The Post. “The look on her face was pure magic and elation.”
The balloon ride was just one of many adventures Norma indulged in during the last year of her life, when she traveled the country with her son Tim, Ramie (his wife) and their standard poodle, Ringo, in a 36-foot RV. She made the decision to forgo treatment after having seen her husband suffer in the hospital. Plus, her doctor said that even if she did survive the hysterectomy she needed, she would hardly be able to return to a normal life, spending time in intensive care while dealing with “miserable” side effects.
“Driving Miss Norma: One Family’s Journey Saying ‘Yes’ to Living” (Harper Collins), by Timand Ramie, chronicles the trip, which spanned 13,000 miles and 32 states.
Tim wasn’t very close to his mother before the adventure, having left Michigan at 19. He admitted that “the fact that she had a personality — I never saw that expressed growing up. Our conversations were stilted.” But after his father died, Tim knew he couldn’t leave Norma alone.
“She is so reserved that I couldn’t imagine her in a shared roominanursing home,” he told The Post. “When wewere visiting myfather in hospice, I had to push my mo mina wheelchair past those rooms, with a sheet or curtain separating patients — I knew [if] my mom[was living there she] would just curl up like a leaf and blow away.”
But Tim and Ramie didn’t have a home to offer Norma. They were nomads, spending much of the year on the road, save for a couple winter months during which they stayed in their trailer on a beach in Mexico.
But the couple thought that inviting her into their gypsy life was “the right thing to do,” said Ramie. “Weweresurprised at how quickly she said yes.”
Amonthlater, they were off, driving northwest through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and to Wisconsin. That’s when they saw the first glimmer of Norma’s playful personality: After stopping at a 55-foot Jolly Green Giant statue, she began to pose with her hands on her hips, giggling uncontrollably for Ramie’s camera.
“It was the first time that Tim or I had seen her smile — I mean really smile — in years,” Ramie writes.
Soon, Norma was letting her son push her wheelchair over a rickety bridge so she could witness Old Faithful erupting. She delighted in getting her first pedicure in Atlanta and eating her first lobster in Maine. She visited the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore. And — thanks to Facebook, where Tim and Ramie posted photos of her travels — she became a minor celebrity, getting her ownfloat at Hilton Head’s St. Patrick’s DayParade and reveling in the city of Marietta, Ga., throwing her a 91st-birthday bash, where she had her first gin and tonic.
“We would receive hundreds of thousands of messages from people saying she was an inspiration,” said Tim. “I said, ‘Do you understand the impact your life is having on all these people?’ She nodded and I could see two little tears. It was the first emotion I ever saw out of this woman.”
There were some scares, such as when Norma’s leg began swelling in Colorado, which led to the nonagenarian’s first encounter with medical marijuana. (She called the dispensary a “pot shop.”) And then there was the time Ringo got sick in Pittsburgh. While Tim and Ramie panicked, Norma soothed them — telling them they hadto remain positive for the dog.
“She was more equipped to take things in stride than wewere,” Ramie said. Ringo survived emergency stomach surgery, but shortly after his return Norma’s heart began failing.
After 13 months on the road, Norma died in Friday Harbor, Wash. Her final adventure had been going whale watching for the first time. She had spent her last few weeks with Ringo — her newbest friend — byher side.“I bet you are glad you brought mealong now, aren’t you?” she kept saying.
They were. Said Tim, “I thank God for that decision every day.”