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Letitia Dewith-Anderson once scared me silly. She
rang my phone, which she didn’t do very often, and when I answered I
could tell that this call was of some gravity. “I’ve got bad
news,” she said solemnly. My heart dropped. A few years earlier, her husband, Bill Anderson, had
learned that he had neuroblastoma, a common childhood cancer that rarely
strikes adults. When it does, it’s virtually always fatal. In fact,
Bill and Letitia didn’t know of another adult who had survived the
disease as long as he had. Bill was a miracle. Superman. “My mother’s in the hospital,”
Letitia said. “They’re trying to figure out what’s going
on, but she may have had a stroke . . . .”
Wait a minute — her mother? I mean, I love,
respect, and adore Mrs. Juanita Barton, and I was sorry to hear that she
was in the hospital — but she has grandchildren. She has lived a full
life. Bill, on the other hand, had just turned 40. I told Letitia that if
she planned to call other people, she might want to rephrase her speech. “Oh, you thought something had happened to Bill?” She guffawed like
I’d made the funniest joke ever. “Bill’s fine. We
don’t even consider Bill sick,” she said. We chuckled about that phone call again Sunday night
as we sat at her kitchen table, sharing a box of tissues and reminiscing
about Bill while Letitia’s mother, among other assembled friends and
relatives, dozed in the den. They met in the late 1980s while working for House
Speaker Mike Madigan. Letitia says she never really noticed Bill, except
that he “looked like a geek,” until one day, sitting at her
desk, she heard the voice of God speaking directly to her and saying,
“You are going to marry this man.” She looked up, and there
stood Bill. The next day, they attended a meeting in Chicago and
wound up going to a Halloween party, smoking cigars, and walking in the
rain. Bill gallantly and jokingly laid his coat on the ground for her to
walk on. They’ve been together ever since.
Even when Letitia was attending law school in
Chicago, she drove home to Bill every night. “We couldn’t sleep
without each other,” she says. They were a well-matched and complementary pair:
Letitia took charge of the intensity department and Bill presided over all
things mellow. They grew together — their family, their careers,
their faith.
“We woke up and had breakfast together, we went
to work together, we hung out at the Capitol together, we ate lunch
together, we hung out with our friends, we came home and went back to bed
together,” Letitia says. When I met them, Letitia had taken a high-profile job
with Mayor Tim Davlin’s administration. Just 10 tumultuous months
later, she resigned [see “Leaving Oz,” Jan. 15, 2004] and went
back to working as a lobbyist, like Bill. Within two months, the City Hall
circus faded into a fleck of a memory when something happened that put
worldly cares into perspective. On March 29, 2004, Bill was involved in a car wreck. Though he initially
felt fine, he began experiencing back pain. Tests revealed a stage IV
neuroblastoma the size of a grapefruit pressing against his spine.
Letitia’s natural reaction was to move any mountain to find a cure
— only, with neuroblastoma, it wasn’t possible. “We did the research and we realized they
can’t do anything,” she says. “It was very clear: This is
not something that man can do.”
Bill underwent surgery and extreme chemotherapy so
powerful that its aroma stung Letitia’s eyes. She administered her
own treatment: massive doses of love and constant infusions of passionate
prayer. To the amazement of everyone else, Bill got well. He returned to work, resumed his daily jogging, kept
going to their daughter’s basketball games. Letitia asked me to come
“interview” Bill on video so that they would have something to
memorialize their journey through cancer. Clearly they had moved past it.
Over the next couple of years I would ask about Bill
whenever I touched base with Letitia about other stuff (mostly how to
dredlock my son’s hair). Sometimes she would mention that Bill was
undergoing more chemo or radiation or receiving platelet transfusions, but
she always said he was doing fine. And indeed, every time I saw him, as
recently as October, he was the same sweet, wonderful guy — happy,
healthy, kind, and serene.
Their preferred treatment — prayer — had
also continued, to the point that Bill experienced an intimate awareness of
the Creator. Last year, when he bought a new car, he got PFT PWR 1 on his
license plates, not because his BMW M3 was so fast but because he had
connected with the perfect power.
“Bill always had strong faith,” Letitia
says, “but believing and knowing is something completely different.
This journey taught Bill that our lives are not about ourselves but about
God, the universal mind, that perfect power.”
Three weeks ago, the doctors said that the chemo and
radiation had induced acute leukemia. “I say this hesitantly, because
I know they told me, but Bill and I don’t believe in paying attention
to the doctors. They mean well,” Letitia says, “but they give
people no hope.”
He died Friday night, in their bed, in her arms.
Letitia, though, knows in her heart that he was healed.
“What’s most important is the spirit, not
the body. The healing wasn’t just Bill; each and every one of us has
been healed,” she says. “The outcome may not have been
everything we thought it would be, but it may have been even greater. Bill
touched so many lives, he’s never going to die.”
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com
This article appears in Apr 17-23, 2008.
