losing your big brother to pancreatic cancer: 'part of yourself is gone'
7 minute read
david illiatovitch-owen was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2021 and his sister sarah illiatovitch-goldman was with him every step of the way until he passed two years later.
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sarah illiatovitch-goldman’s big brother was her ultimate protector and buddy, always joking around and ready for a good debate – if she was up to the challenge.
“i asked a friend of mine if you could describe david and i together and her response was ‘loud.’ so that sums a lot of it up,” she says with a laugh.
talking about her brother, david illiatovitch-owen, keeps his memory alive and helps others deal with the incurable and often rapid-spreading cancer that took his life one year ago this november: pancreatic cancer. sarah has joined forces with pancreatic cancer canada to create awareness and she’s now working on a podcast series she and david started together to share the story of his death.
the two were close, despite an 11-year age gap, growing up in toronto and as adults living in different cities. he stayed in toronto while she had moved to chicago working as an artist and trauma counsellor. he owned a number of gourmet fish stores, had a second-degree black belt and at 6-foot-3 seemed to embody his “total badass” persona.
but on the inside, he was soft and emotional.
“he had a big heart that he didn’t want people to know about and was totally dedicated to his wife and kids above all else in the world,” sarah says. she and her family have all had a tough go of it, as expected, but the loss of david at age 48 has fueled her commitment to advocacy for better detection and treatment for pancreatic cancer. there was no reason for his cancer and no genetic link shared by family members.
sarah also says there hasn’t been much improvement in outcomes since her father-in-law died from pancreatic cancer over 15 years ago (when he was 20 years older than david was). and while it doesn’t have the profile of breast or prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer is on track to become the second deadliest cancer by 2030. it hits fast and hard, leaving families devastated by watching their loved one die quickly and in pain. only 10 per cent of those diagnosed will survive five years while 70 per cent die within the first year.
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“one of his biggest fears was that he was dying young enough that he was going to be forgotten. and we all know that that’s impossible and not true,” sarah explains of honouring him by telling his story, loudly, to help others fight for better odds of survival. november is pancreatic cancer awareness month.
there were moments where david and sarah still laughed and cried, and he really wanted his last act to be recording the story of his death, she says of the plan for the podcast series.
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“other people shouldn’t be worrying about that. other people shouldn’t be worrying if they’ve left their kids and their wife and their family with enough memories for them not to be forgotten.”
david was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2021. the whole family hadn’t gotten together much because of the pandemic, but they surprised sarah’s mom for her 75th birthday. “me and my husband and kids drove up to surprise her. that was in august and i saw him then,” she recalls of seeing david looking well as usual. “we were only in town for a couple of days, but the whole family was together. it was great. everything felt very, very normal,” she says. just a couple weeks later, she was talking to her dad who mentioned they were waiting on david’s tests, which was the first she’d heard of anything going on with her brother’s health.
he was always in great shape and prided himself on having a high pain tolerance, but he’d eaten dinner one night and experienced intense abdominal pain. he ended up in sunnybrook hospital where he had several tests, including a cat scan, and was told everything looked fine. but the pain persisted, although he had good days and bad, so there wasn’t a steady decline. he made dietary changes because there was speculation that he might have an ulcer. sarah found out later that he had months of back pain before the er visit that he chalked up to aging and his physical job. he’d bought a hot tub to see if it helped the pain.
eventually, after pushing for further investigation, he had a second cat scan in october 2021 that came back showing the worst. he had pancreatic cancer.
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“and of course, the forever unanswered question for my family is what would have happened if it had been caught in august?” sarah says of his initial tests. “but there’s no way of knowing.” when she heard the news from her parents who called to tell her, her first thought was “my brother’s going to die like there was no question in my mind, especially having gone through this with my father-in-law. and then thinking ‘this can’t be happening. this doesn’t make any sense.’ i was trying to keep it together for my parents.”
she wanted answers and she wanted a plan, she explains. “i knew i had to just keep going. i’m a very emotional person, but i had that feeling of i don’t want to be emotional. i want answers and i want to know what we’re doing.”
were there any upsides? she says that her experience as a trauma and grief counsellor and being around people whose family members have died in all kinds of circumstances gave her insight to manage her own fear and sadness. and david was lucky to a degree because his tumour was pressing against a nerve cluster, so he was feeling the pain signal that something was wrong. people are usually asymptomatic until the very late stages of the disease. his tumour also was operable because of its location and the fact that it hadn’t spread, but the surgery in march 2022 “decimated him,” sarah says. “he was never the same after the surgery. the pain, the recovery, the amount of weight he lost, over 60 lbs. you could see all the bones in his face. they had flipped his stomach something like seven times during the surgery just to get to where they needed to get to.”
david defeated the odds, though, and lived with the disease for two years. he had numerous complications from the surgery, including bleeding from the incision, and was in and out of hospital.
sarah left her job and rented a place in toronto to spend as much time as she could with her brother. she and her husband had been planning to buy a home in the city at some point to be closer to family, so they decided to move quicker to find something on the market. and a year after the surgery, his cancer came back and he was told he wouldn’t recover.
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the doctors kept going with treatment but options were limited because david was so much weaker and sick by this point. it came down to giving him the best quality of life, knowing he was going to die from this, sarah says of all the heartbreak. the family watched him slowly deteriorate over his remaining months.
david and sarah were close, despite an 11-year age gap, growing up in toronto and as adults living in different cities.
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there were moments where he and sarah still laughed and cried, and he really wanted his last act to be recording the story of his death, she says of the plan for the podcast series. “he hosted a wake for himself after he found out he was going to die. we recorded the wake. we recorded his eulogy. we recorded him with doctors and talking about all the ins and outs of what it is to face your own death.”
he also did a video with pancreatic cancer canada, a rare opportunity for the organization because there are so few patients who live long enough to be able to come to terms with the cancer and talk about it.
“this was right near the end but he was still totally cogent at this time,” she says, pausing to take a breath.
“a week or two later, he took a turn. we don’t know why it went from him being in a lot of pain but being present and then only physically there. i saw him on the friday and we were joking and talking and all kinds of things. and i came back on the monday and he was gone. he died six days later.”
how do you go forward after you lose someone you love?
“grief sucks and it’s not predictable, and one of the hardest things about all of it is that life doesn’t stop,” she says. “you feel like part of yourself is gone. and why should you be expected to keep moving with everything at the same speed? people are so empathetic, and that’s lovely, but everyone has to go back to their lives.”
she’s spent a lot of time with her family this year because there’s no awkwardness or expectation, which has been a welcome comfort. “we all can talk about it or we cannot talk about it. we can cry, we can laugh. everyone can kind of be where they’re at, everyone knows what’s going on.”
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