Campus Currents

In June 2005, Joe Durocher learned that his melanoma, first diagnosed in 2002, had metastasized. "OK, now what do we do about it?" he asked himself. What the hospitality management professor has chosen to do is continue teaching. "The energy I get from students is curative," he tells me in his office one afternoon before his beverage management class. He maintains a Web site at http://orbit.unh.edu/cancer/ that he designed to help other patients overcome fear, anxiety and confusion about medical procedures that sound scarier than they are. He's received 6,000 e-mails so far.

Durocher organized, instead of a wake, a "celebration of life" party to which he invited some of his students, colleagues, family and friends from the present and the past. Of wakes, he says, "Why have this sad thing? People go and they say, 'Oh, he looks so good.'" He pauses. "I do?" Another pause. "I'm dead! And I've got makeup on!"

"Cancer really made my life better," he says simply. "I got a perspective on life."

When I leave, I turn and say goodbye, unable to express exactly how meaningful his words have been.

"Have a nice day," I say.

"I will," Durocher says. "I'm going to teach!"

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