Renee Prince

This story illustrates, I think, the interconnection we often experience even with people we ‘know’ but never meet.

We started this blog nearly seven years ago – in February 2009. Over the course of these years, we have come to know some wonderfully enlightened human beings whom we’ve never met in person. Renee Prince was one of these individuals.

I first connected with her when I found her blog in 2009, I think it was, where she described her experiences working with dolphins at one at one of the big theme parks. She had a Master’s degree in experimental psychology and her dream was to work with dolphins in intraspecies communication. She became so disenchanted with the quality of their lives that she switched careers and became a set designer for movies. One of her greatest animal experiences and friendships was with a hawk she called Tennerin,

Renee was a Scorpio, the most mysterious and psychic sign in the zodiac, and her abilities shone when it came to animals – especially the animals she loved most, like dolphins and that hawk, Tennerin.  She wrote movingly of her relationships with these animals and shared some of the synchronicities she experienced concerning them.

We exchanged emails periodically. Renee felt things profoundly, at every level of her being, and when Tennerin failed to appear one spring, she was anxious and worried that something had happened to him. She also expressed her frustration about her private life – that although she loved working on movies, the hours were long and the conditions were often brutal. Her stepfather developed Alzheimer’s, her mother’s health was failing. She had written a book about her dolphin experiences and I referred her to my agent and later on, to another agent I knew personally. Nothing happened with the book, another frustration.

In late August 2014, I got an alarming email from her. She had discovered that she had a mass in her left lung:

Hi Trish,

The Pet scan showed an 8 centimeter mass in my left lung. They biopsy it tomorrow. Everything I’ve read today on what this means is not good. Not good. I’m beginning to wonder if anything I’ve ever done is going be finished and out there. I was born on 4:42 am in Pasadena, California.(I had asked for her birth data so I could look at her natal chart) I won’t hear the results until sometime next week. I honestly don’t know how I can get through this. Or if I’ll get through this. I need to turn down a TV pilot tomorrow—there goes my income for I don’t know how long—I have to have it removed at the very least and then…???  Without union work I will soon lose my coverage. I can’t even pet my parrot because my fear will translate to her and even with the Ativan they gave me today, I am drowning in near panic.

In September, I received another email from her. She said she had mesothelioma, and was waiting on the results of a CT scan that would tell her if the cancer had metastasized. Her agent had called to let her know her book proposal was being submitted to new editors and she seemed more hopeful.

If the cancer hasn’t metastasized, then I face an operation to cut it out of me and then do chemo to make sure it’s all out. The thoracic surgeon here in Salem has already said it’s too big for him but now the oncologist is referring me to a specialist surgeon in Portland. However, I am writing my affirmations every day and feeling Tennerin as he comes sweeping into my lung and shrinking the thing.

Renee, by her own admission,  had a deeply held belief that she wasn’t good enough, that she couldn’t ever complete something she had started. I  really didn’t understood her belief because, to me,it looked as if she had lived according to her own code. But she felt like this belief had contributed to her health challenge.

My least email from Renee was in April 2015. She was in an airport in San Jose – but I don’t know if that was San Jose, California or Costa Rica or some other San Jose. She was in a holding period, waiting for her insurance company to stop denying her coverage to get two spots of cancer “frozen to death by needle, like my doctor does for all his patients that have survived years past the six months to twenty-two month survival time. I am a great believer (I hope) in the individuality of my own recovery and of not relying on estimates and what has gone before. In choosing the doctor that I did, I think I made the first great decision away from that depressing survival range. Also, every other doctor would have taken the lung out and expected no more than that average survival time range.”

In the email she described her chemo treatment, how awful it was, and how, ultimately, it didn’t work. And then this:

I don’t believe I did anything “wrong” to get this cancer. What happened is that my mother married an alcoholic child-molesting psychopath who was a plasterer and he stored joint compound that contained asbestos and contaminated the entire family. Only 15% of people exposed to asbestos get it, probably because of a gene combination related to—get this—getting certain batches of the polio vaccine which contained simian virus 40, a leftover contaminant from working with monkeys to manufacture it.

If I planned this in some other portion of my existence then what a fucking asshole I was, to cut short my life, which is only now beginning to finally blossom. Thanks, in part, to getting mesothelioma. So maybe I planned to get it, then to get cured. But if I die before I get the things done that I need to do—that I believe I was sent here to do, I’m coming up to the afterlife with a raging anger that they had better watch out for. They don’t want me up there with this kind of seething resentment. They do not.

This evening I was writing up one of Renee’s stories and realized I hadn’t heard from her in months. I Googled her and found this, her obituary.

Renee died at the end of June 2015.

My hope is that she is flying through the skies with Tennerin and diving into the depths with dolphins, and brainstorming with John Lily about intraspecies communication. My hope is that she has found in death what eluded her in life. Peace, my friend. You lived and died according to your own code, and that is a huge triumph. Thank you for sharing the most sacred parts of your life with us and expanding our knowledge and driving home the point that we are all in this together.