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In Loving Memory

Lord help me through another day

A trying day indeed

Give me the courage and the faith

O God and the strength I need

To face each day’s new worry

To walk this lonesome road

To go through life’s work without hurry

To carry this heavy load

Lord help me face my problems

And help me be able to cope

With all of life’s big “let-downs”

God don’t let me give up hope

That someday life will be easier

And that though others are untrue

I’ll make it through this nightmare

As long as I have you

I’ll talk with you tomorrow, Lord

And I know that you’ll be there

I know I can count on you O God

To love me, to always care.

Doris Lynn McCubbin

Two stories of courage…

     Doris Lynn Mcubbin and Diana Lynn Ramsey had a lot in common.

They were Portland girls. They had gone to the same junior high school and belonged to the same church.  They grew up in the same neighborhood – at time their families lived only two doors from each other.

     Both were bright. Doris was the more outgoing, a talented singer who loved to perform. Lynn was quieter, a gentle person with an unforgettable smile.

     Both girls were natural leaders. Both had the knack of influencing people in ways that later would be remembered as unusual and good.

     Last December, Doris McCubbin 17, died of cancer.  In February, her 15 year old friend, Lynn Ramsey, died of cancer. 

     The sense of loss hasn’t lessoned for their brothers and sisters, parents and friends.

    “It’s made our young people think, it’s made all of us think,” said the Rev. Joe Priest Williams, minister of their church, the Baptist Tabernacle at 30^th and Market Streets.

     The irony of the deaths has triggered reactions even among persons who didn’t know the girls. Some Portland residents, worried about heavy industrial pollution in their neighborhood and the need for greater access to health care in the west end, have speculated the deaths might be related to the environment.  But the girls died of different kinds of cancer, and the frightening possibility that their illnesses had a common cause must be discounted. 

The Fathers of Doris and Lynn had good jobs and company insurance policies that paid for hospital and medical bills.  Unlike some Portland families, the McCubbins, who have four other children, and the Ramseys, who have three others, never dreamed of leaving the western part of the city.  People who know them use such words as “steady” and “hard-working” to describe them.  They now live only a block from each other.  They are proud of their neighborhood; they say, proud to live among so many friendly people.

     The parents of the girls agreed to talk about their experience in the hope that their story would help other parents in similar situations. “We don’t want people to pity us” said Doris’ mother, Frances McCubbin. “Doris never wanted people to feel that way about her.

     “It’s not a sob story,” added Willimams. “It’s the story of two families courageously facing disaster.”

     In the words of her mother, Doris McCubbin was “a magnet that drew people.”

     Blonde and vivacious, she had no trouble making friends.  “Doris represented the best in the school and the community,”  said Mrs. Vera Peterson, her homeroom teacher at Western Junior High School.  Doris was graduated from Western and went on to study business education at Ahrens Vocational Technical High School; she was in her senior year when she died.

     Mrs. Peterson also had Lynn Ramsey in her homeroom at Western this year.

     “Lynn seemed to have a depth to her that made the other children value her highly,” said Mrs. Peterson. “She was just learning how to project herself.  She was just beginning to blossom.

     Doris had a fine soprano voice and loved to sing.  “She always told us she didn’t want voice lessons,” said Arnold McCubbin, her father.  “We even got a piano, but she showed no interest in it.  I don’t know why.  I think she thought her singing was a special gift and she could us it best just the way God had given it to her.”

          Religious songs, such as the old hymn “Amazing Grace,” were among her favorites. “Doris fought like everything to keep the choir going at church,” said Ricky Judd, a friend from Sunday school.  It had fallen apart and she got us all back.”

     In November 1973, Doris began having vomiting spells accompanied by a swollen stomach.  The problem eventually was diagnosed as cancer of the colon. 

     She was operated on that December.  Reports weren’t encouraging.  The McCubbins told her it was cancer on the way home from St. Anthony Hospital. “She said she had thought that’s what it was,” said Mrs. McCubbin.  “We told her she would have to have chemotherapy.  She cried just a little.  She said she didn’t understand it.  That’s the only thing she would say.

     “We had five good months after she came home for the hospital,” said McCubbin. “She knew all along, but she made nothing of it.  She did her work at school and home. She enjoyed life and lived more in those few months than she ever did.”

     Doris had missed 44 days of school, but she went back to classes and finished her junior year with an A, three B’s and a C.

     “During the summer, Doris would go out and play softball with us,” said Sherry Powell, a church friend.  “We would ask her if she felt well enough to play and she would say, ‘Do I look sick to you? Don’t be silly!’ And we would laugh because she really didn’t look sick.”

     That summer she sang in the WHAS Crusade for children talent contest and won second place.  About this time she had begun to change her mind about studying music.

     “When she thought she was getting better, she said she wanted to become a minister of music,” remembered her father. “She would talk about going to music school and then spending the rest of her life telling others what God can do.”

     In September 1974, she returned to the hospital for another operation.  While she was there, her Ahrens guidance counselor, Ron Jacobs, stopped by for a visit.  During their conversation she asked Jacobs to let her sister Gloria, an Ahrens sophomore, sing the solo at the June graduation.  Doris was expected to be the graduation soloist, just as she had been for two straight years.  Gloria did sing the solo.

     Doris returned to school, but soon her pain became too great for her to continue. On her last day of school, she wrote a poem which, in part read:

God don’t let me give up hope

That someday life will be easier.

And that though others are untrue,

I’ll make it through this nightmare

As long as I have you.

     On Oct. 10, Doris went back to the hospital…for the last time. Ahrens officials brought her diploma to her.  Friends from church visited every chance they had. “The choir had planned to put on a special program at church, bet we didn’t feel like doing it without Doris,” remembered Connie Colmare. “Doris told us to go on. She said she would be singing with us.”

     Two weeks before she died I told her I hated to see her like that,” said her mother.  “She said, ‘Don’t worry, Mom, it won’t be much longer’.”

     “Doris hated being sick,” she added.  She hated being in the hospital, but she accepted it.  She was a strong girl, a lot stronger than some of us adults.  It didn’t mean the end of the world to her.  It meant the end of a lot of hopes and dreams, but for her it wasn’t the end.”

     When Doris McCubbin Died Dec. 18,  Lynn Ramsey was already in Norton-Children’s Hospital.  She had become sick in November with a swollen abdomen, one of the symptoms Doris had experienced.

     “I hope it’s not like Doris,” she told a friend.

     She was one of the friends who had played softball with Doris during the summer, and she had visited Doris in the hospital.

     When her father told her Doris had died, she said she wouldn’t cry, because Doris wouldn’t have wanted her to.

     “I leaned over the hospital bed and held her,” her father Marvin Ramsey, remembered. “I told her she could go ahead and cry all she wanted to, and she broke down. It really hurt her about Doris.”

     Lynn was small, blonde and quiet.

     “Lynn wouldn’t talk much, but she always tried to be nice,” a church friend Wendy Powell, recalled.  “She would never gossip about anyone.”

     “She became the leader of the Ramsey family in so many ways,” Williams said. “She drew her parents out and the other children.  She got them involved in the church and the school.”

     Last Christmas Eve, after extensive tests, Lynn was operated on for a malignant teratoma, a kind of tumor that is formed out of embryonic tissues before birth.

     After Christmas vacation ended, Lynn returned to school for one day.  After that she stayed at home.  Soon her friends at school heard she was back in the hospital.

     “Lynn was a really friendly little girl,” Doris’ Mother said. “When I went to visit her in the hospital she called out and was so happy to see me. Even in the hospital she never lost that smile of hers.” During her final stay in the hospital, she made a request: she asked the McCubbins to bring her a picture of Doris.

     On the morning of Saturday, Feb. 8, Arnold McCubbin called the hospital to say he was bringing a snapshot of Doris.  He learned that Lynn’s condition was rapidly worsening.  “I think I’d better get up there right away,” he said to his wife as he hung up the phone.  “I think I should be with them.”  He was with the Ramseys when Lynn died later that day. “People can’t really understand how it feels to lose a daughter in that way,” said Mrs. McCubbin.  “They say they hate it, and they do, but they can’t understand.  The Ramseys knew we understood.”

     Lynn was in the same funeral home, in the same room, as Doris had been. Students from Western were brought over on a school bus supplied by the Baptist Tabernacle.

     “I don’t think Lynn realized she had so many friends,” said her father.  “They crowed around the casket.  It was strange.  You almost got the feeling they didn’t want any adults to come up, didn’t want them to interfere. They stood there in little groups, crying and looking at her.  It was as though there was something between them and her.  You got the feeling they were communicating somehow”

     A month after Lynn died; the Ramseys joined the church and have become active in working with the young persons in the congregation.  Their daughters’ death has brought them closer to God and to other people, they say.  Like the McCubbins they often have days when the memories become too great. “We have a big picture of her at home,” said her father. No matter where we sit in the room, she seems to be watching us. Sometimes we even talk to her picture.  You may think we’re crazy, but we do.

     On bad days, Mary Ramsey sometimes re-reads a letter her sister in California sent her after Lynn died. “She’s not dead,” wrote her sister. “She’s just away.”

     “That’s how I try to feel,” said Mrs. Ramsey. “Lynn will never be dead as long as she’s in my heart.”

     Memories also are strong for the girls’ church friends – one of whom came down with an abdominal swelling, reportedly diagnosed as an emotional-sympathetic reaction to the girls deaths… “We all got really close after Doris and Lynn died,” said Michael Austin, a friend. “You can feel their presence every time you walk in the church.  They don’t seem dead to us at all.

     “Their deaths couldn’t have been a coincidence,” said another friend, Debbie Robinson, “They were two of the best people in our church.  There had to be some purpose behind it. ·