JENNIFER CREAGER MEMORIAL

Thanks to Brad and Jen’s family for this opportunity to talk a little about Jennifer and to learn about her life from all of you.

In the way of introduction, I am Dr. Brian Koffman, the cofounder, EVP and CMO of the nonprofit CLL Society. It was though our shared cancer journey and Jen’s need to know more and share what she learned that we connected through CLL Society.

I wasn’t as lucky as you to have known her as long as her family and friends, but I was privileged to get to close to her during her 8 years with her chronic lymphocytic leukemia or CLL and its later transformation into a more aggressive blood cancer.

I am also privileged to be speaking on behalf of several of her CLL Society friends, some of whom have driven long distances to be at the celebration of her life and the mourning of what might have been. They wouldn’t miss it because Jen has become one of our family.

Jen was a regular member of at least two CLL Society monthly support groups. But she was more than a member. She was an upbeat, information hungry, analytic friend who shared what she learned and led by example to those behind her in their cancer history. Her ever-changing hair colors and her “let’s do this” attitude was a powerful tonic for many fellow patients who were paralyzed with fear by their cancer diagnosis.

I want her family, her children to know especially that their mother was a hero, an emotional, spiritual and intellectual giant who fought so hard to stay alive, but shared so much of her learning with others who frankly were sometimes less gifted and also often less challenged as they had a milder form of the disease. She was a great teacher and generous guide to others who recognized how wicked smart she was and how strong she was.

One special cancer friend who couldn’t be here, Deb Sims was a mother with young children the same ages as Jen’s who struck up a tight and close bond that extended over the years and across the world. Their mutual goal was to see their children grow up. The fact that Deb like many of us was devastated by Jen’s passing speaks volumes of her impact in our small community when you know that Deb lives 8 thousand miles from San Diego CA in Melbourne, Australia.

For me, especially more frequently in the last months of all her trials and ordeals, I got to experience up close and grew to admire Jen’s brave, chin up, cool, calculated chess like approach to an increasingly complicated and limited set of options to knock back her worsening blood cancer. When her despair and disappointments accelerated in the last difficult stretch of her aggressive illness, as more therapies failed and more doors closed, the challenges only sharpened her focus on what might still work, what was still possible, how to get there. No stone was left unturned. No possible lead, no matter how thin the odds, was ignored. She was always searching to the end. She outlived her grim prognosis for years by astutely jumping into promising but risky clinical trials when any and all approved therapies were exhausted, but ultimately even her smarts and guts were overtaken by a relentless fast moving cancer and its ultimately fatal toll on her immune system and overall health.

She was a realist too. Knowing the odds were badly stacked against her, she still squeezed in a trip to Ireland and Hawaii during all her battles. Carpe Diem.

Because her lust for life was palpable, her positivity was a strategic choice to improve her odds. I learned so much from her bravery and her passion.

Jen was a champion, an exemplar of how to do fight the fight, and at the same time in the midst of her battles, a wise and compassionate teacher in our community of leukemia patients and care partners.

Brad, Cadi and Delaney, please know that your wife, your mother, was a hero to me and to many others.

I and her friends in the CLL Society are all crushed by his passing. We all miss her. We can only imagine the loss for her family and close friends and send all our love and condolences at this difficult time.

Stay strong, we are truly all in this together.

Here is what I said at the celebration.  It was so good so see everyone and share memories.

--------------------------------

Jen was so organized and such a planner, I’m kind of surprised that she didn’t have something written down for me for today.

Jen wanted a celebration, not a gloomy funeral, so feel free to laugh at my dumb jokes.

It means a lot to see so many familiar faces here, gathered to celebrate Jen. I've known some of the people here for over 30 years. It’s hard to believe that college was that long ago. For those who don’t know me, I’m Steve. I’ve been friends with Jen since 1989.

I met Jen in our senior year of college at UCSD but didn’t really know her that well until we graduated. We both got hired by a Xerox-funded venture called XSoft. The day after graduation we got on a plane together from San Diego to a training center in VA and we talked the whole way across country. That’s where I first heard about her freshman dorm “G House” and the cast of characters that defined her time at UCSD. She made a ton of life-long friends in that crew, some of whom I later got to be friends with too. While G House scattered across the globe after graduation, there were plenty of reunions. Skiing, camping...I remember most but not all of a week in Bermuda where JP hosted a bunch of us from the states. We got around the island by boat and scooter. The boats were awesome, but the scooters were a bad idea. I think Bob Siverson crashed a scooter into Jen and me. Or maybe she crashed into me and him. Or maybe the three of us just tripped over a scooter that was parked outside a bar. I don’t know, one way or another I’m pretty sure I remember us on the ground with a scooter on top of us. Over the years, she told me tons of stories about G House, and a lot of those people ended up being in her life for decades.

Karen Hery was one of her closest friends during this time and she shared a couple of stories with me about Jen during college. One was how young Jen looked for her age back then. One night senior year they were hanging out down at Mission Beach when they were approached by the police, not because the officers thought they were drinking underage but because they thought Jen was a minor out after curfew. She was 21. Another time, Jen was walking in Del Mar to catch local transit to campus when a big yellow school bus pulled up beside her because the driver thought she was a middle schooler who had missed her ride.

For those first 5 years after college, Jen and I worked together at XSoft. It was a tech start-up atmosphere before such things were trendy, and we learned a ton about software engineering and management from amazing mentors like Don Vale and Jim Hamerly. We worked long hours, but mostly I remember the great friends we made there and all the fun things we did. Camping, skiing, volleyball, concerts, pub crawls.

We went separate ways professionally after XSoft, but we stayed deeply involved in each other’s careers and lives. She switched from engineering to marketing for Expersoft, then web development at Cyberworks, before finally finding a home at Intuit where she was an engineering manager for 23 years. She always had great advice for me as I succeeded and failed at a couple of start-ups. She’d nudge me once in a while to work with her at Intuit, and I actually did end up there for a year between gigs. The best part of that year was seeing up close the career she built for herself, and how she had won the respect of a huge organization within a wildly successful company filled with some of the smartest engineers in the industry. She fit right in. Jen was brilliant.

Jen was also fearless. She valued experiences over stuff, and she sought out adventure wherever she could. Want to go scuba diving in Hawaii? Sure, sign me up for scuba lessons. What would it be like to backpack from TJ to Cabo? Let's find out...when do we leave? My company just bought 2 Segways, what do we do with them? Let's have a jousting tournament! I have a picture of Jen petting a CA Gray whale that's 4 times the size of the little ponga we're sitting in, out in the middle of a bay in the middle of nowhere Mexico. She ran marathons. She and Kori ran a crazy 200 mile 24 hour relay race from Calistoga to Santa Cruz together. She bungeed out of a hot air balloon. She did a 50 mile bike race from Rosarito to Ensenada. She was bad-ass.

I do know one thing she was afraid of...moray eels. We were on a live-aboard, a scuba diving boat that you literally live on for a week, diving in Australia at the Great Barrier Reef. There was this one spot where they told us a large moray eel had gotten used to people and would frequently be seen swimming among the divers. This scared the crap out of her. She had no issues with sharks, we saw plenty of those. But the idea of an eel outside its cave swimming around with us all free, wiggly, and exposed…that was way outside her comfort zone. Well, we were diving together near that spot when I heard her scream. That’s right, I actually heard her scream through her regulator underwater. Something had bit her on the arm and she was sure she was getting eaten by a giant eel. I was behind her, so I saw that it was just an uppity little triggerfish, about the size of my fist. The bite didn't even break the skin. I laughed so hard I nearly drowned. Jen was a great diver. I could tell you stories about diving with turtles and sharks in Hawaii, dolphins and penguins in New Zealand, cuttlefish and manta rays in Australia.

We did a lot of cool things together in our 20s.. While we were having all that fun, we were also figuring out what the hell it meant to be an adult. She was determined to plot an intentional course through life. She experimented, researched, was always moving forward and improving herself, and challenging me to do the same. And oh my god, there were books. So many books. On relationships, on career, on tech, on investing, on spirituality, on fitness, on travel. I did my best to keep up.

Oh yeah, and there was a psychic. I don't remember the details, but there was definitely a psychic that one time. I think that was to figure out if the guy she was dating was a keeper or not. Spoiler alert, he wasn’t.

Two more things about Jen: She loved animals and she had a great sense of humor. A good example of both of these things is when she adopted her shepard-mix dog “Cookie” from the shelter not knowing at the time that sweet Cookie was the devil incarnate. Whenever strangers would pass by this snarling, hateful pup they would ask “What kind of dog is THAT” and Jen would reply with a deadpan voice “A chihote. Half chihuahua and half coyote” and then would smugly walk away leaving the other person with the most bewildered expression on their face.

Despite all the time we spent together and all the things we had in common, we never dated. But we talked about dating other people a lot. What to look for in a person, how to meet them, what to do once we found them. How one of us was totally screwing up by dating this person or that person who didn’t fit the criteria we’d agreed were important.

Lucky for me, Jen liked Kori from day one. They were both smart, funny, and adventurous. They bonded instantly. Jen immediately made Kori feel like one of the gang, and they built a beautiful friendship. I remember a party at my house, early in my relationship with Kori, where Jen pulled me outside to tell me Kori was special, and that I better not screw it up.

Things worked out the same way in reverse, but it took just a little longer. I wish I had some great story about when I met Brad for the first time, but honestly, I’m old and my memory sucks. I think we just all went out to a bar in PB and I don’t remember the details at all. But I do remember the exact moment when I knew Brad was the right guy for Jen. Brad, Jen, Karen, Baby Emily, Kori and I were on a ski trip together, staying at Karen’s cabin in Truckee. Jen took a bad fall off of a sled and hit her head on the ice. We got her to the hospital, and they needed to keep her there for a few days. I was trying to figure out logistics so I could stay with her at the hospital...how to get time off of work, how to change flights, how to get a place to stay, all that. Brad took me aside and just said, “I got this. I’ll make sure she’s ok, and I’ll call you every day with updates.” He took charge, made sure she had the best care, and got her home safely. I had no idea at the time that this was foreshadowing the amazing care and support Brad would provide to Jen over the rest of her life. They built a 23 year marriage that was an inspiration for the rest of us.

We all ended up doing so much together. We were in each other’s weddings. In fact, Jen put on a tux and was one of my groom’s men. We were there for each other’s baby showers. We were among the first to meet each others’ kids when they were born. We went to all of each others’ parties. Nobody and I mean NOBODY could put on a Halloween party like The Creagers. And of course, we traveled a lot together in those years.

Jen saved Kori’s life on one of those trips. We were vacationing together on the Big Island in Hawaii in 2006...Jen & Brad, me & Kori, Diane and Dave Masser-Frye and all of our kids.. Jen and Kori were out on a morning run together when a monster 6.7 earthquake hit. They were running next to a big stone wall, and a giant boulder came crashing down. Jen pushed Kori off the trail to safety. They made it back to our condo safely, and we spent the rest of the day at the top of the tallest hill in the area, eating donuts, riding out aftershocks, and waiting for a tsunami that thankfully never came.

As the years went by the Clarks moved to the coast and The Creagers moved to Scripps Ranch. We grew apart by miles but not by closeness. This next stage in Jen’s life was her most important one yet. It was motherhood, and she OWNED this role. Watching her balance career, marriage, and parenting was amazing. She and Brad put so much of their lives into their girls, and especially the Irish dance community. They traveled the world for competitions. She loved Cadi and Delaney with her whole heart and couldn’t have been more proud of them both.

I don’t want to talk much about the cancer that took Jen from us, other than to say she approached it in classic Jen style. She was fearless. She did the research, she experimented with different therapies, she added the CLL community as a new circle of friends in addition to her many other communities, and they were lucky to have her. She balanced the new role of “patient” with her priorities as co-worker, friend, sister, wife, and mother. She did not lie down and take her diagnoses as the end to the joyous part of her life. She fought tooth and nail in true Jen fashion to get the exact right treatments and care she needed. She did not waste any of the precious time she earned. She traveled, spent time with those she loved, and tied up all the loose ends she could.

Jen’s story isn’t done yet. I will still feel her influence all the time. Whenever I have a big decision to make, I will talk to Jen about it. She’s still a great listener. She will still ask all the right questions. She will still help me think twice before I do something dumb, and will encourage me to learn and grow and seek adventure wherever I can. 

I would always say of our friendship that it was meant to be. When our kids were very young, So young, Delaney was still in her mother’s arms. we joined the same church.

Then, one day, Jen came up to me and said, I think our kids go to the same dance studio…. and that was the beginning of a friendship that made my world bigger and brighter.

Jennifer is the smartest person I’ve ever met. I’ve always judged intelligence not only by how much you have but how you use it and Jennifer knew how to use it. She was an engineer who could coach, educate, and still go out of her way to tell you where your contributions benefitted what ever you were working on.

We found ourselves on the same committee volunteering to raise moneyto map the genome of an aggressive form of breast cancer. I loved her careful, logical way to navigate a huge group into a consensus. This would often come in handy when we started to travel together and she managed to find a place with good beer, non spicy food, and a decent glass of Chardonnay for me.

Jennifer’s other volunteering was wide and focused on the people she loved. While she was leading teams at Intuit and moving up the corporate ladder, she made the time to also teach art at the girls’ school, help with building websites and apps for supporting causes she loved and together we also taught Sunday school. Each quarter we would get together at her kitchen counter and select the lessons…We had one rule about lessons, no food (aka nothing too sticky, or that made kids sticky).

She was also a fantastic friend and supporter when it came to Irish dance. She was the person who read all the boards and understood the requirements for dresses, teams, wigs and gems. Jennifer loved gems especially pink ones. I remember the first time she said to me, do you go to Feises? That was also the beginning of our world travels together. We were either headed to a competition or scheduling a vacation around one. If you have a friend who is a planner and knows what a good spreadsheet looks like, Hold onto them tightly, they are a precious gift.

Jennifer’s heart also showed in her relationships with other women. She was the one who fixed your crown without ever telling you it was crooked. She’s the person who shared her knowledge as fast as she gained it. Whether investing, negotiating, and more recently real estate. She also mentored junior women at Intuit, and started monthly women’s networking groups.

In these days since we lost her, my chest tightens and the pain is excruciating thinking Delaney, Cadi and Brad - about the grand canyon size hole she has left.

Jen was a precious gift, and I cherish all of our time together - we climbed mountains, swam in the ocean, and toasted our amazing families at a variety of beautiful locations. There is a piece of my heart that is chipped away- never to be the same. I’m sad and grateful at the same time to have known her and be a part of her world. My world will always be a little dimmer without her here.

I hope you remember her as we do, a dear friend, sister, mother, wife and adventurer- who inspired, loved and made this world brighter

I always loved Jennifer's fun and wit.. every time I was in California for my family visits we met on the Feis weekends. 

Jenn I will never forget the sing sing we had in the Hilton Bay in San Diego the night during the Feis.. Your rendition of Black Velvet Shawl with Ciara and myself was epic.. 

You were always welcoming to me every year I got to visit Ciara and my Californian family.  

Sometimes life takes the best out of us.. rest in peace love.. 😞

Jennifer and I connected online on CLL Forum shortly after she was diagnosed – I was 7 years younger than her but 3 years ahead of her in terms of living with this incurable disease. We had the same markers and, as mothers of young children, the same worries about being there for them as long as we were able to be.

The average CLL patient is a 72 year old man so Jennifer and I were very much outliers and we grew close on the forum because of that. Both of us had aggressive disease that wouldn’t behave for too long on any treatment, we were both told at diagnosis we had a difficult path, and we would spend hours researching and sharing clinical trials we had found with each other at odd hours of the night.

Being on opposite sides of the planet we were able to comfort each other when the rest of our friends and family slept, only we understood what we were both facing and nights were often the hardest.

Over the past few days I’ve read through my many conversations with Jennifer – we were such support to each other – we calmed each other down when we got bad results, celebrated the good and there is such kindness in her messages.

I was so lucky to meet Jennifer in the flesh at a Cancer Conference in San Diego a few years ago when she was still on her first treatment. When I had my most serious relapse and treatment with a phase one trial of CAR-T I kept a blog and Jennifer commented on every post and sent me a book to thank me for sharing my journey. It was a path she would take herself only a year later but unfortunately her disease by then had transformed into a much more aggressive Lymphoma and she was bravely fighting a much more difficult disease – we both knew how much harder it was becoming.

Her tenacity gave her two more years – I swear she could have become a doctor such was her level of understanding of medical research – she was just so super smart and I was very lucky to share one of the hardest parts of my life with her.

But our conversations weren’t all about cancer - she was so proud of her beautiful girls and the Irish dance world gave her so much joy and was a wonderful distraction from the stress she was facing with her health – she loved sharing photos and videos with me and I loved seeing them.

Her family was everything and she was so excited when she and Brad bought their second condo in Hawaii – I promised when we were both well I’d visit her in Maui and we spoke about her coming to Australia when she was well enough too. She said that ‘it would be so fun to hang out with you and your family”.

My final message is for Cadi and Delaney – I’m so sorry your Mum isn’t here but she got you both to adulthood and that is what we both dreamt of doing for our children. And she has helped so many other patients by doing clinical trials – others will live because she took part in them. I know this isn’t much comfort to you now, but I hope one day you’ll be able to read your Mums immense contributions to the leukaemia community – she did so much to help other patients and I’ll share what I can with your Aunt so you can hear her voice in that world when you’re up to it. She helped so many of us and I’ll miss her enormously. I’m devastated that she’s gone but she will always be with you and you will both go on to do so much because of her. I pray your memories will give you so much comfort and know she did everything she possibly could have to outrun her poor prognosis and she was just so very proud of you both.

Much love to you and your Dad from the other side of the globe. Sending you massive hugs from Australia and thinking of you all today particularly - I’m so sorry I’m not able to be at the memorial service.

Deborah Henderson