We sat at a table in the Grand Forks home she shared with her parents, Karen and Rich, and big brother Dylan, and Ali talked like the fresh teenager she was – about favorite colors (lime green and purple) and about learning to play the clarinet. She said she was looking to the future with hope, citing a phrase from the Psalms, “… for I am with you,” as a favorite verse.
And then with her mother’s help, she told a stark, hard to hear story in numbers, the story of her life since high-risk acute lymphoblastic leukemia was diagnosed on March 16, 2007.
Five bone marrow biopsies.
Twenty-three lumbar punctures.
Eight cranial radiation treatments.
Six hundred thirty-eight days of chemo.
Seventy-two days in hospitals, 129 visits to clinics, 13 trips to emergency rooms.
Four strokes.
She had suffered multiple compression fractures of her vertebrae, excruciatingly painful, requiring her to wear a “turtle brace” for 13 months. For six months, she had to use a wheelchair or walker to get around.
This kid, I kept thinking as I wrote down the numbers. This sweet, courageous kid.
Between 11 years old and 13, she had had 19 X-rays, six CT-scans and four MRIs. She had made 20 visits to a psychologist and 34 to physical therapy. She missed 60 days of fourth grade, 98 days of fifth and 62 days of sixth.
But Ali beamed and told me that she had had her last chemo treatment that summer, and there were hopeful words from doctors, and she was so excited, so eager, to charge into seventh grade.
“I’m happy our lives can go back to normal, a little,” she said.
Normal didn’t last long.
The leukemia returned, and Ali Borgen, 14, died Jan. 24, 2011, two weeks after the "Celebration of a Lifetime" party she had asked for and helped plan. More than 1,000 people came to that party. Ali, dressed and dimpled as Pippi Longstocking, raised more than $14,000 that day so her fight could continue.
The fundraising party "was the biggest, baddest parting shot she could give cancer," the minister said at her funeral a few days later. Ali "embraced suffering and death itself by partying in the face of it."
She had asked that people come not with flowers but with bouquets of colorful balloons, which could be given to children as they left the church, and they were. Ali sent them off happy, smiling, being normal.
This kid, I thought. This sweet kid.
Not every child stricken by cancer dies. We need to remember that, to calm and reassure them, give them strength to fight and ease their fears. And we need to do what we can so more children can win the fight and know Ali’s dream – to know the peace and beauty of “everydays.”
We cannot know, most of us, what it means to lose a child. All we can do is listen, offer support, speak the names of the lost and remember.
“Ten years ago, sweet Ali took her final breath,” Karen Borgen posted last Sunday on her Facebook page. “My heart broke wide open with physical pain, anguish, and a peace that Ali and her body, exhausted from four years of treatment, were no longer suffering and in pain.
“I told her to fly as I removed every tube and bandage from her emaciated, yellowed body. I gave Ali, Mom, and myself a final matching henna tattoo. I kissed Ali's soft, beautiful bald head, told her a hundred times that I loved her. She was zipped into a body bag on our living room floor, carried out the front door, and taken away. Without me.
“Part of me has been lost and broken ever since, and it always will be. I didn't know how I could live one minute, one hour, one day without Ali. Somehow, TEN YEARS have gone by. Ten years of not seeing, hearing, smelling, or hugging her. Ten years of wondering what she would look like, what she would be doing. Ten years in a world that's muted in sound and color because of her absence. Ten years of missed milestones, holidays, and everydays.”
For a mother, a father, a brother, it must be as the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote of a friend: “The presence of her absence is everywhere.”
Mike Brown, mayor at the time of Ali’s struggle and death, invited her to lead the City Council in the Pledge of Allegiance before a meeting, and he declared Sept. 5 – Ali’s birthday – to be “Smile Wide Day” in her honor. That was Ali’s motto through all the pain and disappointment.
"She embodied the things we all respect – the courage, the reaching out to others even when she was having such a hard time," Brown said at her death. "Ali had a gift, an ability to connect with people.
"This is hard news to take. The death of a child – there are things that just should not be."
In Ali’s name, then, the fight continues. And I will never forget that sweet, courageous kid.
Chuck Haga had a long career at the Grand Forks Herald and the Minneapolis Star Tribune before retiring in 2013. He can be contacted at crhaga@gmail.com.
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