The Nevada Sagebrush

Alicia Parlette. Photo by Monique Sady/Photography by Monique.

Alicia Parlette’s former journalism professors remember her dedication the most. She was going places in the writing world, and in her time at the University of Nevada, Reno, that was obvious to them.

“She was driven and that was quite apparent after our first meeting,” Paul Mitchell, one of those professors, said. “She just had it. Whatever it is, she had it.”

That was even before she wrote an award-winning series of columns about her diagnosis with a rare cancer, which killed Parlette last Thursday after a five-year battle. She was 28.

While her journalism professors will remember her for her dedication, thousands around the world will remember her for her writing — a 17-part series she wrote documenting her own battles with the soft part alveolar sarcoma that ultimately spread from her hip to her lungs, breast and brain, and her struggle to accept a terminal diagnosis at such a young age.

Parlette wrote the series documenting her treatment for the San Francisco Chronicle, which was later reprinted as a book, “Alicia’s Story.” Written about a month after she was first diagnosed with cancer, Parlette ended her first column by finding a positive light in the devastating news she’d just received.

“In the worst of all circumstances, if I go through this life-changing ordeal and my body just wears out and I die, I will die a writer. The one thing I’ve always wanted to be,” Parlette wrote in June 2005.

Even in her final days, Parlette stayed focused on writing. On a portable voice recorder, she took notes that her family hopes to transcribe and she listened to her favorite book, “To Kill A Mockingbird”, which her former English teacher read to her and finished minutes before Parlette died.

Parlette, a UNR alumna, graduated summa cum laude in 2004 with a promising future. After internships at the Sacramento Bee and the Philadelphia Inquirer, Parlette landed a fellowship working as a copy editor at the Chronicle, a position she described as her dream job.

Mitchell, who remembers coaching Parlette in editing drills in her spare time, said he wasn’t surprised when she was awarded the fellowship to work at the Chronicle. Mitchell said that when he heard Parlette would be working there, he gave her the name of a friend at that paper, Latricia Ransom. Ransom had already met Parlette, though — she was on the committee that awarded her the fellowship at the paper and was already impressed.

“She was easy to work with,” Ransom, who worked as a copy editor at the Chronicle with Parlette, said. “We shared the same sense of humor … It made the days go by faster.”

Ransom, whose working relationship with Parlette quickly developed into a strong friendship, said that after the initial shock of her terminal diagnosis, Parlette started finding ways to deal with it.

“She just faced it head-on, and I really admire her for that,” said Ransom, who said she never liked telling Alicia she was brave because “She probably got enough e-mails (from readers) saying that.”

While she loved copy editing at the Chronicle, Parlette was anxious to find a more creative outlet and used her cancer as a way to write again.

In that series, she detailed from her experience drew thousands of responses. Some readers even traveled to Parlette’s bedside in her final weeks. It also won her a prestigious writing award from her alma mater.

“Alicia knew it was a major story; it just happened to be about her,” Warren Lerude, an emeritus professor of journalism at UNR, said. “(But) she didn’t shy away from it because of that, and many thousands of people read it … I can’t imagine any journalist writing any story better or more completely than she wrote that.”

After Parlette’s tumors caused a hip fracture and made it difficult to breathe, she checked into the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center April 2. In the following weeks, her pain increased but her spirits stayed high, Pat Purkey, her godmother, said.

Even while in the hospital, she was able to joke with concerned family and friends to lighten the mood around her.

“She loved laughter, and definitely wanted us to laugh while we were there,” Shannon Szameitat, a college friend who visited Alicia in the hospital earlier this month, said. “She was joking about how she got to tell us all what to do while she just laid in the bed. When we asked, ‘What are we, peons?’ she replied, ‘No, just the joyful proletariat.’”

The timing of the joke sent Szameitat and others in the room into bouts of laughter, Szameitat said.

That laughter did a good job of hiding the pain Parlette was in while in her hospital bed, which was the point, Jeannette Smith, another friend from college, said.

“We were laughing and joking, but when a nurse came in and asked what her pain level was, she said it was a seven (out of 10),” Smith said. “You would never have known. She didn’t want people to hurt because of her.”

Purkey said the laughter so many people will remember was still there when Parlette was moved into hospice care in her final weeks of life.

“There was a small group of (friends) that decided they were going to be sort of gatekeepers for Alicia and make sure someone was always there with her,” Purkey said. “We jokingly started calling them the lionesses.”

It wasn’t long until the group managed to sneak Parlette’s dog, Clarabelle, into her hospital room. The hospital’s stringent rules forbade the dog from visiting the ICU, but Clarabelle’s presence put Parlette at ease, Purkey said.

Ultimately, however, the pain medications and trouble breathing wore Parlette down until she was slipping in and out of consciousness.

“The last time I was (in San Francisco), I wanted to have our goodbye speech, but she was too sedated to hear what I was saying,” Purkey, who knew Parlette since birth and introduced her parents to each other, said, sobbing. “Instead, I had to write her a letter.”

Parlette’s younger brother Matt read the letter to her shortly before she died, Purkey said. In the letter was a passage Purkey said she wrote about the thousands of people Parlette touched with her writing.

The passage sums up Parlette’s impact on the world she left behind: “In 28 years, God has given you the legacy of a person who is a hundred years old.”

Parlette’s family plans to hold a private memorial service. Whether a public service will be held has not been announced.

Jay Balagna can be reached at jbalagna@nevadasagebrush.com.

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