‘I want to be fearless’: Hamilton’s Miranda Kett inspires strangers, friends with brave battle of aggressive breast cancer

I want to be fearless," says Miranda Haley Kett, explaining why she betook herself to that city to our north, the one with the big pointy thing sticking up in the middle of it, and then got atop that big pointy thing and walked around it.

Some 2,000 feet up. The CN Tower EdgeWalk. At the perfect time - Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Miranda's 37-years-old and has had quite enough of fear. It's not that she doesn't feel it. She does and she has reason to - she has an advanced, aggressively spreading breast cancer - but in her dance with fear, she leads.

Mostly, she's determined - fear, be damned - to soak up every drop of the very moment she's in, while she's in it.

I don't want to put things off," she says. For years I've wanted to do the walk at the CN Tower. So, I did it (Friday, Oct. 22). It's scary but so is cancer. I want to be fearless."

When she learned this spring that she had cancer she debated whether to tell people (and, if so, how) or, in this age of COVID-19, to withdraw and retreat.

The upshot of her deliberations with herself is one of the bravest, most open, outgoing, forthright and ingathering responses to a health crisis one is likely to find. She told people, she posted the news, she joined groups, workshops, she gives updates. She talks about it. On social media. On Zoom. In many different ways, including fun ways. She has shown off different hats in her posts, and hair colours as she faced the prospect of losing her beautiful long hair.

Much in the spirit of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Miranda's is a dynamic, robust approach, and it's a triumph.

She has people all over the world following her, supporting her, sharing with her. Is it helping? It's helping them!

Here's a response to one of her posts. My partner, my best friend of 11 years was just diagnosed with lung cancer. It has metastasized to his brain and liver. I have followed you and your fight and I am truly inspired ... You are my hero!"

It's helping Miranda, too. The level and intensity of response have been as inspiring to her as she has been to others.

Even strangers, sending such kind messages," she tells me over Zoom, as Bowie, her beagle/Boston terrier mix wanders adorably onto the screen.

Over the summer, she dedicated each of her chemo treatments to people who've been especially supportive and encouraging to her, like her family, like friend Linda Kitchen, a colleague from Miranda's days working as a design editor at The Spectator, and Bert Blackarach, an L.A. DJ who's been corresponding in an incredibly inspiring way. He sends her quotes like, It is often in the darkest skies we see brightest stars."

Miranda has an eye for bright sides and silver linings, and so dwells on the positive, such as her short fiction piece Citrus" recently getting published, in Riddle Fence magazine, a first for her. She clings to the good news.

She seeks it. She doesn't get out much but when she does, she drinks up the world with a special relish. She went to the RBG, enjoyed the flowers more deeply, found a nest with baby robins.

New life," says Miranda. I am noticing things more and more."

Then there was the EdgeWalk. Now that's getting out, taking life by the tether. I was nervous at first, when you're first out there, and I'm a bit scared of heights but once you start leaning backwards and forwards ..." She got right it into it, and, of course, there were people there to help.

She also recently completed UCLA's entertainment art program, cramming two years into one, over Zoom, graduating with distinction, acing the screenwriting course, producing a feature length screenplay, The Evolution of Eve," about a woman who gets lost in the Amazon jungle and has to be strong. Like a hero quest.

She says she wasn't trying to make it an allegory of her own situation but maybe it came up subconsciously."

This past April she felt a hard lump in her breast. The doctors, initially optimistic because she's so young, found a tumour. Then, seven biopsies later, they found four more. Advanced stage breast cancer, Her2positive. It spread - lymph nodes, skin.

She doesn't pretend it's anything but extremely hard - her altered sense of self; hair loss; the chemo causing headaches, nausea, rashes, blurry vision, hot flashes.

She wants children. Miranda has a bucket list - Skywalk was on it; check that off. Wanting children, though, is something more primal. There's a danger that what she's undergoing can be a catalyst of early menopause.

I went through some fertility treatments," she tells me. They didn't take. So she worries.

At the same time, she learned, earlier this year, that her father in Sudbury has kidney cancer.

In the post she sent in the spring announcing that she was dealing with cancer she wrote: As some of you know, I battled a liver tumour (in 2015) and won - gratitude to family/friends/coworkers). I AM STRONG!"

All caps. It's a lot, it's too much, but she is strong. It took a year to recover from the liver surgery, but she came through.

Now, she's soaking up the present as much as she can.

Soon, she goes into surgery to remove a breast and lymph node and then, radiation.

She's brave. She's strong. There's fear but she is fearless, and as the song says, Miranda, and as you learned at the edge of the CN tower and at the edge of endurance, as you learned online and from your friends (and strangers), you will never walk alone."

Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator. Reach him via email: jmahoney@thespec.com