Dina was a member of this forum and posted here within 2 weeks of her death. Condolences to her family, particularly her 4 young children. My heart goes out to them.
The following is an article that appeared on the front page of the UK Guardian on 30th Oct '07.
Known to thousands of readers for writing about the disease, Rabinovitch, 44, had a relationship with the Guardian that stretched back more than 20 years, embracing journalism about children's literature, the family court, women's issues, education policy, features and celebrity interviews.
But it was for her humorous and unflinching chronicle of her battle with cancer that Rabinovitch became best known. Her last Guardian column ran less than two weeks ago.
Her fortnightly columns in the Guardian's G2 section were collected into a book, Take Off Your Party Dress: When Life's Too Busy For Breast Cancer.
More recently her blog, Take Off Your Running Shoes succeeded in raising more than £67,000, without, as she put it, running a marathon.
Her target for the appeal, to expand the cancer research team at Mount Vernon Cancer Centre, was to raise £100,000.
"There is no template for the way I am living now," she wrote in her final column for the Guardian, which ran the Monday before last, October 22.
"I check out the depressingly regular obituaries, the ages always similar - 46, 41, 48, leaving behind a son, a daughter, two children, maybe three.
"But these quite long pieces, sometimes more than 1,000 words, are careful to emphasise the lives and the achievements, what was managed despite the illness, rather than talking about how, actually, one is supposed to live each day with the illness."
A regular contributor to the Guardian women's page for more than 20 years, Rabinovitch was also an uncompromising critic of the family court, and as a pro-mothers campaigner frequently arguing that it should not be closed to public scrutiny.
In her final Guardian column Rabinovitch speculated on death. "Because I am young - 44 feels young to me, too young to die - or perhaps because I haven't had much to do with dying, I compare it with the things I know," she wrote.
"What it felt like most of all was that moment towards the end of labour, but still with hours to go, when you utterly reject any lingering notions of natural childbirth and you are yelling for the epidural. In this case it's morphine. Something to take away the physical pain, to relieve the fear."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007...sandpublishing
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