It is a story that never let go. Not after her freshman year at Harvard, which I chronicled for the Globe in a 2005 series. Not after the “farewell’’ dinner we shared in Harvard Square after final exams that next spring. And not in the years since. Because Emily would not permit it.
Emily Crockett, 26, died Sunday from complications linked to a childhood tumor in her brain. From her home in Worcester, from her college desk at Harvard’s Pforzheimer House, from her hospital room at Massachusetts General Hospital and finally from the hospice bed where she died this week, Emily presided over a constellation of friends, colleagues, caregivers, musicians, doctors, and family members who had charted, and cheered, her remarkable journey.
It was difficult not to.
Hers was the story of the little curly-haired girl who could sweetly sing herself to sleep in her bedroom, but would not tolerate a perceived injustice whether it be from a grammar school teacher or - much later - a college administrator.
When she was 6, doctors discovered malignant, star-shaped cells near her brain stem - a golf ball-sized tumor they removed in a five-hour operation that would change but could not define her life.
Before she was wheeled into surgery, Emily - in a direct and disarming fashion familiar to those close to her - wrote 10 questions for her surgeon, Dr. Alan R. Cohen, or “Big Al’’ as she unfailingly called him.
“How big a spot will thay cut off on the side of my head?’’ she wrote on lined composition paper she decorated with a flower, a heart and two stars. “Do you think I will need a wig?’’
Cohen operated on Nov. 13, 1991 - a date that Emily dubbed her “Al-iversary’’ and on which she expected and often received a telephone call from him. Or he got one from her.
In the years that followed, the Crocketts - her parents, Walter and Valerie, and her older brother Jackson - helped write a story of success and achievement against often brutal and depressing medical bulletins, which they buffered with goofball humor and the folk music they made in their kitchen.
