A Prayer Before Dying

Then Berger came in and told her that the tumor was, indeed, GBM. It would take a miracle to keep her alive. He recommended she begin radiation treatments. She considered it.

She went home, to the house she shared with Comings in Bernal Heights. Her voice was two octaves higher - "like Marilyn Monroe on helium," she joked, and so she rented a bunch of Marilyn Monroe movies. Otherwise, she seemed miraculously fine. She responded to email and talked on the telephone in the afternoons. Each morning, she followed a disciplined schedule to get her energy flowing: 6 am, qigong; 7 am, yoga; 8 am, walk; 9 am, meditation.

One night, 10 days after the surgery, Targ came down to the living room, where Comings was working. She sat in his lap and cried as she told him her fear: "Knowing where this tumor is located, there's a good chance I will end up with thalamic pain syndrome. It's the worst thing one can possibly get."

Two days later, the early symptoms began. Pain on her left side. Needing a lot of assistance to walk, then needing a wheelchair. She could no longer see the computer screen, let alone focus her eyes - indication the tumor had reached the optic nerve, which runs through the thalamus. She went to the hospital, and another MRI revealed that the tumor was spreading in great long tentacles over the corpus callosum, from the right brain to the left. Berger described it as "galloping," and he insisted she begin five-day-a-week radiation immediately. This time she relented.

Were the Healers She Believed in Any Help?

They tried. Word of Targ's illness had spread worldwide. Web sites kept track of her progress and made it seem that she would survive. Healing circles everywhere prayed for her. On Wednesday nights on a hill above Silicon Valley, friends and followers gathered in prayer. Many had never met Targ, but they knew her work and thought of her as their patron saint. They had fought off death themselves, or they had lost loved ones, and had felt the power of prayer in their own battles.

Her bedroom turned into a circus. Healers from everywhere showed up wanting to help. It was rarely peaceful and quiet. There was Phillip Scott, a Lakota sun dancer who burned sage; Nicolai Levashov, a Russian psychic who waved his hands; Harriet Bienfield, an acupuncturist with rare Chinese herbs; Desda Zuckerman, an energy worker who used techniques inspired by the ancient methods of the Miwok peoples. The reverend Rosalyn Bruyere phoned often, trying to get on Targ's schedule. And, of course, there was her father, Russell, urging her to meditate, calm her mind, go to that place.

Targ tried. She didn't believe that any particular one of these healers had the power to cure her, but she believed in the general notion that her life was in the hands of a mystical force. She knew her medical doctors had practically no chance of saving her life. We are optimistic beings - we choose to live - and our hope has to vest in something.

In the future, there may be a breakthrough in screening procedures and chemotherapy regimes so that brain cancer is somehow treatable. But that future is no help today. To science, Targ is just a data point. On the value of her life, on the possibility of saving it, science faded into a mute bystander. So she put her faith in these healers, and some tried to take advantage of it.

One was a man who claims to be the last existing Druid. Targ felt he really had a gift. Now she needed him. But he was stuck in France, recently deported. He offered to help if she would clear up his INS problems; then he wanted Comings to get him a job at the NSA in counterterrorism. Then he called again; this time, he offered to help for free, if Targ would convince another family to pay him $250,000 to save their dying loved one.

Nicolai Levashov urged Targ not to have radiation. He argued that it was killing her healthy brain cells. The radiation was painful; it left purple burns on her scalp. She dreaded the late-morning sessions. Levashov insisted he had been able to stop the cancer telepathically and isolate it inside a membrane. An MRI showed the tentacles had retreated; this was almost certainly due to the radiation, but Levashov claimed credit for it. His words finally won her over. One morning, she woke up and announced, "That's it. I'm not going to submit myself to the fire-breathing dragons." She picked up the phone, called the radiology department, and told them, "I feel like you're burning me at the stake!" She stopped going.

A week later, the pain worsened, and she checked herself into the hospital. Now admitted, Targ would receive radiation whether she liked it or not. So one morning, the orderly arrived at her room to wheel her to radiology. Targ was wearing a Viking hat over a gold foil wig and waving a staff that had once belonged to an African shaman. She pronounced, "I am going to slay the dragons!"

The orderly didn't recognize her. "Who are you?"

"I am a psychiatrist on the staff of this hospital!" she stated proudly.

Why did she join the circus? As the cancer progressed, Targ felt increasingly guilty that she was letting the movement down. Forget the year and a half most people get. Her charts told her she had only months. To send all the healers away would signal the end of hope.

So she let the circus go on, even though its zaniness brought chaos rather than peace. She ate her miserable macrobiotic gruel, and she meditated as best she could despite the excruciating pain. There was a poster on the wall in her hospital room on how to go about adopting a baby. She read it in tears, knowing even if she survived they would never let her adopt. So she and Comings decided to get a puppy. And they had the wedding exactly as planned.

On May 4, she and 150 of the Bay Area's parapsychology royalty converged in Tiburon, on waterfront land owned by the Audubon Society. She could barely walk down the aisle. She'd had a craniotomy and was missing her hair. Her wedding dress had to be refit twice because she'd lost so much weight. The left side of her face was not working properly. Yet she sat nobly and beamed. When most people get married, there's a part of the ceremony about always sticking together, for better or for worse. Targ's worse was already upon her. There would be no honeymoon. Making a lifetime commitment in the face of that tragedy left no eyes dry.

Back at the hospital, she wore her ring proudly.

She had one friend with whom she let her guard down, let herself be a normal dying person. When her friend walked into the room, they would both burst into tears.

"What are we going to do!?" they cried.

"I'm craving chocolate," Targ once confessed to her friend. "Sneak me some?"

"Why? Jesus, if you've only got four weeks, don't make it torture. Enjoy what you can."

"I don't want them to know." She was supposed to be macrobiotic.

Her friend became angry. There was too much pressure on Targ to be that poster girl. Targ didn't think of it that way. She was a doctor. She knew her bounds: When someone is about to lose a loved one, never deny them their faith.

Even if you are that loved one.

What Too Few People Know About Targ's Famous AIDS Study

That her study had been unblinded and then "reblinded" to scour for data that confirmed the thesis - and the Western Journal of Medicine did not know this fact when it decided to publish.

Continued on page 6: »