"THE SORROW OF THE SUDDEN DEATH differs from the slow dying that announces itself, then lumbers toward soon but unknown time," Utah poet laureate Ken Brewer wrote for USU's memorial service for the nine men killed this fall in a university van accident.

Brewer crafted a poem that resonates with the raw wisdom of uncensored experience. On June 10, 2005, the retired USU English professor was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The poems poured out of him, 55 pages in six weeks. As humble and honest in the twilight of his writing career as he was at its vigorous height, he began emailing his poems to Star Coulbrooke '96 '99MA, a former student and colleague, who forwarded them on to hundreds of people across the country. When the cancer spread to his liver, he was just as candid about his terminal prognosis as he was about the chemotherapy and radiation treatments that withered his athletic frame, faded his voice and confined him to his home. His days of public readings over, friends and colleagues read for him - in a Salt Lake City bookstore and for a Utah Public Radio show. After 40 years of prolific poetry writing and publishing in relative obscurity, seemingly overnight he became a national celebrity. The Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune, the U's Radio West and CBS News interviewed him at his bedside.

"I decided right away I'm not going to hide this thing," he told Lee Austin in his Utah Public Radio interview. "I knew I couldn't heal my body. But I could heal my psyche, my spirit. And that's where the writing comes in. It's my avenue for teaching myself how to live with cancer, how to live with the certainty of death."

Former students and colleagues stopped by to pay their respects. Donald M. Murray of the Boston Globe was one of many strangers touched. In a column for his newspaper, he wrote, Ken "tells us, without saying it directly, here is what it's like. I'm living your fear and find gratitude for the life I have had, the beauty of family, friends, flowers, memories and each sunrise. No pity, no premature mourning. Ken is doing what writers do, articulating the thoughts and feelings of those of us who are inarticulate, putting his illness in the context of human experience, reminding us of the precious lives we have lived, and telling us to pay attention to the beauty that lies in the commonplace, the ordinary, the too often overlooked."

English Department head Jeffrey Smitten, a close friend, said, "He's writing the best poetry of his life. He took his writing capacity and surrounded this thing, and in a spiritual sense he beat it."

Having outlived the prognoses of two doctors, Brewer hopes to still be around in February for the birth of his first great-grandchild, a boy. His other wish: "To go in the middle of a sentence, pen in hand, surrounded by my family, the people I love." His wife of 27 years, English professor Bobbie Stearman. His two grown children and NUMBER grandchildren. "The physical body, it's amazing what it can tolerate. I've been through incredible pain. So I know I can deal with that," he told Radio West's Doug Fabrizio. "I just want to be able to use my mind right up to the end." -Jane Koerner. POEM