A blow: Cancer strikes Diane

Fourth of five parts.

Diane Muraglia was 53 and schoolgirlishly giddy with the news that she and Ed Kelly had decided to marry.

"I'm getting married. I'm getting married," she'd say to her first cousins, showing off the emerald-cut citrine engagement ring that she and Ed had picked out at a shop in Liberty Place.

Diane's elation was short-lived. As she was imagining a happily-ever-after with Ed, her parents learned she had bladder cancer.

Her doctors believed they could save her life, but only if she consented to removing her bladder, which would require her to use an ostomy bag, an external bag that collects urine. The news came in the spring of 2004, just before one of Ed's twice-a-year visits from England. Her parents, Thelma and Pat, waited for his arrival so they could all accompany Diane to the doctor's office for the difficult diagnosis.

When Diane learned that her bladder would have to be removed, she protested and started to cry. Ed knelt by her side and begged her to go through with it. "I lost my sister and my mother to cancer," he said. "I don't want to lose you, too."

"It was the worst feeling I ever had in my life," he said of that moment. "It shook me to my bones."

Back at home, Diane asked Ed if he would still love her after the operation. "Of course I will," he said, taking her hand.

Still, Diane's cancer changed the hopeful arc of her unexpected love story in an instant. It was as if someone had sneaked into a movie theater and switched reels, from a sunny Technicolor musical to a black-and-white Ingmar Bergman film.

Beating the cancer proved to be the relatively easy part for Diane, who had known health-related struggles ever since she had been born with epilepsy and a shaky right hand and leg.

But the life-altering surgery had an unexpectedly powerful psychological impact. The usually cheerful Diane grew deeply depressed and prone to severe anxiety attacks.

She rarely responded to Ed's e-mail and text messages or would fire off a harsh or snippy note. She told Ed she didn't want him to visit, even as he sent flowers and begged to come.

Ed couldn't possibly love her in her present condition, she believed. "I thought he was telling me one thing and thinking another."

This reversal of fortune was a cruel blow to her elderly parents, sucking the air out of their newfound hope that Ed would be there to care for Diane after they were gone.

"How could God do this to her?" Thelma asked over and over.

They encouraged her to join an ostomy support group, but she wanted nothing to do with that. They made appointments with therapists. And they pushed her to keep talking to Ed.

Once he even bought a ticket to fly over, but she told him she didn't want to see him. A year passed.

"Diane was so down," he remembered.

In the spring of 2005, her parents urged Ed to visit, their last hope for lifting Diane from her despair.

"One day Thelma called me to tell me that Diane was ready to speak and we had a good natter [chat], and not long after I came over and I remember how well she did walking around Rittenhouse Square," Ed said.

As if someone had thrown a light switch, Diane became her old self.

She and Ed went back to their favorite haunts, the Art Museum and jazz concerts at the Kimmel Center, their pace a bit slower.

And they revisited plans to marry. Ed hired a lawyer to help navigate the complex post-9/11 immigration process so he could live with Diane in Philadelphia.

But now the couple faced another hurdle: the rapidly deteriorating health of Diane's parents. Shortly after Ed flew back to England, Pat was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The growth was benign, but a few months after surgery, he had a second brain tumor and more surgery.

At 83, with the crushing handshake of a younger man, he now had to use a cane and was told not to drive. But with his wife and daughter dependent on him for transportation, he was behind the wheel in no time.

The many months of Pat's illness and recovery put any wedding plans or talk of Ed visiting on hold. It was just too stressful for Thelma and Diane to think about much else. And the back-to-back medical crises made Thelma think that it was time to leave their Packer Park home of 40 years.

In the summer of 2006, they packed a lifetime of belongings and moved to an assisted-living home in the city, where Ed, who didn't drive, would feel more comfortable, if and when he arrived permanently. They hated it. They would move three more times in the next 15 months before settling in at Plush Mills in Wallingford.

With all the upheaval, Diane couldn't focus on a future with Ed, even as he continued to e-mail and text. The family's fragility was at the forefront.

"I had to be there for Mom. It felt like a never-ending cycle of bad news," Diane said.

That Thanksgiving, yet another crisis unfolded. Thelma, 82, was rushed to the emergency room, holding on to her distraught daughter's hand as long as she could as they wheeled her out of the apartment on a gurney.

Thelma had cancer - and this time, the diagnosis was not hopeful. Some of Diane's melancholy returned as her mother underwent surgery and spent a month in a nursing home.

The life that she had envisioned for herself the night that Ed had proposed to her three years earlier had not materialized. There was no timetable for her British fiance to move to Philadelphia. No talk of a wedding date.

"I felt like this was never going to happen for me," Diane said.

But as her 57th birthday approached, life was about to throw Diane one more curveball, and it would be a doozy.

Inquirer reporter Kathy Boccella grew up with Diane Muraglia, her first cousin, and witnessed the evolution of Diane's unexpected romance. Boccella also traveled to Leeds, England, to report on Edward Kelly's life there.EndText

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