LIVERMORE – On Sunday, Darcy Wakefield asked the graduates where she spoke: “What do you plan to do with your one wild and precious and only life?”

It is a question that Wakefield, 34, has asked herself as she faces the fatal disease, ALS.

Before her diagnosis, Wakefield considered herself healthy.

She is a vegetarian, nonsmoker and drinks only moderately. She loves the outdoors and, before her illness, was an avid runner.

She’s admittedly a klutz, but in the spring of 2003 her clumsiness became a problem. In training to run in the Beach to Beacon race in Cape Elizabeth, she found she could not run very far. Her right leg became too stiff.

One day she realized she had bashed her knee from repeated falls and was having difficulty walking the quarter mile from her home to Southern Maine Community College, where she taught English.

“By the time I got to campus I was dragging my right foot behind me and it was almost numb,” she said.

Last September she consulted a neurologist, who suspected she had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

“I was shocked,” she said.

“I just kept hoping that it wasn’t ALS. It was an awful month,” she said having spent it worrying, researching and losing weight.

“The more I read (about it), the more scared I got.”

A month later she saw a specialist in Boston who confirmed she had the terminal illness, which is marked by progressive muscle atrophy starting in the limbs.

So: What does Wakefield plan to do with her one wild and precious and only life?

She plans to have a baby.

Shortly before she began to notice symptoms she met Steve Stout, a 42-year-old psychiatrist from Denver. The two met through an Internet dating service and visited each other often in the following months.

After the diagnosis, Stout decided to move to Maine to be with Wakefield. They bought a home together in Cape Elizabeth.

“He told me only days after the October appointment that he wanted to move here,” Wakefield said. “We had been talking about who would move where; it just happened a lot sooner than we had planned.”

Wanting a family was one of the things that drew the two together. So after consultations and testing to ensure that a gene mutation – one of the suspected causes of ALS – would not be passed on to their progeny, they decided to have a baby.

The couple learned in January that Wakefield is pregnant; the child is due in September, a year after she received the ALS diagnosis.

Of Stout, Wakefield said, “I wonder all the time if I could be as courageous about this as he has been if I were in his shoes.”

With courage of her own and the poise of a seasoned public speaker, Wakefield spoke to the congregation of North Livermore Baptist Church on Sunday, where her parents attend. It was graduate Sunday, a day to honor those beginning their adult journeys and she had poignant messages to pass along.

Though she would prefer not to have the disease, she said, she is thankful for the lessons it has taught her.

“We all have death sentences,” she said. “Not one of us is getting out of here alive.”

She reminded attendees to be grateful for everything they have, even during hard times.

And she encouraged the graduates to pursue their dreams.

“Pretend that you have been given two to five years (to live),” she said. “What would you do?”

jhausen@sunjournal.com

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