By Jodi Hausen,Staff Writer

“Living life with a death sentence, I’m learning, doesn’t mean dying,” Wakefield wrote in her recently published book, “I Remember Running: The Year I Got Everything I Ever Wanted – and ALS.”

“I’m also learning that sometimes you need to be handed a challenge bigger than anything you could have imagined in order to see the goodness in every day, in the small things, and in order to discover the huge, endless reservoir of courage within yourself, just waiting to be tapped, just waiting for you to dip in and draw from it,” she wrote.

On Oct. 14, 2003, Wakefield, then 33, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. Known commonly as Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS is a degenerative nerve disease that robs people of the ability to walk, use their limbs, talk clearly or eat solid foods. What it does not affect is one’s intellectual capacity.

In 2004, Wakefield, who grew up in Livermore and formerly was an English instructor at Southern Maine Community College, told an auditorium full of people that she had two goals in life: she wanted a child, and she wanted a book.

Now she has both.

Doing the book was sort of surreal, she wrote in a recent e-mail, the most expedient way for her communicate these days. Though her personal assistants and family can still understand her, her speech is difficult for most to decipher, so Wakefield communicates primarily through close friends and family or by using an eye-coordinated computer, which she said, is cumbersome and slow, but a lifesaver.

“It is really, truly fabulous. I don’t know what I’d do without it,” Wakefield told a gathering of fans at a recent reading at Books, Etc. in Falmouth through her younger sister Betsy Wakefield.

Her biggest thrill was getting the advance copy and learning that Maine writer Richard Russo, of “Empire Falls” fame, agreed to write prepublication praise for it.

“I saw my book for the first time on the display table at Nonesuch Books, an independent bookstore not far from my home. I bought a copy and held it in my lap the whole way home,” she said.

In the spring of 2003, just before her diagnosis, Wakefield saw her life take a dramatic turn when she met Steve Stout, a psychiatrist from Denver, who soon became her partner and moved to Maine to start a life and, soon thereafter, a family, with her. The two were drawn to each other for several reasons, including an intense desire to have children.

So began the second part of Wakefield’s dream coming true.

On Sept. 12, 2004, less than a year after Stout and Wakefield moved into a home in Cape Elizabeth, Samuel Wakefield Stout was born. Her book was published about a year later.

In her book, Wakefield proves that courage often comes in the form of humor.

From a Valentine’s Day telephonic relationship breakup, to what Wakefield describes as a brief love affair with sperm donor 2706, she struggles with decisions about becoming a single mother or whether to tell Stout about her impending appointment to utilize the anonymous sperm donation.

Ultimately, she and Stout decide to have a child through more conventional means.

Using metaphors from her life stories she tells poignant and often humorous tales of other loves, too, including a purple couch, running and her family.

She takes exception to her syndrome being named for a dead person – Lou Gehrig. She believes naming the disease after someone who died from it isn’t “exactly encouraging or hopeful” and takes the liberty of renaming it the “Darcy Wakefield Anti-Disease” or DWAD.

“I can’t imagine ol’ Lou would be too upset by this,” she wrote in the book. “I’m sure he’d rather be remembered for his baseball career.”

Wakefield has not only learned from her experience with ALS, but also models those lessons every day.

“There are a lot – a lot – of really nice people in the world, and they are not always the people you expect,” she wrote in her e-mail. “The smallest acts of kindness sometimes have the loudest reverberations.”

She gave an example: “A few months ago, I was out by myself, and a guy on a Harley stopped. It was one of my former students. He couldn’t understand a word I said, but he got off his bike, got down to my level, and talked to me. The wind blew hair in my mouth, and my glasses were sliding down my nose, and he asked if he could remedy both problems. I nodded yes, and he did.”

Not only has Wakefield realized both her dreams, she also has more, she said.

“The Maine Folk Life Center at University of Maine is publishing my 1996 master’s thesis about my maternal grandmother, Billie Gammon. It’s called No Flies on Bill.’ So I have gotten more than everything I wanted.”

Will she write more? She does and she will, she said. But her next book will be more serious than her first.

“I’m struggling to find a title. I Remember Going to the Bathroom by Myself’ doesn’t have the same ring as I Remember Running.'”