Shonnie Medina was a happy girl who felt she would die young.
Her physical beauty, when she was a young woman in Culebra and a young wife in Alamosa, was the primary thing that people mentioned about her. Photographs and snatches of videotape don’t quite capture it because fundamentally what people were talking about was charisma. It came through her looks when she was in front of you, tossing her full head of dark hair and giving you her full attention. Then her beauty acted like a mooring for her other outward qualities, undulating from that holdfast like fronds of kelp on the sea. Then Shonnie was magnetic, vain, kind to others, religious without reservation, funny, a little goofy, and headstrong.
Being headstrong or unreasonable was the quality that the doctors in Alamosa and Denver blamed for her death—for Shonnie was right about dying young. She carried in her cells a dangerous genetic mutation and died when she was 28, after refusing surgery for her aggressive, inherited breast cancer. Jealous of her body, oblivious to the gene, she insisted on another style of care.
Shonnie Medina grew up in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. Her family is Hispano, a mix of Spanish and Indian people. Older than other Hispanics in North America, the Hispanos claim a 400-year history in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Their villages, dotting the northern reach of the Rio Grande, were once as lively and insular as the shtetls of Eastern Europe.
