Each time 44-year-old Carolynne St. Pierre comes home from chemotherapy at Brooklyn's Lutheran Medical Center, fatigued and sometimes nauseous, she talks about putting off the next treatment.

The hospital is difficult to get to. Sometimes she takes a bus from Concord to Boston, then a train to New York City and a subway downtown to her mother's apartment, so tired by the end that she can barely carry her suitcase up the stairs to the street. Other times, her husband, Rich, drives her to Connecticut, where one of her sisters picks her up. Then he rushes back to care for their three kids.

The experimental treatments are expensive, about $16,000 a visit, and the St. Pierres aren't sure yet what insurance will cover. They fear it won't be much. And then there's the fact that the drugs likely won't save Carolynne's life.

What they may give her, and what keeps her going back, is more time.

Time to spend with 14-year-old Melissa, 12-year-old Brian and 4-year-old Elijah, making memories that she hopes will last long past the day when chemotherapy no longer can keep her cancer in check, the day when she

will die. Time for Rich and Carolynne to find ways for Carolynne's influence - her soft touch and motherly advice - to remain after she's gone.

For the St. Pierres, there is a constant balance of preparation and hope. They talk to the children about their mother's prognosis, discuss what her funeral will be like and cry together. But Carolynne also sets goals, always sets benchmarks in her children's lives, and celebrates when she reaches them.

First, it was to make it to the first day of school. Now, Halloween. Next, Christmas and the new year. Later it will be another summer to sit on the beach while little EJ plays in the water.

"A total dream of mine would be seeing Melissa's 16th birthday," she said.

Without effective treatment, doctors have said, Carolynne's health would start to fail quickly in about two to four months. Carolynne sometimes doubts whether she would be getting the treatment if all she had to worry about was her own health. She dreads the thought of chemotherapy dragging on for years. But she hopes, with Rich's encouragement, for as much time as she can get. Especially for EJ.

Rich's mother died when he was 7. He doesn't remember her and, because she died suddenly, she left no notes or remembrances for him to hold onto. While he thinks their mother's death will be hard for Melissa and Brian (whose last name is Thone and who are from Carolynne's first marriage), he worries most that EJ St. Pierre, a rough-and-tumble boy who clings to his mother, won't even have a faint imprint of his mother in his mind as he grows.

"Without Carolynne, I don't let myself go there very often, but it's going to be really hard," he said. "I know that."

Carolynne shares his fear.

"The thought that EJ wouldn't remember me - wouldn't even remember me - " she said.

Rich knows all three kids will crave stories about their mother when she is gone. So he and Carolynne look for ways to preserve them now. Inviting the Monitor to follow them for the past six months was one of them.

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