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My column from yesterday highlights a former News & Record community columnist whose beautiful spirit came through in her words:

Holly Stevens was one of the nicest people I’ve never met.

For a brief, interesting while in 2007, Holly, an Oak Ridge resident, was a community columnist for the News & Record, meaning she contributed to the paper on a regular basis.

The two main goals we sought in our community columns were fresh voices and unique perspectives.

And, boy, did she have plenty of both.

“Some 20 years ago,” she wrote in her first column, “I read Maya Angelou’s captivating autobiography, ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,’ but I couldn’t quite decipher her own answer to the riddle. “Then, five years ago, I found myself perched in my own cage, not of my choice.”

You see, Holly was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer at age 36. Despite successful treatment, the disease returned years later, eventually spreading throughout her body and, last week, finally claiming her life. She was only 55.

But the disease never dictated how she lived or deterred her from a remarkable journey of pain, discovery, friendship and joy. Of course, she tells her own story much better than I could. “I was going through a protracted and difficult divorce in Washington State, a continent away from my heart’s home in North Carolina, when I learned that my breast cancer of 10 years earlier had sprouted new tumors in my hips, ribs, spine, jaw and skull,” she wrote in that debut column, published on Oct. 7, 2007. In the year that followed, I synched my calendar with the rhythm of the cancer as my body was burned, slashed, poisoned, prodded, injected and fed into high-tech imaging tubes. For months I bore the excruciating pain of a spine fracture at the site of an irradiated tumor before a 10-hour surgery encased my spine in a titanium rod.

“I chuckled then, proclaiming I was a bionic woman, but three months later, the former tumor had the final laugh, as paralysis set in, leaving me a paraplegic from the waist down. Mark that as one year in the cage.”

As sad and unfair as all this may seem, Holly went on to live a rich and fulfilling life. She found happiness in simple pleasures many of us take for granted because she knew all too well how precious and fleeting they really were. “Paraplegia is a poverty of function and fourth-stage cancer a poverty of time,” she wrote, “but poverty, chosen or not, yields unexpected bounties.” She chose to call her remaining years “The Grand Adventure.”

In another column she mused about the joys of stringing clothes on a line as a fresh breeze wafted by — from her wheelchair. “I’m not a purist,” she wrote of the strict discipline of some environmentalists who consider tumble drying an affront to the planet. “The dryer remains a rainy day backup. But mostly we now enjoy the sound of sheets flapping in the wind and the stiff absorbency and sweet fragrance of line-dried towels and clothes.”

Holly became a storyteller and created a website, “The Storyteller and Listener Online.” She established a Triad chapter of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit that, according to its website, “protects consumers’ rights to choose meaningful, dignified, affordable funerals.” She published “Undertaken with Love,” a manual for family-directed funerals. And another book, “Questions: Whys, why nots, how comes, what ifs and other mostly open-ended questions from a searching Christian.”

Since 2003, her obituary says, she set themes for each year, including gratitude, transition, listening, benediction, handicraft, kindness — and, in 2011, “release.”

And even while in hospice, she was curious, thoughtful and still eager to learn. “I’m interested that the conversations and sounds coming from other patient rooms depict a diversity of experience to the end of life as might be expected, just as one might find it the middle of life on this side,” she wrote in her online journal on Sept. 5.

Most significantly, even after a divorce, cancer and paralysis, she lived long enough to attend the wedding of her eldest son, Sam, on July 10. And to find a new love for herself. “In the wake of my failed marriage,” she wrote, “I had reconnected with a man I loved 19 years before, and though I gave him my blessing to move on without me, Bill chose to share my journey.” In 2004, she married Bill Stevens, whom she had first met in 1982, and the two reveled in one another’s presence — in sickness and in health.

I regret that I never personally met or talked to Holly. In those days, my former colleague, Elma Sabo, directly supervised our community columnists. And afterward, I simply didn’t make the time. My loss. But at least I got to know her through her words.

And I’ll try hard to remember the lessons she sought to share about embracing the abundant gifts of every sunrise.