'I planned on preparing to die' -- Bekki Nill's story of faith, hope and building a legacy in Dallas

DALLAS, TEXAS – It was spring 2011 when Bekki Nill began preparing to die.

There was a sense of calm as she packaged up clothes and shoes that she knew neighbors and friends found attractive.

Friends, some close, some not, many connected through her long involvement with the hockey community, came to visit on days between chemotherapy sessions. Even though Nill knew they were coming ostensibly to say goodbye, she was comforted by the visits.

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One day she sat in the backyard in the Detroit area home she shared with her husband, Jim Nill, now the GM of the Dallas Stars but then a senior executive with the Red Wings.

“It was a beautiful day, the birds were chirping and I’m like, I’m going to record these storybooks for these grandkids that I don’t even know but I know that are going to be here and I’m going to miss those opportunities, so I’m just going to set things up for me not being here,” recalled Nill, a mother of three and now grandmother to two toddlers. “And so for a couple of months I planned on preparing to die.”

More than seven years have passed since doctors told the Nill family that Bekki had two-to-four months to live.

And on this night, she sits in a double-suite at the American Airlines Center, arriving with armloads of gift bags for the 17 cancer survivors and their friends or family who will soon arrive to one of the cancer survivors’ nights Bekki organizes at Dallas Stars’ games.

But to understand the magic that is about to unfold in suites 1356 and 1357, one first must understand the magic of the path chosen for Jim and Bekki Nill.

The 1981-82 season was Jim Nill’s first in the NHL. A sixth-round pick of the St. Louis Blues, Nill played junior hockey in the WHL before a stint with the Canadian national team at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid and a year in the Central Hockey League.

Jim and a Blues teammate were at a local restaurant in early January and happened to meet Bekki and a friend.

“What struck me about him was his kindness,” Bekki recalled. “Compassion. Gentleness. In just a short amount of time in knowing him.”

The players walked the ladies to their car.

“That didn’t happen,” Bekki said with a smile. “Open a car door for you? He still does that for me. He still has that same caring compassion and kindness that I’ve seen for over 35 years. And not just with me. He’s that way with a lot of people.”

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They went to dinner and then Jim asked Bekki if she’d like to come to a game.

“I still remember the game, too. It was one of my worst games ever,” Jim recalled shaking his head. “I got in a fight. I got beat up. We lost the game. It was just a disaster. She probably thought ‘what is this hooligan here?’”

Oh sure, he was kind, gentle, all those qualities.

“Until you put him on the ice with skates. Right?” Bekki said. “So then I meet this kind gentle person and then he invites me to a game and yeah, there’s a lot of fighting and he did get thrown out of the game and there were cat-like scratches across his face. I remember thinking, ‘what did I do?’”

Weeks after their first meeting Jim was dealt to the Vancouver Canucks.

“I think God had his footprints all over it,” Jim said. “So we dated, Jan. 7 is when we first met, and I got traded at the trade deadline in February, so we kind of knew each other for about two months and I got traded to Vancouver. And she was going to college in St. Louis.”

Jim went to the Stanley Cup final that spring, the Canucks losing to the dynastic New York Islanders. He returned to St. Louis in the offseason but Bekki still had at least year of college to complete.

No internet. No cell phones. Just a belief that this is supposed to happen.

The couple got engaged while Jim was playing for Vancouver and Bekki was still in St. Louis, which added a whole new element to the relationship — long-distance wedding planning, made even more complicated by the fact that Bekki grew up in a house with three sisters and just one phone line.

“You could never tell who was on the phone so I always had to be careful when I’d phone there and say, you know, ‘is this Bekki?’” Jim said.

“But the one time we were on the phone and it was late at night and the operator came on and said, ‘excuse me, Mr. Nill. … Will you please get off the phone?’ Well we’re thinking it’s her sisters because they want to get on the phone. So I said no. And Bekki said no, too. Because we’re talking, planning the wedding, wedding plans. So the operator hung up. Operator comes back on again. ‘Excuse me, Mr. Nill, please hang up, it’s an emergency.’ And I said, ‘nah, it’s your sisters, they’re playing games.’ So two minutes later the operator calls. ‘Excuse me. Mr. Nill. Mr. Harry Neale would like to speak to you.’ I said, ‘Bekki, I think I’ve just been traded.’ And I was.”

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Neale was the GM of the Canucks at the time and sure enough he called to tell Nill he was on his way to Boston, giving Bekki a clear understanding of what it was going to be like to be married not just to a man but a game, as well.

“I think I was probably too naïve to think that far in advance,” she said. “I was young. I’ve never been on an airplane. Really had never moved very much. … I don’t think I thought about what it meant to be a wife and then a hockey wife, right? That’s just, you kind of grow into it and you learn. I sometimes think I was young, in love, and I would have traveled anywhere. Still would to be with him. Nothing’s really changed that. If he tells me we have to go to Timbuktu tomorrow, then I’m probably there. I’ll be kicking and screaming because I don’t know where Timbuktu is and I want my grandkids there.”

Fair to assume that most people don’t understand the hidden sacrifices many hockey partners make in keeping a professional hockey household afloat. The separation, the long road trips, the demands even when the player, coach or manager is at home.

After being acquired by Boston, Jim was dealt to Winnipeg and then to Detroit, where he finished his playing career during the 1990-91 season after playing 524 NHL games.

He joined the Ottawa Senators as a scout for three years before returning to the Red Wings organization in the summer of 1994, heading up their amateur scouting department and acting as GM of the team’s farm team in Adirondack, making Glens Falls, New York, the family’s base of operations.

Jim recalls being in Russia on a scouting trip when he called Bekki to discover “a disaster” at home.

“We had a septic tank where we lived and the tanks had all collapsed and all the sewers backing up and in the basement and she’s got to clean it up and we had three children at the time,” Jim said. “Things always happen when you’re gone.”

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But those kinds of emergencies would soon seem so trivial for the Nills.

Bekki was 37 when she discovered a lump in her breast.

“I was in great shape. Ate well. Did, really, everything right and didn’t fit into any category that they would have had,” she said. “It was a shock.”

The Red Wings’ team doctor recommended a doctor who could see them right away. A specialist performed a mammogram and the X-rays showed there was something suspicious and a biopsy needed to be done.

“He checked it and said it’s cancer, cancerous,” Jim said. “It’s like, whoa.

“The drive home was tough. Because now you’ve got to tell the kids. We both had our little bit of cries and stuff. But then you look at each other, you know what? We’re going to dig in. She’s got an amazing faith and she said, ‘you know what? God’s going to look after us,’ and away we went.”

Bekki opted for the most aggressive treatment possible, including a mastectomy and chemotherapy.

“I was like, I’m just going to go as aggressive as I can because I don’t ever want to do this again. And those treatments were hard, but I think I did well with them because I had taken care of myself and been in good shape,” she said.

That was followed by five years of taking a maintenance drug. Then everyone thought she was free of the disease.

For seven years, Bekki worked out regularly, an hour of cardio every day. She followed a vegan diet. “I don’t think I have more than 23 grams of sugar a day,” she said.

And then in fall 2010 she started “not feeling right.”

Regular visits to her doctor and oncologists turned up nothing specific but she knew she wasn’t right.

“Then I hear, well, there’s a spot on your liver and I said I’ve never been told that before but I keep getting sicker and sicker at which point I really can’t eat food,” Bekki recalled.

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Her regular healthy diet devolved to a point where all she could manage to consume was a handful of blueberries a day. And what she did eat gave her a pain in the midsection.

Then her shoulder froze up as though she’d pulled a muscle working out.

Finally doctors diagnosed her as having cancer in both the shoulder and liver.

“Now I’ve gone nine whole months without knowing that the cancer that I had, had matastisized to those two spots,” she said.

Unlike the initial diagnosis of breast cancer, there wasn’t a clear path to follow and the prognosis was bleak.

“(The doctor) came out, I still remember him coming out, and he just kind of shook his head,” Jim said of hearing the diagnosis.

It was, added Bekki, “very grim.”

This was May 2011.

“And we both probably without saying the words thought that I probably would be gone by July,” Bekki said.  “When I entered the room I felt like I looked like I’d already died. There was a look of, like, I feel so sorry for you, you know what I mean?”

After battling so valiantly through breast cancer this seemed out of their control.

“I had such a peace about it,” Bekki recalled. “I’m not asking to die. But when you’re faced with feeling so horrible and knowing that you’ve got cancer, really a stage four, they told me it’s incurable, that you’re kind of like, ‘OK, what am I going to do?’”

What Bekki chose to do was lean on her faith, her family and her friends, and prepare for the worst.

“Every night that I went to bed I have a lot of physical pain,” Bekki said. “Jim, he prayed over me every single night and also I was too sick to even really want to read my Bible, so I’d ask him to just read my Bible and he did. He just took over.

“I almost feel like it was harder on him to watch me and to be helpless, and I’m sure he would have rather it’d been him than me. But I had just an internal peace knowing where I was going. We all will die, I just want to know that I’ve done everything I was supposed to be doing and God’s will was done through my life and that’s what gave me peace about going.”

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Bekki recalled taking a walk with her husband one day in July, around the time when the initial prognosis for her survival was at hand.

“I feel like we were able to walk like 20 houses down the street to a graduation party. This was kind of a big deal,” Bekki said. “And so I think it was that point, and probably in reading the Bible and stuff, that I had decided that I don’t get to choose when I’m going to die, that God chooses and he has my date numbered and I need to focus on living instead of dying. And that was a big corner turned for me. So that’s what I started doing. Just waking up every day and saying, ‘I have air in my lungs and my heart is still beating and what is your purpose for my life today?’ And that brings me great joy.”

During this period, Jim, whose Red Wings won Stanley Cups in 1997, 1998, 2002 and 2008, was in line to ascend to GM in Detroit. There had been opportunities to make such a move, but the fit wasn’t there. One of the factors, of course, was Bekki’s health.

But as she continued to battle this second round of cancer, Jim was approached about taking over in Dallas.

Bekki immediately announced that Jim should take the job.

“I said, I think it’s a great situation, da, da, da, all this. But you’re the priority one. She looked at me and said, ‘we’re going,’” Jim said. “And I said, ‘whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down.’ She said, ‘Jim, I just know it’s a calling. This is where we’re supposed to be.’ We were so entrenched in Detroit and had such a network and connected to people, but she said, you know what? You can’t be comfortable either. You have to go out and God wants us to go and let’s keep this thing going.”

What Jim didn’t know is that on Tuesdays as part of her recovery she had been traveling with the daughter of longtime Red Wings owners Mike and Marian Ilitch, to a church in Clarkston, Michigan, where worshippers could put slips of paper into various prayer baskets with a person’s name in hopes of having their prayers met.

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Bekki simply wrote her husband’s name and placed it in the “job” basket.

“I never told him. I didn’t even have a reason for writing them,” Bekki explained. “There was something inside, I would say it was the Holy Spirit, that had moved me to do that.”

For a time it wasn’t even certain Bekki would make the move to Dallas with her husband.

She came to be with Jim on the day he was announced as the team’s new GM in April 2013 and while in Dallas toured homes that might be suitable for her husband.

“I wound up getting in the car of a total stranger just to get a feel for the area and that day I just bought a house because I knew Jim needed to be settled,” Bekki said.

Later Jim would call Bekki at home in Michigan and ask her exactly how to get to the new home.

“I did pick the right place,” she said of the home they still live in. “We had a complete trust that God wanted us here. I didn’t know what the reason was, whether it was for something I needed to do or Jim needed to do or us together or what that looked like but I wasn’t scared.”

The year before Jim took the job in Dallas, video coach Kelly Forbes’ mother, Arlene, was diagnosed with breast cancer. And, around the time of Jim’s hiring, Forbes’ girlfriend, television reporter Julie Dobbs, was also diagnosed with breast cancer.

“It took about two minutes for Bekki to take Julie under her wing and help her throughout the situation,” Forbes said.

“No matter how supportive and loving and helpful I can be, I don’t understand what she’s going through. These women, for them to be together and talk and go through the same things and especially hear survivors tell their stories, to these women it helps them get through it. Hearing it from Bekki just uplifted (Julie’s) spirits and that’s what Bekki does.”

Dobbs has been cancer free for almost five years. She and Forbes were married and now have two children — Ryder, 3, and Anna, 4 months.

The connection with the Nills and with other cancer survivors remains a tangible part of their everyday life. You need to find strength in these situations from whatever source possible and for many that strength comes from the Nills.

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“Bekki supplies that hope and that strength and she shows that it’s possible to keep fighting,” Forbes said. “My mom and Julie have both used her for inspiration.”

Recently Forbes’s mother discovered cancer returned, this time to her abdomen. One of the first calls after the new diagnosis came from Bekki Nill.

“It gives her hope. And hope is huge and the will to fight and go on is very much needed because it’s a tough situation,” Forbes said.

In this suite on the night of a Stars-Wild game, Samantha Ferguson sits in the front row filming the warmups and opening ceremonies on her cell phone.

She’s a diehard Stars fan, even though she hasn’t been to a game in 17 years.

Last October the security guard and former U.S. Navy veteran was diagnosed with breast cancer and was told she’d had it for at least five years before it was detected. After undergoing surgery and chemotherapy, with radiation treatment likely in the future, Ferguson said the prognosis is good.

“It’s been very painful,” she said. “Very hard. Some days you just don’t want to get out of bed.”

She wouldn’t have missed this night for anything and not just because she is finally back in a hockey rink watching the Stars. Maintaining her job, which involves shift work, is stressful, so this group provides some much-needed support, she said.

The shared experience of every woman who walks through the doors to these suites at these special survivors’ nights defines them in some way as family. And if they don’t feel that walking in, then they most certainly do walking out.

Amy Bradley knows many of the women who have made their way to the American Airlines Center on this night. She is the chemotherapy scheduler at Texas Oncology-Baylor Charles A. Sammons Cancer Center, but on this night she doesn’t see them as patients — they are people connecting with others who share a common path with common hopes and fears.

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“I think it’s really amazing,” Bradley said. “They get to share stories and probably connect in a way they don’t connect out there.”

Moments after Toni Tate meets Bekki the two embrace and Tate tearfully displays her specially done nails, all featuring a unique Dallas Stars motif. The nails are special because chemotherapy often leaves patients’ nails paper thin and prone to tearing.

Just knowing that other people have had the same experience creates something meaningful for Tate, who was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 40 in 2017. She promises to try and not weep as she describes what she’s going through, but it’s a promise that needs not be made and certainly one that needs not be kept.

“Sometimes going through this journey you can sometimes feel isolated,” said Tate, a risk management specialist for an insurance broker.

Tate watched her mother die from cervical cancer 22 years ago, so when she got word she, too, had cancer – a call that came while she was sitting at her desk at work – she wanted no part of the process. The mother of two – Tate has a daughter in the U.S. Air Force – asked her original oncologist how long she had.

“I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want to deal with what was ahead,” Tate said.

But a new oncologist worked with Tate and mapped out a plan, telling her that she had no choice but to fight.

She’s undergone a double mastectomy and is in the midst of the reconstruction process, the final stage of which will be done in November. She is cancer free but continues maintenance treatment every three weeks.

“It was a success story,” Tate said. “He gave me hope.”

Now she and her perfect Dallas Stars nails are here to share stories, comfort, information and simply share in the spirit of the fight.

“Just to be around a group of people who have these shared experiences and can relate, it forms a bond that we share,” Tate said, wiping a tear from her eye. “It’s an opportunity to encourage and to be encouraged.”

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Nill drops by the suite near the end of the first period of a game the Stars will ultimately go on to lose — not that such a small thing detracts at all from the moments shared in Suites 1356 and 1357.

We ask Bekki what she tells people when they ask how she’s feeling.

“I’m well,” she said with a smile. “I mean, who knows what’s going on inside? I can’t think like that. You can wake up and dwell on stuff that can bring you down but I don’t focus on that. I get up and I do what I can to bring joy.”

On the way to this event, Bekki turned to a friend who was driving her to the arena and told her that even when she’s gone she hopes nights like these will still continue.

“I want this to happen long after I’m not here,” Bekki said. “So this is important to these people. It gives them hope. It gives them encouragement. So whether it’s in the breast cancer suite or whether it’s me delivering muffins to the office or whatever it’s about, I don’t know what somebody else’s day is like and if I can bring them joy in anything that I do, then that is gratifying to me.”

(Top photo: Joshua Dahl/USA TODAY Sports)

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