COMMUNITY CENTERED
Cheryl Hannabury is the proprietor of Stars Market and Coffee Cellar, the only coffee bar and gourmet food shop on tiny Shelter Island, located at the eastern end of Long Island, New York. The fulltime population is about 2,500, but it swells to five times that number when the summer renters and tourists arrive. All of them, it seems, get their bagels or lattes or pasta salad or chocolate pastries from Stars.
Today Cheryl's mother, Charlotte, is taking a shift behind the counter in the downstairs Coffee Cellar. "How is she?" a customer asks.
"She's fine," Charlotte smiles kindly. "Thank you for asking."
Cheryl, 47, suffers from Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph glands. It was diagnosed when she was 40. Although Hodgkin's disease, as it's often called, is usually one of the most curable cancers, Cheryl has not been so lucky. She has endured several bouts of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. All have failed to eradicate the cancer.
But her mother is right. Cheryl is feeling fine--maybe the best she's ever felt in her life. That's so even though her cancer is still active. "It's showing in my neck and in my groin right now, and I have a good-size mass underneath my left arm. But nothing's increasing in size and I'm not in pain," she tells me. She shares such details more judiciously now than she has in the past. "You have to understand that out of every hundred people who come in the store, ninety of them know about the cancer and ninety people ask. People say things out of concern, but sometimes the less said the better. It can get so draining," she says. "I need all my energy to take care of myself.
Cheryl's illness has been big news on the small island. Her health insurance wouldn't cover the monumental costs of a bone marrow transplant $250,000, plus another $100,000 in associated expenses. So, in 1995, the community went to bat for her, collecting enough money to get the procedure going.
Cheryl, in the outpouring of affection and concern, became everybody's property. The island's residents sympathized as she struggled to recuperate from the harrowing procedure, and mourned with her when the symptoms started coming back six months later. |
Finally, she understood: "I can live with cancer. All I have to do is accept it and stop fighting"
In desperation, Cheryl turned to alternative therapies. But a CT scan soon revealed more cancer than she had ever had. "I felt like I had failed that if I had really believed in the treatments, they would have worked," she says.
The guilt was made worse by her sense of responsibility to the community that had contributed to the transplant. Every time she went out she felt pressured to put on a happy face. "People were saying to me, 'Oh, Cheryl, you shouldn't be so angry.' Or, 'You shouldn't be negative.' Pastor Bill"--her minister and friend--"was the only one who allowed me to be depressed, to be really angry. He made me realize that if I didn't experience those emotions, I could not work through them, and I couldn't go on to the next step."
Pastor Bill told her she had every right to give up, if that's what she wanted.
She discovered that she didn't want to. She went through chemotherapy again, lost her hair, got pneumonia, and parked herself for a week on Miami's South Beach. There, sitting on the sand, for no reason that she can explain, Cheryl experienced a moment of pure light. "It was a breakthrough of the senses," she remembers. "I smelled the sea air, I saw the blue sky, I heard the birds." She'd been sick for six years, and now, finally, she understood: "I can live with cancer. All I have to do is accept it and stop fighting."
Recalling that moment, she says, "I've emerged from this a completely different person. For months after the transplant, I wouldn't look in the mirror, because I felt there was nothing left. I remember the day I finally looked and saw my eyes again, and realized my soul was still there."
Cheryl, who has bright red hair at the moment, has had seven different hair colors in the past year. She's not thrilled with the 57 pounds she's put on since she started taking prednisone, the only medication she's on now. "I'm dealing with a whole different body shape. And my face is twice the size it used to be. I went to Macy's and had a makeup redo--that was fun. And okay, so I have to buy size sixteen clothes."
She pauses, and smiles. "But you know what? It's me. It's who I am. I'm alive." · |
