What Cancer Cannot Do

Cancer is so limited
It cannot cripple love
It cannot shatter hope
It cannot corrode faith
It cannot destroy peace
It cannot kill friendship
It cannot suppress memories
It cannot silence courage
It cannot invade the soul
It cannot steal eternal life
It cannot conquer a child’s spirit.

Maria and I rest against our backpacks in the underground Metro Station, headed home from Washington DC. We chatter the time away, with occasional long silences stretching out behind us like well-traveled train tracks. The lack of anything to say, we find, is okay too. After 7 years of friendship, comfortable silence is just another one of the things we’ve come to depend upon in each other.

Maria Joffrion, at 30 years old, is many things to many people. She is John’s wife, Grandma’s daughter, Pam’s sister and “momma” to Ben, Lucia, Tommy and Sean.   She is an attentive neighbor, an active community member and a model caretaker, and advocate within the walls of the Dana Farber Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital where her 5-year-old, Tommy, receives treatment for cancer.

But she is my best friend, so I have no choice but to tell her story from my heart. And because her life is so deeply embedded in mine, I can’t bear to extract myself from it for the sake of journalism.

She has just shaved her head – well, I have just shaved her head – as part of a national “Shave for the Brave” event known as 46 Mommas, where shavees raised money in exchange for the simple act of becoming bald. The money benefits St. Baldrick’s Foundation, a national volunteer-driven charity dedicated to raising funds for childhood cancer research.

From time to time, she reaches up to feel her fuzzy scalp, radiant with the leftover adrenaline. In the years since we met, with babies in slings and later big bellies and not long after that more babies in slings, I can’t recall a time that I have seen her look more breathtakingly beautiful.

Empowered and fierce, she wears her new look like a queen. And me? Devoted member of the court, often a jester and sometimes a trusted confidant.

Today, I simply stand in complete and total awe.

Shave for the Brave

The Mommas came from California, Florida and beyond. They came by car, by plane and by train. They came alone and they came with their families. Some shaved their heads with the heartfelt intention that people everywhere begin to understand how truly beautiful bald really is. Some came with the child who has become their driving force for finding a cure.

But no matter where they came from and how they got there, they all had one thing in common: the experience of having a child who has either lost, or is actively fighting an unfair battle with cancer and they’re not going to stop fighting until childhood cancer stops stealing our babies.

Like it or not, I absorbed the Mommas’ grief and puzzlement at this place in which they find themselves, each of them 1/46th  of a collective voice pleading for change.  From the sidelines, I had no choice but to see the little faces – printed on cardstock and clutched in the hands of the women who would have taken it all away in a heartbeat if they were only given the choice. Maria, of course, held a picture of Tommy - goggle-eyed and beaming from our town’s summer lake hangout.

It sounds like it should have been a somber event, yet, on that sunny day, from the vaulted marble ceilings of Union Station in our nation’s capitol, what I witnessed was something else entirely. Everywhere I looked there was pure joy and relief at the sheer act of doing something – at the release from having taken back some control for the first time since being assaulted with the words that can bring a grown woman to her knees.

Your child has cancer.

Finding Her Voice

If there is one thing I have learned about Maria since Tommy was diagnosed with a rare form of adult Leukemia in 2010, just two years after learning he has the equally rare genetic disorder neurofibromatosis, it’s been that I have no choice but to share her.

The quiet, serene woman who was once my solitary walking buddy, kitchen cook-mate and spontaneous park play-date has become a voice louder than life, advocating for not only Tommy but for children across the globe. Her passion has been slow to build but as of late she is an unstoppable force, a ferocious lioness – now without a mane.

Like many of the Mommas whose days are filled with worry, stress, treatments and medicines that may or may not bring solace or wellness, the plight is to feel heard and to know that she is making a better world for her kids.

Maria’s message, with her newly bald head, is painfully clear: Childhood cancer needs a cure – and raising money is the most she can do. More money means more research, and more research means better treatments. Better treatments, she hopes, means that she will get to watch Tommy go to middle school dances, graduate high school and get his first apartment. For now, it’s enough to have made it to kindergarten, and Maria has learned to take one day at a time.

The day after the 46 Mommas event, Tommy wore a message across his little body that had been hand-picked to spread the word. In blazing black letters, it simply said “I love my bald momma.”

Small Town Shave

Central Massachusetts might soon be littered with kids bearing that same message on their shirts. On November 21st at 10 a.m. in downtown Leominster at Mia Bella Spa and Salon, a handful of brave folks – not all mommas this time and not even all women – will shave it all off to show their support for St. Baldricks, the organization that started it all.

Many of them are our friends and they are shaving their heads simply because of how much Maria, Tommy and the rest of the Joffrion family mean to them – some are strangers who have been moved by pieces of Tommy’s story that they have read in the local media. And some have yet to step forward – registration for the Shave will be taken right up until the day of.

Maybe some of the money will make its way to the scientists who created the little pills Tommy calls Tic-Tacs – the medicine his parents know simply as “Gleevec” that has, so far, made more invasive treatments unnecessary.

Beautiful Friendship

Not long after Maria shaved her head, I woke up in a cold sweat, gasping for air. I had dreamed she was gone, though my subconscious - mercifully - had spared me the details. All I knew was that she wasn’t there anymore. Alone and bewildered, I sent text after desperate text – a fact of life that only now brings me some amusement, that I enjoy texting so much that it is my preferred mode of communication even in my dreams. “I really could use a friend,” I kept sending out to people, going down my contact list one by one. “I really miss Maria.”

It’s neither a criticism nor a lament that there were no responses. Rather, an acknowledgement from the very core of my being, that in my absolute lowest moments, Maria has been the most steady and reliable of friends – the kind of friend every woman should be so lucky to have. And the kind of mother that a child like Tommy deserves – equal parts pioneer and activist, completely devoted and driven. Irreplaceable, inspirational, invaluable.

And bald.

Beautifully, bravely bald.

Freelancer Amanda Roberge is a Leominster mom of three.

For information on the Central Massachusetts Shave, contact miabellaspace.com.  Also visit 46mommas.com and stbaldricks.org for information.