August Miles: For Cookie’s Physician Assistants
We’re starting our August blog post with another marathon training update! As many of our followers have seen on our Facebook and Instagram pages, Justine is excited to be running the 2020 NYC Virtual Marathon. She will be running 26.2 miles on October 30th: what would have been our mom’s 57th birthday, and a little more than a year after she passed away.
Even though we were looking forward to running the marathon together in person, we’re grateful for the opportunity to continue fundraising for triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) research and our mom’s incredible team at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). We’ll continue to feature Justine’s training progress on our social media pages, so please feel free to leave an inspirational comment to help cheer her on! Our Fred’s Team page will also continue to be active, so please be on the lookout for some exciting new promos. We’re hoping to reach our $8,000 fundraising goal by Cookie’s birthday, and every single dollar counts.
For August, we dedicated our training miles to Cookie’s team of physician assistants (PAs) at MSK, who were a critical part of not just our mom’s team, but our support system as well. Cookie always raved about how much she loved Christina, Liz, and Sarah, and it was easy to see why. They have this indescribable, intuitive gift of some of the deepest empathy we’ve ever known and are very similar to Cookie herself, in terms of their calmness, resiliency, and strength.
The decisions we had to make in the last week of our mom’s life felt intensely insurmountable at times, but in the midst of chaos, these providers were our peace. They became our lifeline to the point that we would count down the minutes until they’d start their next shift, convincing ourselves “all we have to do is make it until Christina gets back.” Christina was the one to deliver the reality of Cookie’s prognosis to us in that last week, and who coached us on what to expect as our mom took her final breaths. She let us sit in the moments of heartbreak, preparing us for the pain we would feel, while also convincing us that the stormy waters would eventually calm. And even having only known her for a few days, we took her word for it–and she was right.
We’d be lying if we tried to downplay the pain that’s accompanied our grieving and mourning in the last 10 months. But the kindness we experienced at MSK–especially from our mom’s PAs–is ingrained in our souls, and is a big part of what keeps us going. All in one breath, they were able to laugh with us, cry with us, and care for us. From making sure we had blankets to sleep on in the hospital room, to texting us on our mom’s birthday, Christina went above and beyond what could ever be expected when it came to truly sharing in our experience. She facilitated some of the most difficult conversations we’ve ever had, and so effortlessly modeled the juxtaposition between gratitude and sorrow that we would soon be expected to navigate ourselves. But because we had seen Christina do it–because we had seen her and her fellow PAs handle such difficult moments with resilience and strength–we knew we could do it too.
The walls of MSK hold both our deepest gratitude and deepest sorrows. But one wouldn’t be here without the other. And although the gratitude we feel is so tightly interwoven with the pain, its impact on our ability to heal is not lost on us. Knowing that Christina, Liz, and Sarah were the people who were there to hold our mom’s hand and comfort her when we couldn’t be there ourselves is incredibly humbling. While we wish it was under different circumstances, having the opportunity to experience empathy from providers like Christina, Liz, and Sarah is something we’re determined to pay forward, especially knowing how much our mom adored them.
“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”
–John F. Kennedy