Finding Hope Through Supporting MSK

A connection to cancer since 1958

I was dating a young man who was tall and beautiful. He looked like one of the doo-wop stars of the moment. One day, after a few months of growing quite close, he came to me and said, “this has to end,” but he would not tell me why. Needless to say, I was heartbroken.

A couple weeks later, there was a knock at the door of my family’s home. There stood the young man’s stepmother. She asked to come inside and speak with my mother and father.

As my parents later shared with me, the young man had been suffering from Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. When we had met, he had been in remission, but the cancer had returned. Now, he was in the hospital and was asking if I would come see him.

“I have to do this,” I told my mother. So together my parents and I went to a hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. I will never forget the moment I laid eyes on the young man. I almost didn’t recognize him he was so sick. Although eventually he was discharged from the hospital, we remained apart, and he passed away from the disease two years later.

I wish I could say that my connection to cancer ended there. But it was just the beginning. In the following years, both of my parents and my only sister passed away from various cancers.

Cancer has had a tremendous impact on my life. Despite my losses, when I look at all the new advancements and treatments that Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) has developed since my first experience with cancer in 1958, I have many reasons to remain optimistic. I know that with every new lab built, graduate student trained, and clinical trial funded, more lives are saved.

It is for this reason that I decided to support MSK through a bequest gift in my estate plans. I have long made donations in memory of friends and family who have passed away, and I became a monthly sustainer in 2014 through Friends of MSK. I couldn’t think of a better way for my estate to have an impact than by magnifying the advances MSK is making each and every day for generations to come.

To learn how you can join Sydney in making an estate gift to MSK, and to join our Cullum Society which honors our community of legacy donors, contact the Office of Gift Planning at giftplanning@mskcc.org or 800-688-1827.