Sunday in the Park: Marching for Breast Cancer Awareness Month

It is 6:46 am on Sunday. The train that goes to New York City is right on time. Too early in the morning for the cosplay participants who are going to the last day of NYC Comic Com, and the diehard Yankees fans are home in bed, having left the bars and restaurants around Manhattan where they watched their team clinch the American League title the evening before.

I have taken this ride before, headed to Central Park for another one of many sponsored walks designed to bring awareness and fight breast cancer in the month of October.

Each time there is a cruel irony that occurs to me. After this many years, we are still here fighting for a cure. But, on the flip side, after this many years, there are so many survivors proclaiming their personal victories as well.

The subway takes me relatively close to the park entrance, but the path to the starting line is deep inside the park down a long pathway. I continue my anxious concern that I won’t find my group as there are hundreds if not thousands of walkers and teams descending on the Naumburg Bandshell.

Prior to this year I have walked without a group, once with my then college-aged daughter and once on Long Island. This year I walk with a team, finding its participants in the center of the organized chaos under a big white, handheld sign. The music is pumping, the selfies are clicking, and I sigh with relief.

For the next four miles we are a community that honors and memorializes loved ones, a sea of never-forgotten faces and names on a sea of pink t-shirts. I think of those in my own circle–friends and family that fought this cancer. My great Aunt Rose, who lived to be 98 years old with a sense of purpose and good humor. And my beloved, generous and stylish friend Valerie, who never got the chance to hear my children call her “Aunt Val.”

The runners, bikers and pedestrians who own Central Park move around this human wave like it’s any other Sunday. Given the walk is in a kind of loop, we will finish where we started, hearing the DJ’s thumping bass line in the near distance.

I mention my return to this event to a fellow walker as we make our way to the finish line. She confides that a family member was diagnosed recently, and they are awaiting the details of a treatment plan. Walking today was to do something positive, she explains. The fight is not over. We are still here, raising funds, walking miles undeterred.

As we part, I wish her well and stop for a quiet moment amidst the noise to hold her family in my heart and prayers.

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My volunteer organization, Hadassah, has three principle strategies to fight breast cancer: educate and raise awareness, advocate locally and nationally and support groundbreaking medical research at the Hadassah Medical Organization in Israel. Visit this link to find out more information.