Long road from childhood cancer leads to marriage
It’s the love story of love stories. They also got married and lived happily ever after.
There’s really no other way to put it because it’s actually two love stories wrapped into one “made in Memphis” package.
Start with the story of two frightened children who overcame childhood cancer to become friends, then best friends, then husband and wife. But there’s also the story of the couple who fell in love with a city where their courage was tested, their story was written. This is Joel and Lindsey Alsup. They got married on 901 Day, Sept. 1, in the gold-domed Danny Thomas/ALSAC pavilion on the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital campus. There was no other place and no other day it could have been.
On choosing the pavilion — where St. Jude founder Danny Thomas and wife Rose Marie Mantell Thomas are laid to rest — Joel said, “That was the easy part. This is hallowed ground.”
Added Lindsey: “It’s a city that captured my soul. It’s a town like us — been through a lot, but loves really hard, works really hard and plays really hard. It’s a city where you get second chances.”
Their story traces back to the late 1980s when Joel, a 7-year-old from Chattanooga, was diagnosed at St. Jude with osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer. It would result in the amputation of Joel’s right arm.
Lindsey — then 10-year-old Lindsey Wilkerson from Crane, Mo. — found out in 1991 that she had acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
“Our families would actually sit in the waiting room and visit while she was in treatment and I was coming back for checkups,” Joel says. “I don’t think they even knew each other’s names then. We had no idea where it would end.”
Joel and Lindsey really first got to know one another in 1993, after completing their treatments at St. Jude, and crossed paths at St. Jude functions, doctor appointments and such. Lindsey had a crush on Joel early on, but Joel didn’t talk much in those days.
Eventually, their paths diverged as Joel went off to college at Middle Tennessee State University and Lindsey to the University of Central Arkansas. Lindsey married and had two children, Audrey, 12, and Jacob, 8.
About 15 years ago, Lindsey realized her dream of returning to Memphis to work for St. Jude. She’s now a liaison in the ALSAC Liaison Office.
It was during her orientation that she was taken around to meet people and was told there was someone in particular she might want to meet. It was Joel, who was already working there and is a video production supervisor for ALSAC.
Immediately, the friendship rekindled with the old friend she had not seen since high school. Over time, that platonic friendship morphed into something more between Joel and Lindsey, whose first marriage ended in 2015.
It was after watching the movie “Alien” at Joel’s home in 2016 that he finally said he loved her. She knew she loved him, too.
Joel, 38, and Lindsey, 37, were soon discussing wedding plans, and they knew the city they had come to love and the place in that city that had saved their lives both had to take center stage.
“We started thinking, ‘So, what day of the week is 901 Day in 2018?’ ” Lindsey said. “Saturday? That’s perfect. That was also the first day of National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, so we knew there was something special at work.”
Thus, the pavilion on the St. Jude campus on the day that celebrates Memphis.
“I absolutely love and adore this town,” Joel says. “I wasn’t like Lindsey; my goal wasn’t always to move back here and work for ALSAC/St. Jude. Then I realized about halfway through college that this was what I wanted to do. I moved here not knowing a soul, and this city and my co-workers just took me in.”
Joel’s parents have a special place in their hearts for St. Jude and Memphis as well.
“St. Jude is a powerful tool in the hand of God,” said Bob Alsup, “bringing hope to all moms and dads for their children and miracles to many.”
“In the middle of my deepest, darkest fears, St. Jude was my calming place,” noted Lota Alsup, Joel’s mother. “It was where I could breathe, where I could hope. I didn’t need or expect guarantees. I just knew that St. Jude was our best shot, the reassurance that the most that could be done was being done.”
Adds Lindsey, “I fell in love with Memphis from the very beginning. When I first came here, all I could dream of was going home. But somewhere during treatment, the definition of home kind of evolved. It would be things like, we would go out to dinner (when she was a patient) and then, mysteriously, our bill had already been paid for. There was one time our car broke down, and someone had it towed to the local dealership and the repairs were paid for. You can’t find that many places.”
And so under the domed pavilion, with both natural and St. Jude families looking on and Lindsey’s daughter Audrey as maid of honor, Joel and Lindsey married in the most Memphis of places on the most Memphis of days and left in a 1959 white Ford Fairlane convertible for a reception at a very Memphis place, the Old Dominick distillery downtown. The honeymoon in Grenada even sounded Memphis and Mid-South, though their Caribbean isle was a far cry from its North Mississippi counterpart. It couldn’t have been any other way. “This is where our lives were saved,” Lindsey says. “It’s where we found friendship and our love of each other and our love of the city.”