A little light
Hayases find joy amid tragic news
LAHAINA — The love emanating from inside of the three-bedroom, second-floor apartment in the middle of Lahaina town that the Hayase ohana lives in could fill a hotel ballroom.
And it is clear that the smallest of the six residents — 14-month-old Quinn Aiko Kamalei Hayase — is the center of attention.
“She’s loved, she’s made her mark,” grandmother Jonelle Hayase said.
“She’s definitely a handful, as you can see,” grandfather Jason Hayase said. “She keeps everybody on their toes. It gives me a daily thing to do, she keeps me on track.”
Quinn’s mom Tayler PeligrinoHayase arrived home from Midland University in Fremont, Neb., last week as a surprise to her grandparents.
Tayler’s teammates on the Midland women’s wrestling team — and friends from around the 50th state and Midwest U.S. — wait with anticipation daily for Jason Hayase to post video and photos of Quinn on his Instagram account.
If Tayler’s dad is later than normal for his daily posts, many of his 1,108 followers get antsy for their daily Quinn fix.
Leland Hayase, 15, and Alexis Peligrino-Hayase, 13, Quinn’s uncle and aunt, smile every time she comes near in making her rounds of the living room.
Jonelle Hayase, 48, Tayler’s mom and Jason’s wife, watches all of it with a heart full of emotion, most of it pure joy.
Jonelle was diagnosed in May with stage 4 colon cancer that has advanced to her abdomen. After surgery to remove nine inches of her colon was performed, doctors now tell Jonelle she has three to five years left on Earth.
She faces chemotherapy on a week-on, week-off schedule for the rest of her life.
“Basically, right now, it’s just about trying to buy me more time,” Jonelle said.
She has a lifesaver in her first granddaughter’s seemingly eversmiling face.
“Definitely, my whole focus is on Quinn, you know,” Jonelle said. “It doesn’t take me to that place that I don’t want to think about. I just have her, I stay positive. I think she’s taken a lot of that away from all of us, as far as thinking about what I’m going through, just focusing on her, and her being happy.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has worked out in a few ways for the Hayases. Leland and Alexis can watch Quinn when Jason takes Jonelle to her chemotherapy treatments in Wailuku — it is time the teens relish.
The hardest part, of course, is Tayler being away from her daughter, although there are daily FaceTime phone calls and reminders.
“Every day we make sure that she knows who mom is when mom’s in college,” Jonelle said. “We have her pictures — we say ‘good morning’ to mom every morning, ‘bye mom.’ So, she’s really taken over our life in a good way. To me, she was a Godsend, she was a blessing for us. And we needed it.”
It was a blessing that came as an absolute surprise at 9:52 a.m. on Sept. 17, 2019.
Tayler finished third in the state wrestling tournament in the 145pound weight class in mid-February 2019 and then resumed cheerleading for the Maui All-Stars club.
It wasn’t until her physical three days prior to her scheduled flight for Midland over the summer that she discovered she was pregnant — the doctor originally thought she was 10 weeks into her pregnancy, but a follow-up ultrasound showed she was actually 34 weeks along.
Quinn was delivered completely healthy at 7 pounds, 15 ounces, and 21 inches long.
“I continued to wrestle,” Tayler said. “The whole time, like half my senior year, I was pregnant. I have this deal with my parents, I get to cheer after wrestling is over. I did that. Then I graduated, walked the line and everything, was pregnant, still didn’t know.”
Tayler’s physical was on a Friday and her doctor called with the news the next day — the day of her going
away party.
“He said I was pregnant and I said, ‘You’re lying, there’s no way,’ ” Tayler said. “I said, ‘You can’t tell my parents today, please don’t call them today. This is my going away party. If anything, you can call them tomorrow because I’m not telling them. You’re going to have to tell them, I’m not going to tell them myself.’
“That was the first time I’d ever seen my dad cry in my whole 18 years of being alive. It was a roller coaster.”
Once the shock subsided, Tayler’s family rallied around her.
“I loved being pregnant, that one month of being pregnant was the best month of my life,” she said. “Everyone did everything for me — my grandma, my brother, my sister, my mom, my dad. Oh, I loved it.”
Tayler did not even realize she was in labor on the morning of Quinn’s birth. Her labor pains lasted about 30 minutes and “I have one stretch mark on my stomach.”
Leaving her baby when she went
to school in January was not easy.
“Yes, it was hard, I cried a little bit, I mean a lot,” Tayler said. “Actually when we were at the airport, I didn’t really cry. My parents came up with me to Nebraska and when they were leaving me, my mom was crying. My dad, I believe he cried on the plane, I’m just going to believe that. It didn’t hit me that they were gone and that I was a mom — I still don’t believe that I’m a mom.
“After they left, maybe like a week, I started missing them a lot and baby a lot, cried a lot. I still had all my friends up there telling me, ‘It’s OK.’ ”
The entire extended ohana are behind the Hayases’ decision — Quinn has 18 total grandparents, great grandparents and great-great grandparents — to send Tayler to Midland to begin her college journey.
“Oh, super proud,” Jonelle said. “I would share her story with everyone I come in contact with.”
Several age-group trips to the Mainland, wrestling for the Lahaina Roughnecks in the Maui Style program, then Lahaina Intermediate and Lahainaluna helped Tayler to the point where she got a scholarship to Midland.
“Everything that we could do to prepare her for college, we did,” Jonelle said. “If it meant not paying the cellphone bill, or cable bill, it was trying to get her there, to prepare her for it.”
The Hayases did not want to take away from their daughter’s long-term goal of a career in law enforcement, perhaps the FBI.
“Going to college was not more of a transition for me, it was more ‘Can she handle being by herself?’ ” Jonelle said. “We said, ‘When you go to school, you go to school, but when you come home you’re full-time mom.’ ”
Jason chimed in, “We told her: ‘We got this, we got Quinn.’ ”
Tayler, a psychology and sociology major, is grateful for the family support.
“It was hard, but knowing that mom and dad, my whole family, especially my grandmas, they’re all there watching her,” Tayler said. “She’s a handful and I appreciate that they watch her when I’m in college.
“Right now, I have criminal justice classes. I don’t really know where I’m going with my majors, but as long as I can get a job and move out of this house … there’s a lot of us in here.”
Tayler said she has her eyes squarely focused on the future with her daughter.
“We have lived here since I was in first grade,” she said, glimpsing at her parents. “I want to grow up, and then I’m going to take Quinn and then we’re going to venture the world. And we’re going to buy you guys a house.”
That dream brings laughs and smiles from both Jonelle and Jason.
Tayler remembers receiving a call from Leland that she needed to come home in May. When she got there, she knew something was amiss by the looks on her family members’ faces.
“My dad told me and I just started crying, horribly crying all over the place,” Tayler said.
For all of the Hayases, Jonelle’s diagnosis has added more immediate meaning to each day they have together.
“Now, I look at it like I’m not only going to school for me, but I have to go to school for you,” Tayler said, looking at her mother. “Because I could
have stayed home, but you were like, ‘Go to school, keep getting your education.’ Now I go to school for more than just one reason.”
When Jonelle and Jason are at wrestling meets, often taking action photos for the media, Quinn is taken care of by the assembled crowd.
“Everyone knows I’m a mom — she’s a famous baby,” Tayler said. “People are always, like, ‘I can’t believe you’re a mom.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m a mom. I don’t believe it either,’ but all the high school kids love her, all my cheering friends, they love her. All my friends up there want to meet her.”
Quinn’s father, Shiloh Lopez, a former Lahainaluna classmate of Tayler’s, shares custody of Quinn and has her every weekend.
“He’s just like the best dad,” Jonelle said. “She loves her dad. She knows who her dad is. When he comes to the door, she just runs, she knows she’s going to dad.”
When Leland first found out he was going to be an uncle, he said, “I was kind of mad because I didn’t have a room — I’d been sleeping in the living room — so I got mad, but then I realized I had to support Tayler because she’s having a baby and a whole new life story. I just went with it, got used to being called uncle.”
Leland, who wrestled at 132 pounds as a freshman last year for Lahainaluna, admits that he used to give his mom “a hard time in school, but when I realized that she was stage 4, I was like, ‘OK, maybe I have to do some schoolwork because she is not going to be here all the time for me.’ … It means a lot.”
Being “Auntie Alexis” puts a smile on the youngest of the Hayase children, an eighth grader at Lahaina Intermediate School.
“It’s fun because she’s always happy and fun, but when she gets angry or hangry she’s a handful,” Alexis said. “I try to help as much as I can when
I’m not in class or working on my homework because Tayler has to get her education and we all have to watch Quinn.”
The wrestling community — from youth to high school — has reached out to the Hayase family since Jonelle’s diagnosis. A GoFundMe account quickly raised more than $30,000 that will help the family off-set some anticipated doctor bills yet to come. More than $10,000 was raised in the first 24 hours of the account being posted.
“Unbelievable, I never expected it,” Jonelle said. “We never wanted to do a GoFundMe account. I help the children fundraise for everything — our children, everyone else’s children in the club, the high school. I’m all about, along with everyone else involved, that no kid gets left behind. Whether we have to sell extra tickets for them, whatever it is, to make sure they get on that plane and wrestle or cheer for that matter.
“I never really knew the impact that I had on the community, on these families, until I saw it come back to me. Every time I would see a donation, I would think, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it,’ sometimes from people I don’t even know. It puts a smile on my heart and makes me just come to terms with, like, ‘Gosh, I guess I did something good.’ ”
Lahainaluna head coach Todd Hayase, a third cousin of Jason Hayase, said Jonelle is a stalwart in the entire Maui County wrestling community.
“She’s so special,” Todd Hayase said. “Jonelle is family and not just what she’s done for me and Lahainaluna wrestling, but the Luna family, as we call it the ohana. With Maui Style she helps a lot — her kids all grew up with Lahaina Roughnecks. It’s just her and Jason, how much they reach out and their aloha for anybody, any club. It’s not just a Lahaina thing.
“They would help anybody, any club, and I think it shows because if you were to ask any other parent or any other coach from any other club, they would all say great things about Jason and Jonelle. Their aloha is for everybody. They’re just incredible people.”
Kim Ball, a founding force behind the Maui Style program and coach of the Napili Surfriders, said the Hayases are always at wrestling meets.
“She’s one of those tireless workers behind the scenes,” Ball said. “She never wants to take any credit, but as far as like fundraising for the Roughnecks or Lahaina Intermediate School wrestling or Lahainaluna, she’s always been kind of the ringleader organizer in so many ways, not to mention what she does for Maui Style, too.
“They are the unofficial team photographers for wrestling for all of Maui.”
Jason and Jonelle got married on Aug. 15 after more than 20 years together.
“She’s always wanted to get married, but I always put it on the back burner,” Jason Hayase said. “But with her diagnosis and with Tayler going back to school, she really wanted to get married. It was kind of hard with this COVID thing. We couldn’t invite anybody, so did a little private ceremony at my working place. It was definitely a load off my back, a monkey off my back, and getting her the last name that she always wanted, Hayase.”
Added Jonelle: “I think it made our family complete. So, that’s what I wanted, I wanted to give that to our children.”
Jason said that the diagnosis hit him hard, but when he looks into the eyes of his granddaughter he immediately begins to feel better.
“She definitely gives me a sense of purpose,” Jason said.
This is not the first serious challenge that the family has faced.
Jason is a recovering crystal methamphetamine addict who has been sober for 14 years, starting his recovery soon after his family ended up in a homeless shelter. He says the serenity prayer whenever needed when things get tough during the day.
“We had family problems and we fought because of the meth,” Jason Hayase said. “In order for me to get back with my family, I had to take a drug test and I tested dirty, went through the program at the homeless shelter, got better and the rest is history.
“I use the serenity prayer every day, especially now with Jonelle’s diagnosis and all that. So, that has really helped me.”