PINK CHAIRS
Beyond ribbons, project features survivors’ art
These days, it’s rare not to see Grace Carpenter greet the morning sun at the beach.
It was something she had done in her early 20s, but stopped because “I just got caught up in life just like everyone else does,” she said from her Palm Beach Gardens home on a recent afternoon.
At age 36, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Now, three years later, she starts her days with the ocean.
“It was a place I could go, I could tell my day was just a good day for the most part,” she said. “Yeah, I hit bumps in the road during the day ... but the way I was handling it was greatly different. I like the way I feel and I keep coming back to it.”
That day, in the corner of Carpenter’s living room, the sound of crashing waves emanated from speakers attached to an Adirondack chair. With the help of artist Jordan Clemmons, the chair’s back slats are painted with a pink sunrise, sand and seashells dust the chair’s front, yoga figures strike various poses on the left armrest and a yin and yang is drawn with positive and negative words from her journey through life.
The sunrise is what keeps Carpenter healthy — mind, body and soul — after being cancer-free. Her chair is placed at Loggerhead Marinelife Center for the month of October, which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, as part of Jupiter Medical Center’s Pink Chair Project.
The medical center and the Margaret W. Niedland Breast Center asked breast cancer survivors to paint a chair that represented their motivation through treatment. The chairs and survivor stories are placed around Jupiter and Palm Beach Gardens.
The American Cancer Society estimates that more than 266,000 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed in women and 2,550 new cases diagnosed in men. It most often is found from the discovery of a lump in the breast, but early breast cancer is most commonly diagnosed through mammograms.
There are 29 chairs in all, mostly representing women who were treated by Jupiter Medical Center. Some had beach themes, like Carpenter’s. Others had flowers, like survivor Jo Nagorka. One had a blunt message for the disease: “Cancer, Kiss My A**.”
‘A positive experience’
Before her diagnosis, “I was not a happy person,” Carpenter said. She was studying to become a funeral director and writing a paper when she put her laptop aside. It was her time of the month and her breasts were sensitive. But a pea-sized knot in the tissue gave her pause. It kept growing as the weeks passed.
She found out a tumor was growing in her breast, but was not in her lymph nodes.
“For me, it was a bad diagnosis, but I made it a positive experience,” she said.
Carpenter has tacked up a piece of paper titled “My ‘Saving Grace’ Checklist.” She checked off items like going through eight rounds of chemotherapy, going through 33 rounds of radiation therapy, having a double mastectomy and reconstruction. One item not yet complete, as it’s an ongoing process: “Live in the moment, Healthy, Advocate, Love, Laugh.”
“I think for me, the biggest growth and change for me has been spiritually within myself and wanting to live a life fuller than what it was before,” she said.
‘When everything kind of fell apart’
Nagorka, 58, emanates a quiet calm in her personality and paintings. Before cancer, she considered herself a positive person. As her five-year anniversary of being cancer-free comes up in November, she is still appreciative of life.
“I appreciate every day,” she said. “Everybody I meet, that’s the most important person I meet because they are.”
When Nagorka found out she had Stage 2 breast cancer, she didn’t tell anyone for three days.
She had skipped a few annual doctor visits, but in 2013 a nurse practitioner felt something Nagorka had discovered in the shower a week before: a golf ball-sized lump in her left breast.
The first time she cried, she said, is when she found out she needed chemotherapy.
“First one, your body kind of goes into shock, but you get through it. The second one wasn’t so bad. But the third one is when everything kind of fell apart,” she said. It starts killing the cancer cells and the other cells. It took two years for her body to feel normal again.
Nagorka loved painting as a child and into her college years, but it wasn’t until after her mother, Aileen, died two years after her cancer diagnosis that she picked it back up and never let go.
She enjoys painting flowers, serene beach scenes and designs on children’s rocking chairs.
“You get lost in it,” she said. “You do it and it’s fun.”
Her hibiscus chair, displayed at Bloomingdale’s at The Gardens Mall, has some pink in it, but explodes with green, purple, blue and yellow, too.
In a way, Nagorka sees life after cancer the same way Carpenter does.
“The sun goes up. The sun goes down,” Nagorka said. “You’re still here to see it.”