My cousin Cheryl

Most of us look up to an older cousin even if we have brothers and sisters of our own. A cousin who led the pack at playtime when we were kids and yet was responsible enough to account for every sweaty head at the end of the day; a cousin who taught us the basics of eye makeup and etiquette (“Don’t get up from your seat when being introduced to a boy!”); who represented the best of what we wanted to be when we grew up.

Cheryl (the eldest daughter of my aunt Nellie Mayor and uncle Pedieng Loleng) was that cousin. Growing up, she was the older sister I loved, looked up to and tried to emulate. This, after outgrowing my initial resentment because she, not I, was the flower girl at my parents’ wedding at Lourdes Church in Quezon City. I couldn’t understand why it was Cheryl who wore that dainty white frock at my parents’ wedding, and posed beside my beloved parents in their laminated wedding photo. It was only after I was old enough to grasp that I was born a year after my parents were wed that I forgave Cheryl for that imagined usurpation of my throne.

And I replaced the resentment (I would actually pinch Cheryl when no one was looking) with the loyalty of a puppy that followed its master because it was so much fun to do so! We played games and shared secrets. She gave me weight-loss tips and taught me how to make pakipot with boys (I took the lessons so much to heart I actually became scared of boys!). She was good in Math but wasn’t a nerd — in fact she was the dream girl of many suitors.

Cheryl taught me how to survive my first year at UP, with those dreaded dawn registrations. There was only one thing I couldn’t learn from her, and that was how to dance. Cheryl danced the ballet and could dance a mean swing at parties while it took me years to cease being part of the wallpaper.

Lucky for me, Cheryl was a good example. That my sister Mae and I looked up to her was a given, and if she played hooky, we probably would have played hooky, too. Follow the leader, right? But Cheryl was confident, independent, diligent, smart. She and her sister Natalie (who we also looked up to) traveled around Southeast Asia in their early teens. They were active Girl Scouts. In college, Cheryl immediately took driving lessons — she knew what she wanted and knew how to get there. After graduating with a degree in engineering from UP, she went on to the US for further studies. She became a top executive at Hewlett Packard, at one time supervising a global workforce of about 40,000 employees.

The eldest of the female cousins on my father’s side, she had set a benchmark for us.

* * *

About eight years ago, Cheryl discovered a lump on her breast. She had it checked immediately. At a reunion we had at our second cousin Ching Lugtu’s beautiful house in Alabang last Tuesday, Cheryl, whom I hadn’t seen in 20 years, recalled that it was the week between the test and the results that was agonizing. Sometimes, too much knowledge can be frightening, because while researching on breast cancer and comparing her symptoms to what she had read about, she knew.

When the doctors confirmed that she had stage three breast cancer, Cheryl “fell apart.”

“I told my doctor, ‘What’s going to happen to my children’?” Cheryl remembers crying. At that time, her two children Tarrant and Kyra were toddlers. After the initial outpouring of her grief, Cheryl wiped away her tears and straightened her back.

“That was the only time during my illness that I fell apart, Joanne,” she tells me. After that, she took over the reins of her future — as much as humanly possible. Typical of Cheryl, she took charge. She studied her options, bit the bullet, endured the pain of the treatments and the surgery and courageously faced all her trials. “I wasn’t going to sit back and let the cancer take over.”

She told her husband Jeff Mangasarian, “This cancer is just a kink in my schedule.”

And she meant what she said.

* * *

Her illness made Cheryl realize what truly mattered to her. She quit her enviable job at Hewlett Packard to be a full-time mother to her kids. The family moved from San Francisco to the suburbs of Chicago. She learned to ride horses and now judges horse Dressage competitions. She volunteered to be part of a clinical research study for a cure for breast cancer, hoping that the knowledge gained from the study would help others.

Eight years after discovering she had cancer and even now that she has vanquished it, Cheryl doesn’t take things for granted. She has not insulated her children from what she has gone through. But she knows that whatever the future brings, she has already won the greatest battle of her life — the fight to be with her precious children at the time they needed her most.

* * *

There is a God who has a master plan for us all, but in that master plan is an allowance for free choice. We can chart our course, wipe the dust off the windshields of our lives, and take the wheel.

Cheryl was a good example then. She still is a good example now.

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