Road to survival

By Cynthia Hubert -- Sacramento Bee Staff Writer
(Published Sunday, June 2, 2002)

Once, all the woman of the Wall of Hope could be called survivors.

Now, many of their photographs are marked with sad footnotes. They are pink ribbons, noting deaths from complications of the disease, and each time she must attach one, Marilyn Gayler Axelrod becomes a tiny bit more determined.

Marilyn Gayler Axelrod and her daughter, Hillary Friedberg, are starting a series of seminars in hopes of changing the way researchers, fund-raisers, philanthropists and others view and attack cancer.

"It makes me angry when people die. It makes me said," said Axelrod, 54, who eight years ago founded the traveling tribute to people, like herself, who have fought breast cancer. "It makes me even more resolved not to walk away from it."

So, with the California portion of the wall complete, Axelrod is taking on a new mission. Drawing from the experience of the thousands of patients she has met through the project, she is seeking to create a national dialogue about the root causes of breast and other cancers.

It will begin with the first in a series of "traveling seminars" on the subject on June 15 at the Central Library in downtown Sacramento. The seminars will explore, among other things, environmental links to cancer.

"It's been a dozen years for me, and I still don't have an answer for my cancer," said Axelrod, a widow who works 50 to 70 hours a week on various volunteer projects and supports herself by taking in boarders at her home in Davis. "So many people have died. We need to start focusing on where cancer begins, the cause, rather than on the end, new drugs to treat it."

As with the wall, which Axelrod began out of a borrowed room in a department store, the seminar project will start modestly. As the dialogue spreads, Axelrod said, she hopes it will lead to real changes in the way researchers, fund-raisers, philanthropists and others view and attack cancer.

"Most of the attention in our country has been on cures," she said. "But most of the people I have talked to want to know about causes. They don't want their children to get this disease."

Even as she tackles her latest venture, Axelrod plans to continue to take the California Wall of Hope, a panel spanning 200 feet and featuring 1,500 elegant photographs of people who have battled breast cancer, on the road. She hopes to enroll other states in the project and guide them in the process of licensing their own walls.

"I will be as busy as ever," said Axelrod, nearly buried by files, papers and photographs in her home office. "I see no letup at all."

From as far back as she can remember, Axelrod's life has been frenetic and unpredictable.

She was born and raised in East Los Angeles, one of three children of the late Sylvia and Jacob Feldman. "It wasn't 'Leave It to Beaver,'" she said of her childhood.

Axelrod's mother was mentally ill, and her father developmentally disabled. "By the time I was 12," she said, "I had a pretty good idea of how to run a household."

As harrowing as they were, Axelrod's chaotic early years taught her resilience, compassion and patience, she said. "We never knew what was going to happen with Mom, and it was all Dad could do to keep his job," she said. "So it was really up to me. But it wasn't all bad."

Marilyn was the first person in her family to graduate from high school. After marrying young, having a child, Hillary, and going through a divorce, she finally got a college degree in journalism at age 35. "My daughter was 5. I made her a cap and gown and we graduated together," she said.

Following a brief stint in newspapers in the Bay Area, she brought Hillary to Davis and worked for a couple of trade magazines before launching her own business selling advertising for various magazines and newsletters.

She met her second husband, Daniel Axelrod, at a laundromat. A retired University of California, Davis, professor of botany and geology and more than 30 years her senior, he invited her and Hillary to his home to pick citrus fruit one winter day. Axelrod met them at the door two days before Christmas with cookies, milk and a small gift for the girl. Romance bloomed.

In 1990, five years after the couple married, Marilyn Axelrod felt a lump in her chest and learned she had breast cancer. She was 42 years old, and had seen both her aunt and her mother fight the disease. Axelrod underwent a mastectomy but opted out of chemotherapy after two grueling sessions.

"The day I was diagnosed I thought, I have got to do something about this. It's just too devastating," Axelrod recalled.

It took four years for the Wall of Hope idea to surface. "I was throwing away pictures from some work I had done with a glamour photography company," she said. "It suddenly hit me. What about pictures of people with breast cancer? Wouldn't it be amazing to build a wall of pictures of survivors?"

Within days, she had booked a room at a local department store to use as a photography studio. She got together a few outfits and accessories for prospective clients to wear, and hired a specialist to offer them makeovers. After a small item recruiting cancer survivors to take part in the project appeared in the newspaper, she realized the potential power of the Wall of Hope. "We were inundated," she said. "The phones were ringing off the hook."

Volunteers placing portraits of Sacramento - area breast cancer survivors in a panel that will be added to a traveling exhibit.

The following year, Axelrod introduced the Wall of Hope at a rally at the state Capitol. "People were just blown away by it," she said. "The reaction was incredible."

Supporting the project by selling photo packages to participants and their families, Axelrod has since taken the project to cities across California, arranging photography sessions and displaying the wall. The project has gone to Texas, Ohio, Connecticut, Nevada and, most recently, New York. Axelrod's goal is to have all 50 states represented in a "Mile of Survival" that she hopes to take to the nation's capital.

Among her most ardent supporters is her daughter, Hillary Friedberg, who has been immersed in her mother's work from the beginning and now serves on the project's board of trustees.

Friedberg recalled the day her mother told her and her stepfather about her cancer.

"Deep down, I think she was more angry than scared," Friedberg said. "She promised me that she would fight, that she would be there for my high school graduation, college graduation, and someday my wedding. My mom's resolve to live, and the sense that she didn't have time to waste, put a fire under her."

Friedberg, 25, who is married and lives in San Ramon, said it is almost impossible to separate her mother from the Wall of Hope. "I almost can't remember a time when she wasn't working passionately on the project," she said. "I meet so many survivors who tell me what a difference she makes. Her determination to live gave our family hope even when we felt hopeless. Now her determination has evolved into this project that brings hope, support and education to so many women."

Axelrod, with the exception of her tenants, has an empty nest now. Her daughter is on her own. Her husband died in 1998. Both of her parents are gone. Recently her beloved dog Pele died at age 17. She has begun dating a man she met online, and is considering moving to the Bay Area to be closer both to him and to her daughter.

But Axelrod never allows herself to plan too far into the future, even though her disease has long been in remission.

"As a survivor of cancer, I have not looked far ahead," she said. "I look at today, I look at tomorrow, maybe next month and perhaps the fall. For however long I am here, I just have a burning desire to make a difference."

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