“We didn’t realize that she didn’t know,” said the elder McCabe. “We hadn’t purposefully not talked about it.”

Rather, he and the whole family were facing so much.

On July 17, 2013, McCabe was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

“It was about like getting getting kicked in the stomach,” he said of the news. It crushed his wife, Iona. And neither knew how to tell Reilly or her big brother, Johnny, then 12.

“I knew we needed help,” John McCabe said. “We needed to know how to deal with it and how to help the kids through it.”

One day after his diagnosis, he walked into the Dempsey Center.

“I came off the elevator and I met Mary Dempsey,” he said. “I immediately got a hug, and we talked about what I had.”

Fourteen months later — after four rounds of chemotherapy — John McCabe looks healthy.

The treatments’ cancer-attacking poisons never made McCabe too sick or took away his hair. He missed little work from his job as a buyer for Central Maine Healthcare. Today, he’s unsure how sick he is.

“Now, we’re just kind of waiting and seeing,” he said.

And they’re learning.

At the Dempsey Center, the family took nutrition and yoga classes. There were day-long, group counseling sessions — some for kids and some for adults — aimed at helping folks manage both immediate fears and long-term health. They learned strategies for dealing with mounting medical costs.

Meanwhile, Reilly and Johnny learned about cancer.

One of the first lessons was to never be afraid to hug their dad.

“Pretty much every kid that comes through our doors worries that you can catch cancer,” said Tookie Bright, the center’s youth and family services coordinator.

They read books. They learned that cancer affects the body “like weeds in a garden.” And along with other children, they visited hospital facilities, including operating rooms.

“The kids get to touch and feel and experience and learn about cancer in a way that they need to,” Bright said.

The work has kept the family together, John McCabe said, sinking into a couch at the center with Reilly on his lap. Iona sat beside him with Johnny sandwiched in between.

The illness can do catastrophic damage to the family, he said.

“You know you need to rebuild,” he said. “You know you need to make it stronger.”

On Saturday, the McCabes plan to walk in the Dempsey Challenge. They named their team “Friends for Hope.”

“The illness made me realize how important each and every day is,” he said. “I try not to take it for granted but to make it special, not just for me but for them.”

The family will join the thousands of people who will walk, run or bicycle in the weekend-long event benefiting the center, which serves anyone affected by cancer without charge.

John and Iona described the center as a kind of sanctuary.

“It’s in the atmosphere here,” Iona said. “You feel it when you come off the elevator. I say, ‘The only reason I can talk about this without falling is the Dempsey Center.'”

For John, too, it’s been a place where people understand and help.

“You feel yourself working through things that you didn’t realize you need or that you could,” he said.

The sense of being overwhelmed by so much fear, worry, anger and frustration subsides, Iona said.

“When I came, there was an immediate sense of ‘OK, we’re going to make it,'” she said. “You can exhale.”

dhartill@sunjournal.com

Copy the Story Link