As much as any family you are likely to meet, the Mallory ohana of Ewa Beach embraces the milestones of everyday life with earnest appreciation and an infectious sense of triumph.
"We live one day at a time," says mom Jennifer Mallory. "And we really try to appreciate the good days."
It was a good day when eldest daughter Kiera attended her eighth-grade Rites of Passage ceremony. Another when 10-year-old Lily got her official military dependent identification card. Still another when Jennifer got her latest test results back from the doctor and was reminded again that sometimes no news is the best news of all.
Jennifer Mallory and her four children — Phillip Jr., Kiera, Lily and Bella — have an extremely rare predisposition to cancer called Li-Fraumeni syndrome. The hereditary condition typically involves a mutation of the TP53 gene, which serves as the genetic blueprint for the p53 protein, a natural cancer suppressant.
Cancer had devastated Jennifer’s family before the syndrome was ever diagnosed. As a teenager, Mallory watched as cancer took the lives of her father, brother, aunt and cousin.
Mallory held out hope for a happier future when she married her high school sweetheart, Phillip, and started a family. Her third child, Lily, was born soon after Phillip, a pilot with the Air National Guard, was assigned to Hawaii.
"Being a mother was all I ever wanted," Jennifer says.
But at age 2, Lily was diagnosed with a rare form of adrenal cancer and an even rarer sarcoma on her leg.
Surgery and chemotherapy were successful, and Lily has been cancer-free for six years. Still, after testing for Li-Fraumeni turned up positive for Lily and her siblings, the specter of illness looms.
Two years ago Jennifer was diagnosed with breast cancer. The disease has since spread to her lungs and brain.
The family responds, as it always has, with a mix of dry-eyed realism and unshakable positivity. They control what they can — diet, exercise, sun protection — and accept the unpredictability of what they cannot. They acknowledge fear and anxiety as necessary points along the same spectrum of human experience as hope and joy.
This weekend, as they have for the last five years, the Mallory family will operate a lemonade stand in Ewa Beach in support of Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation, which raises funds for childhood cancer research.
For more information, visit 808ne.ws/1G8QoYq.
Aloha: Condolences to the family and friends of Wannette Gomes, who died Saturday. Gomes was featured in a Jan. 7, 2014, column (808ne.ws/1KlVpjB).
Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.
