By Robin Erb
From: freep.com
Kate Paul spends her days among swirls and textures, fairies and dinosaurs, stone towers, a crooked treehouse and a cityscape dangling in outer space.
There are more than 800 square feet to paint here at Gilda’s Club Metro Detroit — walls and doorjambs and molding that wrap around corner after corner and stretch from floor to ceiling.
Who has time to think about cancer?
This fantasyland is in the playroom of this three-story operation in Royal Oak named after comedienne and former Detroiter Gilda Radner, who died in 1989 of ovarian cancer.
In this wood-frame home along Rochester Road, those with cancer and their loved ones come to seek information, inspiration, support from any of 120 programs.
But this time around, having returned to replace murals she did in 1997 and 2004, Paul is creating more than another whimsical escape in the playroom here. She’s brush-stroking something she couldn’t have years earlier: a legacy passed from one cancer survivor to others.
“I think I’m really in the right place at the right time,” she said.
In 2011, Paul’s doctor delivered the news that Radner once heard: Ovarian cancer.
Paul, 58, a regular at the gym and on her bike, was thunderstruck. Her last stay at a hospital was when she had her tonsils out at 5. The tumor in her abdomen had grown to 8 inches without notice.
“With cancer, you’re extraordinarily changed,” she said. “It hits you like a hurricane. It gives you something, it takes away something.”
When she’d been at Gilda’s before, Paul was a painter only, noting the women with bandanas, wondering about their stories.
“I never thought that I’d be part of the brethren,” she said.
‘This is bad, really bad’
Gilda’s Club sits alongside the rush of traffic north of 13 Mile. The Sears Roebuck home with its expansive entryway and sweeping staircase offers a surprisingly quiet retreat for those diagnosed with cancer and their loved ones.
On Jan. 29, staff was changing shifts just about dinnertime, and program manager Shahin Ip was welcoming first-time visitors for a new members meeting.
Elsewhere, offices and meeting rooms also were alight — not unusual for Gilda’s Club, which remains open until 8 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays.
“All a sudden I saw water streaming down the wall,” Ip said.
Somebody grabbed some towels. Others began to move furniture. Eight months pregnant, Ip was trying to find the source of the leak. Others were telling her to sit down.
Then an alarm went off — shrill and relentless.
“And then it just started like raining,” she said. “It was absolutely chaotic.”
In the dead of Michigan’s record-breaking winter, a frozen pipe had burst. Thousands of gallons of water gushed through the sprinkler system, rushing toward the basement from the top floors of the home, soaking floorboards, drywall and insulation along the way.
It didn’t look bad at first — just wet, said Gilda’s executive director Laura Varon Brown.
And she shook it off when a firefighter said, as he left the scene: You know this all has to come out, don’t you?
“When you came in the next morning, you could just smell the wood — the wood soaking up the water. Little by little it began to sink in: This is bad, really bad,” Brown said.
In the following weeks, Woodlawn Church across Rochester Road opened its doors to some of Gilda’s programs as restoration crews stripped much of the interior of the home naked to its frame. The kitchen was a complete loss.
Most devastating was the loss of the basement Noogieland — the playroom named after the noogies that Bill Murray’s sketch character, Todd, used to give to Radner’s Lisa on “Saturday Night Live.”
“Noogieland is so special for our kids. It’s not a basement … it’s this magical kingdom” for children who have cancer or whose loved ones have cancer, said Ip. “Adults might see a basement. But the kids? You opened the door, and it leads you to this different era, this different realm.”
In February, Paul’s phone rang as she worked in her home studio. Trained as a theater set painter, she had created the Noogieland mural — vast medieval scenes and castles — in 1997 and added to it in 2004.
Informed of the water damage, Paul was asked to create another escape.
She chose her words carefully: “I said, ‘You might want to find someone cleverer and who can work longer hours.’ ”
The previous summer, doctors had told her the cancer had returned. Now she was in the middle of another nine months of chemo to fight the same cancer that had killed Radner and given form to Gilda’s Club.
“My breath just stopped,” Ip said.
Fantasy and hope
Paul, who also is responsible for other sweeping murals around southeast Michigan, including at the Royal Oak library, was so weak when she showed up in April that she had to hire help to carry in pots and drop cloths and ladders and reference books.
She worked just a few hours a day at first. She took two weeks off for chemo. She came to work one day with a tube snaking under her work smock and into a bag of liquid in her pocket. It was an intravenous antibiotic.
Paul is assisted by fellow painter Peggy Kerwan, and these days, her strength is returning. Her workdays are now five hours, sometimes longer.
Bees and butterflies hover above flowers of brilliant hues. Dinosaurs gather at a watering hole. Stone steps lead to an archaeological dig. A playful giraffe dons a black-and-red firefighter’s helmet — homage to the Royal Oak firefighters who arrived as water gushed from the ceilings.
“It’s great fun,” Paul said of her work. “Your brain is firing all the time, constantly reassessing, researching. What does an aardvark look like? What does a treasure chest really look like?”
She pauses, then busts out laughing: “I don’t think they knew how much I’d run amok.”
Along one of the last stretches of the wall to paint, one that greets visitors as they step off the elevator, a smiling Gilda Radner peeks from behind oversized daisies.
Paul stands nearby this day, paint-splattered as usual. The blue painter’s tape on her hands protects fingertips made painful and sensitive by her most recent round of chemotherapy. A light fuzz has replaced the ginger locks she used to have. And she still tires by midafternoon.
“A woman once told me, ‘I don’t seen cancer in your painting.’ But why would I want that? I don’t want to understand, to face the thing I want to deny.”
Rather, she said, she’ll let the doctors do what they have to do, and she’ll follow their orders. In the time between, as her body regains strength, she’ll do what she wants to do: Paint bold strokes, play with colors, assess and dab on new details.
The cancer hasn’t changed what Paul paints or what the children will see in this vast Gilda’s Club fantasyland. The fact that she’s a better painter these days than she was in 1997 and 2004 comes from years and experience.
Still, she said, there’s a focus that wasn’t there before. There’s a determination and clarity that wafted in with her diagnosis.
“I don’t have as much self-doubt anymore. I can’t afford it,” she said. With cancer, “you don’t have time to suffer fools or to have self-pity. You have to make time move, to make good use of it …
“Look,” she said, “you deal with what you’re given, and then you carry on. You just carry on, right?”
Barbara Jacoby is an award winning blogger that has contributed her writings to multiple online publications that have touched readers worldwide.