Standing Tall

By John Strege
Photos by Thomas Broening October 19, 2009

Heather Farr was a wisp of a woman once cast as David to Laura Davies' Goliath in a Curtis Cup match at Muirfield. The Scots called her "The Wee One." She was a shade over five feet tall, barely a hundred pounds, all of it tenacity infused with charisma and accentuated by an infectious smile that was too deeply ingrained in her character to allow breast cancer to erase it.

A two-club wind could have knocked her down, but for 4½ years she stood her ground against the battering ram of a deadly disease, refusing to wallow in the toxic pool of self-pity. She saw a cure just around the corner of every hospital hallway she walked, including the last one.

"I've got to show you something," she said to her younger sister Missy Farr-Kaye, escorting her to a room in which a bone- arrow transplant machine was being installed. Once she regained her strength, she intended to have another transplant, she said, her enthusiasm and will unyielding even as death closed in.

It is here that Missy's own story begins, where Heather's sadly ends. Heather, for whom LPGA stardom seemed imminent, was 28 when she died in 1993. Four years later Missy, 30 at the time, survived her own breast cancer scare, only to have the disease return in July 2008.

Would anyone have begrudged her asking, Why me? She posed this question instead: "What would Heather do?"

Life does not come with instructions, but Heather left behind a tutorial on coping with cancer. Dignity and grace provided the subtext to its central theme: Surrender is not an option and a smile is obligatory.

"I have one bar of how to do it," Missy says. "Heather's my bar."

Farr-Kaye, 42, a former professional golfer and now the associate head coach of the women's golf team at Arizona State, has met her crisis with the kind of resolve and optimism that suggests that anything less would be a stain on her sister's legacy.

"It's not for me to question why," Missy says in a room adjacent to the pro shop at ASU Karsten GC in Tempe, Ariz. "Everybody has their cross to bear. For whatever reason this has been the Farrs'."

A bilateral mastectomy the first time around was thought to have precluded the possibility of Farr-Kaye's cancer returning. Doctors declared her cancer free. Go live your life, they said, the words an ode to joy for a mother of two young sons.

A decade later, a third son having joined her family, she discovered a lump. A biopsy came back positive. "I thought, 'Oh, my God, this can't be happening again. How in the world could this have come back?' " Farr-Kaye recalls. "The doctors said 'The breast tissue's all gone.' I had my pity party for a day or two, then I sat back and said, 'OK, what would Heather do?'

"Heather's outlook was so amazing," says Farr-Kaye. "Occasionally, among very, very close friends and Mom and Dad and me, she would break down. But she would always perk herself up. She never wanted anyone to feel sorry for her. She'd say, 'There are people out there that have it worse than me.' You have to be tough. You have to be strong to face it."

Yet even an iron chin can turn to glass in this arena; the cancer and the toxins required to eradicate it countervail the strength one might bring to the fight. "Your body starts to turn because of the effect of all the chemo," Farr-Kaye says. "It's a poison. Really, that's what killed Heather."

For Farr-Kaye, chemotherapy every three weeks begat the familiar cycle of illness, as well as hair loss that would have been the least of her concerns were it not for young sons incapable of understanding that it was a side effect and not indicative of something more sinister.

"Even if you're feeling good, if you don't have hair, they're like, 'Mom must be dying,' " she says. Only her oldest son, Dalton, 16, understood. Cameron, 5, "couldn't wrap his brain around it as to why" her hair was falling out. Riley, 11, went mute on the matter. "Didn't want to talk about it, nope, 'I know you're fine,' " she says. Two months into her chemo, his cone of silence lifted.

"I'm afraid you're going to die, and you're not telling me the truth," he said.

"I've always told you the truth," she replied, "and I'm telling you now that I'm going to be OK. If I had cancer everywhere and only had a couple months, I would tell you that to prepare you for it."

Death at that point was less of a concern than the minutiae of living day to day. Colleagues raised money to provide housecleaning for a year, and friends brought meals, allowing her to direct her depleted supply of energy toward her children and recovery. In the meantime, she buried her malaise beneath a perpetually cheery demeanor that her doctors wanted to bottle and sell as a prescription. "You would never know when Missy was having a bad day," says friend and former LPGA player Val Skinner.