'My heart and soul': Berkley mom rides in PMC for daughter who lost battle with cancer
BERKLEY — In the wake of unthinkable loss, one local mom is making it her mission to help cancer research.
Kristina McGarry, of Berkley, will be pedaling in the 2023 Pan-Mass Challenge Winter Cycle on Feb. 4 in memory of her daughter, Kyla.
Kyla was just 14 years old when she was diagnosed with metastatic alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma in May 2018.
She died in March 2020, just as the country was shutting down amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
After McGarry experienced the unfathomable grief of a parent losing a child, she turned to the Pan-Mass Challenge, which donates 100% of funds raised to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in the hope that someday, no one else will have to endure the kind of loss that her family has.
This year, when she takes on the PMC Winter Cycle, she will be doing so with Team Kyla.
‘One of those people that just lit up the room’
Today, McGarry is a paraprofessional at the Berkley Community School and has worked in the school system on and off for about 10 years.
But when Kyla and her younger brother Drew were still little, she stayed home with her children so that she could be with them all of the time.
The family also had a home on the Cape, in Falmouth, so in the summer when school was out that’s where they’d go. They’d spend their days at the beach, and McGarry’s husband James would join them for long weekends.
“We enjoyed it so much. The beach was one of Kyla’s favorite things,” McGarry said in a phone interview.
In addition to her love for the beach and the ocean, Kyla was a promising student athlete.
She loved running, and just two weeks before her diagnosis, she had broken Somerset Berkley Regional High School’s freshman hurdle record.
In addition to track and field, Kyla also played soccer, and she loved to ski. And she was a great student while she kept up with all of her athletics, her mom said.
When she was in seventh grade, Kyla already knew that she wanted to be a pediatrician someday, a dream that she held on to.
“She dreamed of becoming a pediatrician. And that was well before she was diagnosed. She loved children,” McGarry said.
Kyla also loved photography.
“She loved photographing sunrises and sunsets, any kind of beautiful sky,” McGarry said.
After her diagnosis with metastatic alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma, a soft tissue cancer, she kept up with the hobbies that she loved so much.
When she was going through treatment, she and her mother would sit and paint together, too.
“We have so many pictures that she took and that she painted,” McGarry said.
Field Hockey All-Scholastics:Here are the 2022 Taunton Daily Gazette picks
Kyla loved sunny themes, and her own disposition reflected that.
She never complained. She was a 14-year-old girl who lost all her hair, and she was sad about it, but she never complained, her mother said.
“She just marched right through.”
Kyla offered the same sweetness to everyone who crossed her path, from family and friends to people at school and her healthcare providers and fellow patients.
During her treatment, when she was able to go to school, even if she was feeling horrible, her teachers would see a warm smile on her face.
“She was a great friend to people. She was the type of person that everybody just wanted to be around. She just always had a smile on her face,” McGarry said.
Her doctors and nurses would say the same thing.
“She was one of those people that just lit up the room, and made everybody feel good,” McGarry said.
Treatment with Dana-Farber and Jimmy Fund
Kyla’s care team at Dana Farber and the Jimmy Fund “were just amazing,” McGarry said.
McGarry recalled being particularly touched by how emotionally invested the team was in her daughter’s care.
“I can’t even say enough about them. They do this day in and day out. People might think it becomes kind of robotic to them, giving bad news. When they have tears in their eyes, it’s pretty amazing, the level of care,” McGarry said.
Kyla was treated along with kids who were closer to her age and also dealing with cancer, separate from the younger kids, who might not have understood what they were going through as much as the older kids did, McGarry said.
The staff there was “great, absolutely wonderful. We still keep in touch with them.”
Her nurse practitioner, who adored Kyla, will be a member of Team Kyla during the PMC Winter Cycle.
Kyla finished treatments in September 2019 and was getting ready to go on her Make-A-Wish trip in November, but “she knew something was wrong,” McGarry said.
Kyla said she needed to know, and so they did not go on their trip.
She relapsed in November 2019 and died on March 18, 2020.
‘We have to learn to survive it every morning’
For the McGarry family, their lives are divided into before and after.
“That’s our life now. That’s how we operate. Before she was diagnosed, when she was here, and now, when she’s not,” Kristina McGarry said.
Their home is full of Kyla’s pictures and paintings, and Drew, who is now 17, also attends Somerset Berkley Regional High School, where teachers and staff also remember his sister fondly.
McGarry said that this is the hardest thing they’ve had to deal with as a family.
“It’s a learning experience every day. Time goes by, and people think we’ve survived this loss, but really, we have to learn to survive it every morning,” she said.
They are all learning how to carry their grief.
“We keep going because she would want us to keep going, and that’s the type of person she was.”
Team Kyla honors her memory in PMC Winter Cycle
One way McGarry has found to keep going is participating in the PMC, to help fund cancer research so that someday, other people will not have to experience the same kind of loss.
“Anything that I can do, or that anyone around us can do, we try to do. We do rides, we do fundraisers … we’re just hoping that someday we live in a world where somebody won’t have to go through this same hell,” McGarry said.
For her first Winter Cycle, McGarry was part of Team Joey, named after a little boy that Kyla befriended and loved during her treatment.
McGarry, who is also a runner and has participated in triathlons, wanted to contribute, but said at that time she couldn’t grasp putting her own team together. She remembered raising about $6,000 for Team Joey, and reflecting that maybe she could start her own team.
For the 2023 PMC Winter Cycle, she began Team Kyla when she was still a team of one.
“I had no idea what was gonna happen,” she said, but she figured if she was the only person on the team, then so be it.
She need not have worried.
“I sent out a simple text to a few of my friends, and I think within 15 minutes we had a team of 10, and now we have a team of 15,” McGarry said.
“I don’t know why I thought that making a team to support Kyla and everything that she went through was going to be difficult, because it happened so fast. It was a testament to Kyla’s character.”
Team Kyla will be participating in five, 45-minute rides, led by local spin instructors, at The 521 Overlook at Fenway Park in Boston.
Real estate:Custom-built colonial on over an acre of land sells for $699K in Dighton
According to PMC’s Winter Cycle Fact Sheet, this event has a fundraising goal of $750,000.
The Winter Cycle takes place on Saturday, Feb. 4, from 8 a.m. to 1:45 p.m., with an after party at Lansdowne Pub from 3 to 7 p.m.
For people who want to participate, there is a non-refundable $50 registration fee and a $500 fundraising minimum per session. All fundraising minimums must be met by March 1.
To learn more or to register, visit wintercycle.pmc.org.
McGarry praised the PMC as an “amazing organization” and acknowledged the need for more funding for research into childhood cancer.
She’s riding for Kyla because “she is my heart, and my soul, and my number one reason for riding. We ride to remember her, and remember her battle, to honor her, and to ride for patients who fought and won already, patients who are fighting right now … It’s just riding for everybody to hopefully end it at some point.”
Taunton Daily Gazette/Herald News copy editor and digital producer Kristina Fontes can be reached at kfontes@heraldnews.com. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Herald News and Taunton Daily Gazette today.
This article originally appeared on The Taunton Daily Gazette: Berkley Pan-Mass Challenge: Kristina McGarry rides for daughter Kyla
