A woman gave bouquets of flowers to fellow cancer patients at Froedtert. After her death, her family carries on the tradition.
In 2017, the year her triple-negative metastatic breast cancer came back for the third time, Terese Ulickey started a tradition that would grow into her legacy.
Ulickey's three sons had decided to raise money to buy their mother flowers for every chemotherapy day that she'd have to endure. To their surprise, they'd raised $2,000 in less than a day — enough to pay for six bouquets of her first treatment and two for each day after that.
And so, every other Thursday, the former Milwaukee police officer would arrive at Froedtert Hospital's Clinical Cancer Center for her chemotherapy treatment with one of the two bouquets in hand. The nurses, happily supporting the spontaneously-born tradition, would be waiting for her to hand the flowers off, with the instructions that they be given to "somebody that needs a smile today."
"There are so many people who are worse off than me," Terese told WTMJ-TV in a 2017 interview about her decision to share her bouquet with other chemotherapy patients. "Why me? I don't need two."
At first, her sons weren't sure who she was giving the flowers to.
"We thought she was giving it away to a neighbor or a friend or something like that," said Zack Ulickey, her 28-year-old son. "But we found out later that she had taken a bouquet to chemo with her and given it to another patient before they got their treatment."
Family continues tradition of delivering flowers to cancer patients
Terese died in August of 2019 at the age of 60.
In the years since, her family has carried on the tradition of delivering flowers to cancer patients in her memory, recruiting volunteers and collecting donations through their non-profit organization, Terese's Flowers of Hope. They've completed some 150 deliveries.
"One day we just got a knock on the door and I got this beautiful, beautiful bunch of flowers," said Jane Dillon-Perkl, 65, who got a bouquet at home while she was in a two-week isolation after getting radiation treatment for neuroendocrine carcinoma. "I started crying right away."
In carrying on Terese's simple but powerful gesture, Zack Ulickey hopes that for a moment, people who are having a hard time will be reminded that they are not alone.
"She was always thinking about other people, even when she was the one being treated," said Tabitha Lockwood, Terese's former nurse at Froedtert Health.
"This is a little glimmer of hope in dark places," she said.
The gift of flowers show patients that they're not alone
On a sunny Friday in early October, Zack Ulickey walked down the familiar hallways of Froedtert's cancer center, rounding a corner to arrive at a bright, quiet waiting area.
The receptionists lit up when they saw him, giving him a warm hello and immediately letting him through the doors to treatment area.
Zack and his friend, John Mumper, 48, made their way to one of the clinic's nurse stations. They made their first delivery to a woman who was sitting alone, looking out a window at the trees and town surrounding the hospital as she received her treatment. They told her Terese's story. Surprised, she thanked them for the flowers.
As they walked back down the hallway in search of a second patient, another nurse ran out to them. She had a patient who could really use the pick-me-up, she said, if the last bouquet hadn't been claimed.
The patient was on her very first day of treatment. She was alone.
Ulickey and Mumper went into her treatment room alone and delivered the flowers.
Mumper recounted the scene after. The woman sat "melted" into her chair, he said, her eyes slightly open and teary. She was rubbing plastic soda bottles, which she had filled with water and frozen, on her hands and feet. Ulickey immediately knew why. He remembered his mother would feel burning in her hands and feet when she had chemo. Toilet paper or paper towel rolls, dampened and frozen had helped Terese then, he told the woman. They brainstormed other ideas with the patient for a few minutes.
"Her eyes were wide open and bright," Mumper said of the moment the patient started engaging with them.
"To have someone walk in that understands what they're going through on some level and is leaving (flowers) for them, that's an impact," he added.
The process of getting chemo can be uncertain for patients. It's hard to know exactly how long things could take, or how the person will respond to the treatment. So it's not uncommon for chemo patients to attend treatments alone, Ulickey said. Many tell him they just don't want to inconvenience their loved ones by bringing them along. Others simply don't have anyone to go with them, he said.
One day, Ulickey recalled, there was a woman who'd waited almost an hour before being told that for some reason, her body was not taking the treatment. She went back to the waiting room sobbing and frustrated, yelling at the nurses before sinking into a chair, defeated.
Ulickey had watched the scene, and a nurse asked if he could give the flowers to her that day. The patient told him she had felt happier just seeing the flowers from afar. And then she noticed Ulickey was walking closer and closer in her direction.
"She said, 'I forgot about all the chemo stuff. I just thought the flowers were so pretty,'" Ulickey recalled.
Recipient pays the kindness forward by joining Terese's Flowers of Hope
Tracie McGuire was one of the earliest recipients of a bouquet from Terese's Flowers of Hope.
In November 2019, she was at Froedtert getting chemo after being diagnosed with stage four bladder cancer. It was one of her last treatment days and — because the intensity of the treatments build over time — one of her hardest. She felt very sick and weak.
The flowers were a "neat pick-me-up," McGuire said, and it was comforting to know "that somebody who I didn't even know was thinking about me or any of the other cancer patients on that floor."
The delivery inspired McGuire to become more involved with the non-profit. On her next birthday, she raised $800 on Facebook to support Terese's Flowers of Hope. Then, she decided to sign up to deliver flowers herself.
"I think it's just a neat experience to not only be on the receiving end, but then also on the giving end and being able to speak with the cancer patients," she said. "Let them know that, 'Hey, you're not alone. And I'm a cancer survivor.'"
The deliveries were one way for McGuire to pay forward all of the kindness people showed her when she was diagnosed: the meal trains and grocery deliveries, cards and balloons. She got a second flower bouquet from Terese's Flowers of Hope after having major surgery to remove her cancer.
Seeking to spread the gesture even further, McGuire even started buying her own bouquets to give to people in her life who are going through hard times, whether cancer or something else entirely.
"I just know it was a big impact on me," she said. "So I hope that it makes an impact on somebody else, too, when they're kind of in a down-time of their life."
Zack Ulickey said there's a "selfish" aspect to the deliveries, in that they help him, too. With the support of donors, he personally spends little more than gas money to have the opportunity to share a little beauty with someone in need, and to honor the memory of his mom.
"We get messages weeks and weeks after the fact. People saying they still had the vase that they look at. Or the flowers lasted two weeks, and now there's a picture where the flowers were," Ulickey said. "Those are kind of the things that I think my mom enjoyed seeing and enjoyed bringing out of people. I think it's just important to carry on."
Learn more about Terese's Flowers of Hope, including how to donate and volunteer, at the group's Facebook page.
Contact Devi Shastri at 414-224-2193 or DAShastri@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @DeviShastri.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Family continues mother's tradition of delivering flowers at Froedtert
