Real Woman Helped Her Through Cancer

Through her art and generous spirit, Stacy Kitchen looks for creative ways to empower and inspire people.

Don’t look to her life’s challenges to define Stacy Kitchen. Not her battles with breast cancer or even the loss of a child. Instead, look to her art. In her sculpture, Keep Moving Forward, which she entered in the 2024 Art All Night show in Trenton, words like “invincible,” “grace,” “fearless,” and “breakthrough” cover a woman’s upper body, head, and hair. The phrases were clipped from magazines during her bout with cancer and stored in a shoebox. “I used words (mainly from Real Woman magazine) that motivated me, and I crafted this piece to uplift and inspire resilience through life’s ups and downs,” she explains. “The sculpture stands not only for my life experiences, but also for what other women face. It embodies the challenges, triumphs, and perseverance that we all endure.”

And 57-year-old Kitchen has endured so much. From an early age, she was considered at high risk for breast cancer—her grandmother had Paget’s disease of the breast at age 45, and her mom had breast cancer at age 50. Sure enough, Kitchen was 21 years old when she had her first breast lumpectomy. Throughout her adulthood, she had three surgeries before she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018 and underwent a bilateral partial mastectomy, an eventual revision, and 6 weeks of daily radiation to beat it.

In 2011, the Bucks County, PA, native and multimedia artist also faced the loss of a child who died at 17 right before her high school graduation in a shocking accident. She and her partner of 28 years, Jon Hunton, had to make the gut-wrenching decision to donate her organs. “Going through that kind of grief, you almost feel numb. Life keeps going around you. You’re in a store or a mall, and everybody is laughing and doing their thing, and you just feel like you’re made of lead,” she recalls. “But the support network that came out of the woodwork was amazing. They helped me so much.

“I remember one woman said to me, ‘Stacy, unfortunately, you are going to be this person for someone else one day, helping them through their own pain.’ And she wasn’t wrong.” 

Kitchen’s attention and energy is focused on being that source of encouragement for others, using her creativity as a vehicle to reach as many people as possible.

Tag Team

Kitchen’s 5-week course of radiation treatment started every weekday at 6 am, the first appointment of the day. The treatment was difficult—the incisions took a long time to heal, and she became increasingly exhausted. But she also felt buoyed by the other people who were fighting for their own lives.

I spent hours and hours in doctor’s offices and receiving treatment. And I had a lot of time to sit there and just look at the patients and their families. Many of them came to treatment so sick and drained. They were worried, thinking, Am I going to make it through the treatment? Is the cancer going to come back?” she says. “But we were all supporting each other every day. When one of us completed the treatment and rang the bell, we were all happy for that person. But the next day, someone new would come in and begin their journey.”

During one of her treatment days, there were pieces of paper near a box on a counter with a sign encouraging people to leave a positive message. Kitchen was struck with a desire to give something back to other patients, friends, and family members as they battled cancer. “I created 300 tags with motivational messages cut from magazines or retyped quotes. I was just hoping these words would speak to people the way the magazine spoke to me,” Kitchen says.

She used quotes like “The best and beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart” or “When I am quiet, I can hear my own song.” When she returned a few months later, almost all the 300 tags were gone, finding homes with patients and their loved ones, just as she had hoped. “That convinced me that words can heal,” she says.

Shoebox Wisdom

This year, when Kitchen saw that the Art All Night show was returning to the War Memorial in Trenton, she knew it was time to tell her story and help others through her art. In creating her piece, Kitchen was on a mission to get people’s attention and hopefully pass along a message of hope and determination. She turned to an old source of inspiration. “When I was healing from breast cancer treatment, I had a lot of time to read. You’re tired. You don’t feel good. So, when you find sources of joy and empowerment, you lean in. I love Real Woman, so I would read it and then cut out words of every single magazine. The words stood out to me. Some were positive. Some were empowering. Some of them were hard to read, but they were real. They spoke to me, and I saved them in a shoebox,” Kitchen explains. “I used many of those words to create the sculpture, Keep Moving Forward, hoping that they would inspire people as much as they inspired me.”

The reception to Kitchen’s sculpture astounded her and encouraged her to continue using art to offer hope to others. But she’s found other ways to give back by visiting nursing homes, schools, libraries, and hospice centers with her American Kennel Club-registered therapy French bulldogs and reading to people to lift their spirits. “Hospice centers are the hardest, but it’s also the most rewarding,” Kitchen says, her voice cracking with emotion. “You’re there with people who don’t have much time left, but they are spending it with you. And you can really lift their spirits.”

Kitchen continues to need biopsies every year since her breast cancer because the screenings often show abnormalities that require a second look. However, even though the journey continues to be challenging, Kitchen says she wouldn’t change it. “You don’t know how strong you are and how strong your body is until you go through something like this. Cancer isn’t anything you’d wish on anybody, but you learn so much about yourself, your strength, and what your body can do.”

Her biggest lesson, she says, is that life is a shared journey. Now, the positive impact we can make on others is the centerpiece of her life. “There’s a quote I love by [spiritual leader/yogi] Ram Dass that says, ‘We’re all just walking each other home.’ I do everything I can to play a role in supporting others through life’s challenges,” she says. “I live by that.”