Many of us pick up emotional baggage over the years and end up lugging it around. For Devora Farrell, it took a life-threatening disease to get her to finally put her bags down — and even toss a few away. “I didn’t just have some baggage,” quips Devora, who has stage-four cancer and a total of twelve tumors in her body. “I had a bunch of suitcases, some of them matching.”
Cancer isn’t the first nisayon Devora has faced — she spent years trying to recover from a painful childhood is trying to raise a son with a mental illness and after a business venture failed she went from giving tzedakah to receiving tzedakah.
Yet being diagnosed with cancer turned out to be the biggest test of all one that pushed Devora to completely rethink her perspective on life. “In fact” she says with a refreshing openness and candor “it’s not an exaggeration to say that I’m a lot happier sick than I was when I was well.”
It is her ability to wrest joy from despair that makes Devora such an inspirational woman and public speaker a role she fell into after she was diagnosed with cancer.
As we sit down to chat in the Borough Park home of her friend I quickly learn to appreciate the witty and wise comments she makes on any and all aspects of life. “Chocolate” she says taking one from the tastefully arranged coffee tray on the table “is one of the incontrovertible proofs that there is most definitely a G-d.”
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