Santa Rosa cancer survivor lives life ‘in the eye of the storm'

The suitcase in the hospital where Cathy Ziffren's husband had just died looked like an ordinary bag, but it wasn't.

Inside was an electric razor, a toothbrush, a change of clothes and a secret.

The year was 1967, and Ziffren, a distraught 24-year-old widow who had just lost her husband to a brain tumor, picked up her husband's suitcase and had a realization about how to embrace life.

“I looked at that tiny suitcase and thought: possessions aren't important at all,” Ziffren said. “All you have when you die, is who you've been and what you've done. So you have to do your best to live your life every day.”

Ziffren, now 75, said this lesson about taking a positive, non-material approach to life is what helped her not only support family and friends through cancer, but nearly 20 years later, guided her when she was diagnosed with breast cancer herself.

“I tried to never let myself feel defeated,” she said. “I was just going to go out and do everything I could to stay alive. And that meant not stressing myself out. I was going to be happy and think positively.”

Ziffren had first noticed a lump in her breast at the age of 42. It was 1985; she was living in Los Angeles and going through a stressful divorce. Her doctor wanted her to have a biopsy immediately but she couldn't schedule it before a planned trip to London to see her daughter, Laura.

“I lived with this over my head the whole time I was there,” she said.

A few weeks later, once Ziffren returned from Europe, she had the biopsy and learned the lump was malignant.

“What went through my head is: ‘I want to get this out as quickly as possible,'” Ziffren said. “'I want to get this out and overwith.'”

Ziffren had the surgery and breast reconstruction, while doing her best to stay upbeat through it all.

“Of course there were times when I got very sad and scared, but very seldom,” she said. ”Most of the time I believed the cancer was out and gone. But there were times I was in fear - raw fear. I thought, what if I died from it? I could die.”

Keeping busy after her surgery, Ziffren said, kept her in good spirits. She and a boyfriend, Bob Henry, looked high and low for a property in Wine Country and in the summer of 1986 moved to a 20-acre property on the outskirts of Calistoga, one that would keep them distracted and invigorated with projects.

“We were literally out in the dirt building this property,” Ziffren said. “I think that part of it was good for me. When we got the property there was no power and no water. There was nothing on it. So we put in a well and we dug 3-foot deep trenches. The driveway was really long. We brought in power, cable and electricity underground. I think the whole relationship with Bob and the land was really healing for me.”

Ziffren and Henry eventually opened the store Wexford & Woods in Calistoga in 1992, selling soaps, lotions and candles.

She said, “When we did it, it was something Calistoga didn't have and I thought everybody's coming to a town for spas to feel good so I thought this shop would be perfect.”

Little did Ziffren know that cancer was going to cross into her life again. In 1997 Henry was diagnosed with a form of skin cancer, and the couple moved to Santa Rosa in 1998. A few months later Henry died of liver cancer.

Ziffren, a petite woman with an easy smile, said she feels like she has lived her entire life in the eye of the storm. Ziffren was just 16 years old when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy, removing a breast, the lymph nodes and the muscle as a protective measure. Ziffren took away a lesson that cancer is a disease you have to fight head on.

Through the brain tumor of her first husband and the breast cancer she battled, Ziffren had become a survivor with grit. And when her sister, Ellen Brock, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995, just 10 years after Ziffren fought it herself, she felt like she knew what to do.

“Ellen was 47 at the time and I just listened,” Ziffren said. “My sister and I have an incredible relationship and I know how she reacts to things. I just said, ‘Look at me, we caught it in time and it's going to be great.' And every time she would get sad, she'd call me and we'd talk and I helped her through it.”

Ziffren pointed out that she and her sister each had their own way to fight breast cancer.

“We were just totally different,” she said. “Ellen liked to examine everything. She liked to investigate it. Me, not so much. I didn't want to know.”

Today, Ziffren lives in a Santa Rosa house on an acre with a backyard filled with olive trees, oaks and Douglas firs. Her roommates are two Shiba Inu dogs, Rui and Kira, and two cats, Roger and Milo.

She says she tries to keep her mindset steady, far from the fray of arguments and upsets.

The effects of stress on the body's defense system can be taxing, said Dr. Ellen Barnett of Santa Rosa's Integrative Medical Clinic. She said that negativity, fear, worry and stress are the vast majority of moments where people focus, often being in the future or the past. Dr. Barnett explained, “So, for all those moments that you are in the present, you are NOT tweaking your fight or flight adrenaline system that we know brings havoc to your body. It seems from the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and many others, if we stay in the present for about 40 minutes a day in this way, we can significantly affect our physiology for the better.”

These days Ziffren's mantra is to keep herself in the present so she can see what's right before her. This is particularly true when she's in her home, which feels like it's enveloped in a forest. She calls it her “happy place” and it's so tranquil that even her dogs and her cats are simpatico with each other. None of her pets fuss, either, with the sheep that come every so often to graze on the grasses in her preserve. Looking out at the trees, Ziffren smiled at the patchwork of green.

“Enjoy every minute you have, every day,” she said. “I mean just savor it. Just stop at least once a day, and say ‘I'm so lucky for what I have, for where I am, for what I'm doing and for the people around me.' I never forget that, not for one single day. Ever.”

Peg Melnik can be reached at 707-521-5310 or peg.melnik@pressdemocrat.com.