From June 15-20, the Notre Dame Alumni Association will team up with the Malibu, Calif.-based Simonton Cancer Center to host a special five-day retreat on campus. There, people whose lives have been affected by cancer will gather in solidarity to learn how to cope with the diagnosis.

 “The University and its campus environment is a natural setting for this retreat,” says Tony Haske ’87, who serves on the Simonton Center’s Board of Directors and is helping coordinate the retreat. “Being diagnosed with cancer can be a lonely experience and to invite people back to campus is rather fitting. This is where a lot of people had some of the best times of their life. It really helps people focus on preparing for the fight ahead.”

A similar retreat helped Tony and his family after he was diagnosed with metastatic kidney cancer in 2003. He and his mother, Nancy Haske, a 1963 Saint Mary’s graduate, attended one of the Simonton Center’s weeklong retreats in Santa Barbara, Calif. to learn more about cancer, dispel any preconceived notions about it and construct a new outlook.

“The retreat was more than a coping tool,” Nancy says, “it changed my entire perception of cancer. You have been programmed by the media to believe certain things, and some are true and some aren’t. But for the most part, people fear the word ‘cancer’ and if you’re actually dealing with it, that negativity will affect you physically and emotionally.”

The Simonton Center tells its patients that the way they perceive their condition is critical to both the efficacy of their treatment and its outcome, so it promotes a message of hope. Nancy describes the retreat she and Tony attended as “a how-to course for believing” that arms patients and their families with a deeper understanding of themselves and their own beliefs, as well as tools and disciplines to help them remember that throughout the treatment.

“You can’t view a cancer diagnosis as doomsday,” she says. “You have to recognize what’s going on inside you but focus on what you believe, even if the outcome may be negative.”

Nancy says the lessons she learned at the retreat prepared her not only for Tony’s battle, but also for her younger son’s. Following the retreat, Dan Haske was found to have a malignant brain tumor that would require chemotherapy, radiation treatment and surgery.

“The way I took the news about Dan affected the way Dan himself took the news,” Nancy remembers.

Today, both of Nancy’s sons are fully recovered, and she believes she has been “doubly blessed.” But for all the families struggling with cancer, she recommends the retreat this summer.

“It helped me and our family a great deal,” she says. “Everything I learned there about cancer, about what I could do for Tony, and about hope I later shared with the rest of our family.”

Click here for more information about the upcoming cancer retreat at Notre Dame.