 "Photo: Courtesy of the Dwyer Family")
The summer after her high school graduation, Nicole Dwyer visited the Twin Cities on a mission trip with her youth ministry group. For a week, she volunteered in a low-income neighborhood with a group of students from other ministries.
One of their projects was to repaint offices at a church and charter school, a job that entailed lugging dozens of paint buckets up three flights of stairs.
But only one student in her group, her friend Carolyn Windberg, knew that lifting the gallons was a struggle for Dwyer, who was suffering from osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer.
“She never told our group that she was diagnosed with cancer or that she had a hard time using her right arm,” Windberg said. “When she did use it, she was in a lot of pain. But she never once told them that. She just kept going right through her work and she never complained that it was too tough.”
For the next year and a half Dwyer, a freshman at Loyola and resident of the far southwest suburb Mokena, fought against the disease with the same passion she illustrated on the mission trip.
But on Thursday, Oct. 29, she lost her battle with cancer, dying at St. James Hospital in Chicago Heights. She was 19.
Family and friends are heartsick, but remain comforted by her strong faith in God.
Dwyer was an active member in her youth ministry group at St. Mary Catholic Church in Mokena during her four years in high school. She would regularly attend a teen mass on Sunday nights at the church and went on various retreats and mission trips sponsored by the ministry.
“I was really taken by how she presented scripture and prayer,” said Sarah Jarzembowski, the youth minister at Dwyer’s church. “She prayed like a spiritual young adult prays. She would open her mouth and beautiful words of the Holy Spirit would come out.”
At Loyola, Dwyer was a participant in a Christian Life Community (CLC), where she gathered with a group of students weekly to pray together and discuss their spiritual lives.
“I think one of the most amazing things is that she didn’t give up,” said sophomore Elaina Polovick, the leader of Dwyer’s CLC. “I think [cancer] would be such a hard thing to deal with and instead, in all of our meetings, she was just so vibrant and loving toward God and would be an example for me, as someone who doesn’t by any means suffer the way she did.”
Polovick said on the application for the CLC, students were asked to write three words that described them well. Dwyer wrote “positive, open and understanding.”
“I would definitely agree,” Polovick said. “She was such a positive person. You would have never thought that anything was bringing her down.”
Dwyer was diagnosed with the cancer in spring 2008, prior to her graduation from Lincoln-Way East High School. When classes began in the fall most of her friends went away to school, but her dream of attending college was postponed, as she needed to stay home for chemotherapy and radiation treatments, which were conducted at the University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital.
“She never wanted to know what the survival rate was,” Windberg said. “She never wanted to know if the doctors knew how much time was left.”
From the time she was diagnosed until her death, Dwyer endured 20 rounds of chemotherapy, 10 blood transfusions, four surgeries and 15 rounds of radiation.
However, this past August, Dwyer began to feel healthy enough to start her college education. Friends and family say she couldn’t have been more thrilled.
“Her decision to go to school, although it seemed like it would be stressful and very hard on her because at the time she was going to be doing radiation while she was there, I think it gave her a lot of hope and a lot of inspiration to keep going,” Windberg said. “She wanted to experience it so bad like the rest of us ... it was a dream that she could accomplish and she did.”
“I was so proud of her,” said Dwyer’s mother, Barbara Bogard Dwyer. “In the little time she went there, she was going through treatment and not feeling so well, but she was just determined to go to school. I was extremely proud of her.”
At Loyola, besides being a member of a CLC, Dwyer was active with Students for Life and had recently joined Big Brothers Big Sisters. Her hobbies included playing board games and watching Gilmore Girls with friends, scrapbooking and cooking.
“She cooked me dinner before,” said her friend Beth Debelak, a junior at Loyola who also knew Dwyer in high school. “She was quite excellent at it. The year she had to stay home, the year she was going to be a freshman and I was a sophomore, I remember promising her I would let her come over and use my kitchen because freshman dorms didn’t have any. She was just so upset at the idea that she couldn’t cook.”
In Mokena, Dwyer worked at a place called The Creamery. Friends said she would often tell them to come visit her because she made the best milkshakes, and recently, she was named Miss Creamery 2009. She was also a cast member in numerous plays put on by her high school’s theater group.
Unfortunately, after a few months at Loyola, the cancer reoccurred in Dwyer’s right arm and both of her lungs. She withdrew from the university in October and moved out of Mertz Hall, where she had been living.
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