There was a time in Kristi Moody's life when she was, in the broadest sense of the word, an ordinary woman.
The 41-year-old Arkansas native, the pride of Warren High School, went to college like millions of her peers across the country with her eye on a legal career. At Louisiana Tech University, she met the love of her life, Scott Moody, whom she would later marry, just like many people do. The couple settled down in Little Rock, where Kristi attended law school at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, just like a growing number of women were doing.
Passing the bar in 1995, she entered the corporate world, like many of her contemporaries. In 2000, she converted to Catholicism, drawn to the solemnity and consistency of rites which had survived 2,000 years of change around them. In 2001, the couple started a family with the birth of daughter, Ella. Almost on a dare, she also got into running, something she hadn't done since high school, eventually entering and completing several marathons.
And though she never stopped to think about how blissfully routine the juggling of baby, career, husband and even faith had become, the fact was Kristi Moody's life had attained a level of normalcy that, much like her running, marked and measured the hours of her life in a quiet, predictable, controlled pace.
Until the ordinary morning in 2003 she rolled over in bed, bound for her regular run with her usual friends and felt the decidedly unfamiliar mass under her right breast. Barely a week later, after a flurry of tests and doctor visits, the tumor was confirmed. It was the beginning of what Moody calls, without a trace of irony in her voice, the New Normal.
"The thing that people who haven't battled cancer don't understand about the people who have is how much we crave normalcy," she said. "For me anyway, I found the changes to my former life paralyzing and so I tried to stay as close as possible to my routine.
"I had a lot of people telling me 'Why are you at work?' or 'You should be doing this or this or this.' People thought I was weird for not having a bucket list of things I wanted to get done. I can't speak for everyone, but if I had done that it would have been just like giving up."
The New Normal meant reporting to work as vice president of law for Windstream in Little Rock, even after the lumpectomy or as the tolerable first couple of rounds became the savage fifth and sixth rounds of chemotherapy. It meant looking into the eyes of 3-year-old Ella who could somehow understand Mommy was sick but couldn't abide a medicine that made her too tired to so much as play a board game with her.
The New Normal also meant coming to grips with the possibility of the most cruel outcome to this condition and the inherent unfairness of a disease that had come to rest on someone who had none of the risk factors — no family history, non-smoker, young and in shape. This was the part of the New Normal that was soul wrenching.
"There was a period where I was very angry with God," she said. "I thought, 'How dare he? I have a 3-year-old. I go to church. I give my share. I'm living a good life.' The thing I had to personally realize was it has nothing to do with God. Sit in an oncologist's office and you will see all kinds of people from all walks of life, including people who are much better Christians than you are.
"I remember going to see (former Cathedral rector) Msgr. Scott Marczuk shortly after being diagnosed and he told me flat out 'This is not a punishment.' I couldn't see that at first, but once you get through the pain and anger, you start to see that self righteousness as pretty obnoxious to think that you are any more or less special than the next person. So I started going to God for grace and peace, something I have found in the Catholic faith that I didn't find in the church I grew up in."
Moody is quick to point out one never fully beats cancer, because even though she officially has been cancer free since 2004, there are "little scares here and there," as she puts it.
"It's kind of like how you think of your kids," she said. "When everything is going well for them they aren't in the forefront of your mind every minute of every day. Cancer has been like that. It's something you learn to push to the back of your mind, but it never fully leaves you."
In a strange way, one gets the feeling that while Moody certainly doesn't want to resume her individual fight with cancer, she doesn't want to fully forget what it meant to be in the fray, either. It's part of what drives her in her work as a board member of the Arkansas affiliate of the Susan G. Komen Foundation, where she gets to hit back at the disease on behalf of others.
In 2006 she volunteered for Runway for a Cause, a fundraising luncheon benefiting CARTI and the Baptist Breast Center in Little Rock. She has also gone from simply running in the Komen Race for the Cure event in Little Rock to serving as its co-chairwoman Oct. 22, an event which attracted an estimated 46,000 participants across a variety of affiliated activities. In 2012, she will again chair the race, the most visible of the Komen Foundation's work raising money for cancer research.
Moody said in these challenging economic times, such events are more important than ever in keeping donors engaged, particularly in a battle that has raged for decades.
"In the last 20 years, research and investment has reduced the mortality rate dramatically for breast cancer patients," she said. "The money we raise supports that effort through advocacy and awareness. There are still many women in Arkansas, particularly in rural areas, who don't have access to mammograms, for instance. Our grant to the University of Arkansas Medical Center's mobile mammogram unit is one way we are helping to address that issue."
The Moody family, which also includes 3-year old Mary Scott — born post-cancer — are members of the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Little Rock.
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