July 3, 2003
By Christy Robinson - Dallas Morning News

Building a wall of resilience

Woman's cancer battle inspires quest to create 60,000-name monument

After a chemotherapy session three years ago, Michelle Miller of Allen realized she hadn’t prayed in a while. She told God she didn’t blame him for the Hodgkins Lymphoma that was poisoning her blood and immune system, but she needed to see that the battle ahead held a purpose.

Just then, she said, images of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall flashed across her TV screen.

“I jumped up and down in the living room shouting, ‘I’m building a monument! I’m building a monument!’”

Three years later, she’s finalizing preparations to launch an official national promotional campaign to fund a granite cancer monument to go in Allen Station Park. Her nonprofit charity, The Cancer Monument, Inc., aims to gather 60,000 names for the monument in the spirit of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C.

“The design is like a human cell,” she said. “Cancer begins at the cellular level, and if people know that much, that can be the beginning of understanding.”

Names can be added to the monument for a fee.

The monument, which will honor people who have had any type of cancer, whether they’ve survived or not, will feature eight inner wall where names will be inscribe. Four outside walls will serve as fountains with corporate and family sponsor inscriptions. A 40-foot lighted pillar will stretch from the monument’s center, and the ground within the monument will be engraved with cancer statistics and facts.

Ms. Miller, 36, aims for construction to begin within five years, but she’ll build sooner if the 60,000 names that are needed to fill the wall are collected. The foundation began officially taking names June 1. Between 1,000 to 2,000 names have been collected so far.

The monument will cost about $7 million to build, Ms. Miller said. Extra money raised from inscription costs will be used for an endowment fund to maintain the monument.

Sarah Bayley, marketing director for the North Texas chapter of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, said the monument would be the only known cancer monument of its size.

A year ago, Ms. Miller approached the Allen Chamber of Commerce to explain her venture and announced she needed lawyers and architects to help – for free.

Allen architect Danny McLarty’s experience battling prostate cancer in 1998 prompted him to contact Ms. Miller and discuss transforming her vision into a formal design.

“I settled on the fact we were meant to work together on this,” he said.

The monument’s home will be in the park between McDermott Drive and Exchange Parkway. Tim Dentler, director of the Allen Parks and Recreation Department, said the city has set aside a piece of land for the monument off Cedar Drive. When the monument is complete, Ms. Miller will deed it to the city of Allen, she said.

Susan Whitehead of Grand Rapids, Mich., saw a booth promoting the cancer monument at a Light the Night Walk in Plano three weeks after her daughter, Stephanie Robinson, died of leukemia in Dallas at age 34. Ms. Robinson’s name will be included on the monument.

“I hope the wall will remind people that without losing some of these honored heroes, the progress of finding a cure, and prevention, wouldn’t be possible,” she said.

After 10 months of chemotherapy, two months of radiation and a failed bone marrow transplant, Ms. Miller’s lymphoma is still not in remission.

“I’ve had every opportunity to become inward, to kick my feet up and eat Haagen-Dazs,” she said. “But out of bad things can come good things.”

Registration forms for name inscriptions are available at www.TheCancerMonument.org.

E-mail carobinson@dallasnews.com.