Excerpt: 'Promise Me: How a Sister's Love Launched the Global Movement to End Breast Cancer'

Pink ribbons: Making good on a promise to cure breast cancer once and for all.

ByABC News via logo
September 8, 2010, 11:15 AM

Sept. 13, 2010— -- When her big sister was dying of breast cancer, Nancy G. Brinker made her a promise.

She vowed to end the silence, the stigma and the shame enshrouding a disease that at that time in the late 1970s, no one dared utter out loud. She also promised to cure breast cancer once and for all.

After Susan G. Komen lost her battle with the disease at the age of 36, Brinker set out to make good on her promise, founding Susan G. Komen for the Cure, which has become one of the world's most influential charities for research into the causes and treatment for breast cancer.

More than 30 years after Komen's death, Brinker's memoir, which comes out Tuesday, brings to life the woman whose name has become synonymous with pink ribbons and hope. It also tells the story of Brinker's life and her efforts to build the groundbreaking charity.

Read an excerpt from the book below, and head to the "GMA" Library to find more good reads.

Where Will Meets Way

My waking memories of my sister have grown hazy over the years,but Suzy still passes through my dreams as animate and vividas a migrating butterfly. Her face is fresh and full of energy, her hairwindblown but still beautiful. In a freshly ironed skirt and patent leatherballerina flats, she defies gravity, scrambling over a pile of slick rocks,Roman ruins stacked like unclaimed luggage on a hilly roadside inSouthern Spain.

Suzy, be careful, I call as she climbs higher.

Oh, Nanny, she waves me off , mugging for the boy with the camera. .

(Boys could never keep their eyes, or cameras, off her.) He tells Suzy tosmile. Say queso! But she's already smiling. In studio and fashion photos,she was always slightly Mona Lisa, never haute couture haughty. Almostevery candid photograph I have of Suzy seems to have been snapped justas she's bubbling up to giggle, that precise moment when you can seethe laughter in her eyes and feel the active upturn of her mouth, but thenot- quite sound of it is forever suspended in the air, teasing like the unplayedeighth note of a full octave. Even in the dream, I ache for the unfinished music of her life.

Back home, Suzy would write something silly on the back of the photo of the Roman ruins— I swear, it was like this when we got here!— while I'd carefully record the date and precise location where the picture was taken. I'm simply not gifted with silliness like Suzy was. I appreciate it as an art form, and I try not to be frustrated by it, but gifted with it? No. I am not.

Suzy wasn't serious or "bookish" like me, but all her teachers loved her, and I always thought of her as the smart one. In addition to her savant silliness, she was gifted with emotional intelligence, empathy, our mother's generous heart, an unfairly fabulous sense of style, and a humming, youthful happiness that made her naturally magnetic. She had ashy side, but people loved her to her dying day because she was just so much fun to be around.

I can be a bit of a task to be around, I'm afraid. I have no talent forsitting still. I'm not capable of pretending something is fine and dandy,when in fact it's not. If something needs to be said, I'm compelled tosay it, and I do it as diplomatically as I can. But let's face it, candor's lessendearing than coquettishness on any playground. My gifts were sturdyconstruction, a stalwart sense of justice, and the ability to whistle, ridehorses bareback, and skip stones over water as well as any boy. I was anatural bridge builder. Even as a little girl, I was the ambassador betweenmy high- spirited sister and our rightly starched father. She was threeyears older, but when Suzy was grounded, I was the hostage negotiator.When Suzy exceeded her curfew, I was the peace envoy.When Suzy died, my life's work was born. Her meaning became mymission.

Born on Halloween, 1943, in Peoria, Illinois, a gentle and generousplace that embodies the very soul of Americana, Suzy was three when Icame along in December 1946. Mom says she peered at me over the edgeof the bassinet and said, "Well! She's quite a character."

We were thick as thieves from that moment on. Suzy was always a queen bee in the neighborhood gang, and I was thrilled to be Suzy Goodman's little sister. I was her entourage, her liege, her cheerful sidekick, ambitiously pedaling my tricycle in the wake of her fleet- footed, inventive escapades. I can't remember a single instance of her telling me to buzz off or leave her alone or go play with the other kindergarten babies so she could hang out with the big girls who had more sophisticated things to do.

As our mother ages so gracefully, I can't help thinking what a couple of grand old ladies Suzy and I would have been together. That was our plan from the time we were little girls. My sister and I expected to age gracefully, set up housekeeping, cultivate a nice cutting garden, and sit in lawn chairs, watching our grandchildren play. We never discussed the fate of our beloved spouses; we just naturally assumed we'd outlive themin some "God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world" kind of way. It never crossed our minds that we'd be hip- broken or infirm. Not us. We'd be the spry old dames delivering Meals on Wheels, organizing holiday toy drives, knitting mittens for the underprivileged, quilting lap robes for all the tragic polio children.

The muggy summer of 1952 teemed with mosquitoes and clingy midwestern humidity. The school year ended (I was fresh out of first grade, Suzy liberated from fourth), but instead of that lazy, hazy wide- open summer feeling, we found ourselves in a world of closed doors and shuttered windows. It seemed to Suzy and me as if the city ofPeoria had pulled into itself like a turtle, afraid to poke so much as a toeout to do anything. The ice cream parlor and candy store closed up shop.The streets and sidewalks felt muted and unfamiliar. Women hurriedthrough the grocery store, holding the cart handle with a fresh hanky ordishcloth. We'd already been told there would be no movies, no carnivals,no concerts in the park. When Mother told us the municipal poolwas closed, Suzy groaned.

"What about the lake?" she asked.

"They're letting a few people swim there," said Mother. "Invitationonly."

I raised the possibility of the swimming pool at Uncle Bob and AuntHelen's house or the wading pool at the park or even our little plasticpool in the backyard, but Mother shook her head.

"Dr. Moff et says children can get polio from going in the water.""Clean water right out of the hose?" I said skeptically. "How wouldthat give a kid polio?"

"I'm not sure," said Mom. "It's a virus, and it's very contagious. Nowscientists are saying not to swim. I saw it in the newspaper. You girlsshould tell the other kids. Help spread the word about that. Even if itlooks perfectly clean— and I don't care how hot it is— you girls don'tgo near the pool. Understand?" And knowing us as well as she did, sheadded, "Nancy, I'm counting on you to obey me."

Suzy tucked her knees under her chin, wrapping her arms aroundher legs, and I put my arm across her shoulders. She wasn't pouting; itmade her sad to think about the poor polio children with their wizenedlimbs and squeaky little wheelchairs, their drawn curtains and dilatedeyes longing for outside. It terrified her and broke her heart whenever weheard of another child in our neighborhood tumbling into the bottomlesswell of his own little bed.

These days we've all but forgotten what a scourge it was, but in 1952,there was a global epidemic. "Infantile paralysis" was a malevolent phantomthat shadowed every summer day and haunted every cricket-fillednight, poised to cripple and kill with one touch to the spine, the mostdeeply dreaded childhood disease of the twentieth century worldwide.Mom stroked Suzy's strong shinbone.