Starbucks and Cancer

My love for coffee started at a decently young age.  Actually, it was my love and loyalty to Starbucks that got off to good start when I was young.  When my brother was diagnosed in 2000 with Leukemia the nuclear family unit was turned into something else.  It just wasn’t simply nuclear anymore.  While my father worked to keep food on the table and health insurance, my mother was often at the hospital with Jon.  This really doesn’t sound like a big deal until you understand that during the first year after diagnosis, Jonathan spent over 280 days in the hospital.  That’s a lot of time without your parents being at home in a normal capacity.  Also, normal capacity for my family meant that we spent a lot of time with our parents because we were homeschooled and our parents took that responsibility very seriously.  They were always involved in our lives, education, extracurricular activities,…etc.  Every moment was always a nurturing moment.  Yep, even those moments when I was getting in trouble for lying or shirking my chores, my parents were always trying to teach me a greater lesson out of it.  It was pretty annoying at the time, but now I see the value and necessity of it, and am quite thankful.

Yet, this family environment was rather shaken up with Jon’s diagnosis.  Suddenly, and for quite some time, the simple consistency of family had become inconsistent because everything revolved around Jon’s health and care.  I’m not bitter about that.  We were dealing with the situation of a loved one’s life that was battling death.  The severity of the situation made it understandable, even to an 11 year old, but it was still difficult.

In the midst of all this inconsistency, my mother and I would sometimes go to Starbucks for a cup of coffee as a short but needed time together.  Starbucks at this time was an absolute luxury in our family.  Up until this point in my life I had only had drip coffee brewed at home and Tim Horton’s cappuccinos (which are pretty darn good).  A latte was just a funny sounding word that existed far outside my vocabulary.  Things like espresso, mocha, flavor shots, and basically the entire Starbucks drink menu had to be explained to me.  I slowly caught on.  I learned very quickly that I liked mochas over lattes.  Raspberry sounded nice, so I opted for that once and was hooked, yet it wasn’t quite perfect.  It took a year before I realized that the barista was making me a white chocolate raspberry mocha.  I then opted for a raspberry mocha during my next visit and stressed the “not white chocolate, please” to whoever took my drink order.  Obviously, I still hadn’t picked up the lingo, but I was enjoying this little adventure of creating a drink that seemed like creating art.  Finally, I had perfected my raspberry mocha.  Then my father introduced me to peppermint mochas and I was equally hooked.  These two drinks have been a mainstay in my life for 13 years now.

13 years and I’m still drinking the same drinks, with an occasional wild card of course.  You probably think I’m weird.  Well, I’ll just help you out, I am.  But that’s beside the point.  The point in all of this was that Starbucks was one of the few things in the early years of cancer life that was consistent in my life that was also necessarily superficial.  All around me people were dying and my own brother was possibly doing the same thing.  I needed something superficial that could represent a consistent “safe haven” that wasn’t going to die on me.  I could always count on any Starbucks in the city of Columbus to a) be there, b) make what I ordered perfectly every time, and c) not "die" on me (this was pre-2008 economic collapse).  I wasn’t silly enough to cast all my hopes up on the shoulders of Starbucks.  I simply found a little encouragement in the consistency of a drink, a barista, a company.  It reminded me that outside of my own life, there was a whole different world.

It may seem silly that I found such meaning and encouragement in a drink and a company.  However, it’s not silly at all to me.  I think it shows the depths to which humanity can sink when faced with pretty rough times.  I found encouragement in a pretty expensive coffee drink when the rest of my life was confusing and dark.  Unless others have been in similar circumstances at such a young age, I don’t expect understanding.  However, I think it's important for all of us to recognize, to the best of our abilities, when others are going through rough times and have compassion, even if they seem a bit nutty.  Hey, offer them a Toffee Nut Mocha ;-)

The little things in life really do matter.  So cheers to life with a Peppermint Mocha!