Although virtually every one of her key female family members had been touched by the disease, when makeup artist turned beauty entrepreneur Sonia Kashuk got "the call," it still threw her for a loop. She was home alone in her downtown Manhattan loft (husband Daniel Kaner, son Jonah, and daughter Sadye were out for the evening) when she fielded the bad news from her oncologist. After Kashuk's six years in Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center's Breast High-Surveillance Program, during which she underwent extensive tests every three to six months, the results of her umpteenth biopsy were in. This time, she had cancer.
"I grew up with this; it was always very real for me," says Kashuk, who lost her maternal grandmother to breast cancer and witnessed her own mother's (thankfully successful) battle. "But when that call came through, it was still very, very weird. I thought, I can choose to feel sorry for myself, or I can just plow through it. I think having kids makes you stronger."
A midwesterner who worked her way to the top of the makeup-artist profession before being tapped by Target in 1999 to create her own brand, Kashuk is a straight-shooting, make-it-happen type. Her decades in the fashion and celebrity worlds (and her tight friendships with more than a few household names) haven't eroded a certain earthiness.
She immediately decided to deal with her cancer on her own terms. And that meant approaching it entirely differently from the way her mother had 25 years earlier. Kashuk's mom, Millie, kept her four children continuously informed about what was happening with her medically. In contrast, Kashuk didn't make a peep to her two children for six solid weeks post-diagnosis.
"Even as a 23-year-old, I was totally freaked out when my mother went through treatment," Kashuk recalls. "That's why I was so nervous about telling my kids. In life, the one thing you feel you have forever is your parents." Not that sitting on the information was easy: "My mother would call every day and ask, 'Did you tell 'em? Did you tell 'em?'"
Before breaking the news in a very low-key manner (she never actually used the word cancer), Kashuk made another crucial decision: to forgo radiation in favor of a prophylactic double mastectomy. Though she had a lumpectomy within a month of the diagnosis, that was merely a stopgap before the bilateral removal.
Essentially, she had hit a wall on worrying. "I'd been going for MRIs and sonograms religiously for so long," she says. "The double mastectomy allowed me to discontinue all that. Otherwise, I would have had to remain under surveillance. Knowing I had an option not to live like that was enough for me."
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