For 17 years, Beverly Kirkhart had lived a storybook existence. No one, least of all her, could have predicted it would end suddenly in divorce, bankruptcy, the loss of her home and the sacrifice of the business she had built from scratch and managed for over ten years. Through the worst of it, she used to joke to friends: “At least I have my health!” Then came the devastating news: “Beverly, you have breast cancer.”

Following is the story of how this admired survivor made lemons from lemonade…and became her own hero.

While studying for a degree in business administration at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Beverly married her college sweetheart, an architectural student. Following graduation, they spent eight months touring Europe, then settled in historic Santa Barbara, a picturesque town on the Pacific Ocean just north of Los Angeles. For the next five years, she sold commercial real estate, while he made his mark in designing houses. 

In 1981, Beverly discovered a historic, dilapidated building that would put her at the forefront of an emerging trend in weekend getaways. She acquired the property with her husband and another couple, then spent 18 months securing permits and renovating the badly-neglected Spanish Colonial Revival structure, built in 193l, that was located only 84 steps from the beach. When they were finished, Beverly had turned the Villa Rosa – which is still one of Santa Barbara’s landmark small hotels – into a romantic hideaway with 18 guest rooms, private verandas, wrought-iron balconies, and a courtyard filled with potted bromeliads and orchids. Beverly chose Southwestern furnishings throughout, which one travel writer noted was “several years before Southwestern everything was the rage.” 

After opening in July 1982, the Villa Rosa attracted praise from travel critics across the country. Among them, Travel & Leisure magazine wrote: “Villa Rosa is everybody’s favorite Santa Barbara inn. Transformed…from an old frog of an apartment building into the petit prince of the waterfront, it has impressed even veteran guidebook writers Henri Gault and Christian Millau.” Los Angeles West magazine said at the time: “Inns don’t get much closer to perfection than the Villa Rosa in Santa Barbara….Beverly Kirkhart runs the Villa Rosa with grace, flair and attention to every detail.” The Villa Rosa also regularly appeared on the top lists of recommended destinations, including in Condé Nast Traveler and Los Angeles magazine.

Beverly spent the next decade managing it, while her husband established his own prominent architectural firm. They went on to design and built their dream home in Santa Barbara’s lush foothills, which was featured in Sunset Magazine. “It was a beautiful home with a lap pool and a guest house. We were driving really nice cars, and owned a hotel that people loved to stay in. Everybody looked at us as this perfect couple. I was very active in the community, very much involved in tourism. Then, in a matter of days it was over,” she recalls of the havoc that abruptly consumed her life.

Out of the blue, her husband came home one day and announced their 17-year marriage was ending. “He’d obviously been contemplating it for a long time,” she says. “But he hadn’t shared it with me. I knew something was up. I knew there were problems. Not that we argued. But his disposition, his attitude, everything just switched. And I questioned: what is going on?”

He then filed for bankruptcy. “It turned out that he had invested in a lot of expensive land to develop residential homes, but the market just dropped out and he couldn’t sell it. And from there we just went down the tube very quickly.” 

Once bankruptcy proceedings started, everything they owned jointly was frozen by the courts. Without notice, Beverly was evicted from their house. To protect her investment in the hotel, she quickly sold it to her partners, only to lose the proceeds to the IRS. “So not only was I dealing with the loss of a man who I thought I was going to live with for the rest of my life, I lost my house, no longer owned my business, and was living in a car and trying to survive each day,” she recounts.

The woman who had once served as one of the region’s business leaders – including as the president of the city’s convention and tourism bureau, co-founder of the Lodging Association of Santa Barbara and creator of their visitor’s information center – was now penniless. When she could, she house-sat. When there was nowhere to go, she often spent nights sleeping in her car. 

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The Diagnosis

Just when it didn’t seem possible that things could get worse, Beverly’s gynecologist discovered a lump in her breast during a routine exam in October 1993. The needle biopsy showed it was benign, and the doctor advised her to watch for any changes.

Six months later, while she was showering, Beverly felt it again. This time it had grown to the size of a pea. “I just knew it was breast cancer.”

So she returned to the doctor, who did another needle biopsy. Concerned, he sent her to a breast surgeon, who removed it. A few days later, Beverly was checking her answering machine one evening and discovered a message from the surgeon: “Beverly, I’m sorry, but you have breast cancer. Come and see me. We need to see if it’s gone into your lymph nodes. We need to move on this right away.”

“I was just stunned,” she recalls. “I was standing there frozen in fear. Here, I’ve already gone through all that other stuff. Now I have to go through this! It can’t be me! At first, I was in denial. No, it’s not me. Then shock, oh my god, what do I do? I was just lifeless. I was empty. I was kicked down.” 

Unfortunately, cancer ran in Beverly’s family. Her sister had survived breast cancer twice, the second time requiring a mastectomy. Her mother and grandmother had died of colon cancer, and two of her father’s brothers were killed by the disease.

After investigating her options, Beverly settled on traditional treatment, supplemented by diet, yoga, exercise and meditation. For a year, she was consumed with chemo and radiation treatments and doctor’s appointments. She lost her hair twice, but was reprieved of a mastectomy.

“At the end, I was so exhausted, it was like crawling across the finish line,” she relates. “It was just a nightmare. I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t focus on anything.” 

Meanwhile, Beverly was working as a development consultant for non-profit organizations. The hardest part, she says, was trying to pretend everything was normal around male clients, while showing up to meetings wearing wigs. 

Fortunately, because of the bankruptcy proceedings, she was still covered by her estranged husband’s insurance. Otherwise, who knows what Beverly would have done. “Just one chemo treatment alone was more than $4000.”

She has never relapsed. Even though her doctor wouldn’t say she was cancer-free until last year, “my attitude was that I was cancer free the minute I got through with my treatments.” Indeed, Beverly celebrates each new birthday as not another year of getting older, but another year of survival.

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Her First Major Turning Point

Six months after her last chemotherapy treatment, Kirkhart met a friend who was going through similar treatments. “We both had been poked, jabbed and prodded, examined like objects, and we had had enough! We began to talk about what brought us joy, happiness and personal satisfaction in our lives. One thing we had in common was our love for bike riding.”

Suddenly inspired, Beverly decided to turn her setback into a comeback. So she signed up for The Century Ride – a 100-mile bike ride up the coast above Santa Barbara. “I’d never done anything that physical in my life, even when I was healthy.” She began training every day, covering her bedroom with affirmations written on Post-it notes to keep herself focused.

The ride day turned out to be cold and windy. “I hit severe head winds. I felt like I was riding a stationary bike – pedaling and pedaling, but getting nowhere.” After a short lunch break at the 50-mile mark, she got back on the bike and headed south. “My back began to scream, every body part ached, including a few I didn’t know I owned.” But it looked like she’d make it.

Then at the 90-mile mark – after 7 ½ hours in the saddle – Beverly encountered a mountain that she had to climb in order to reach the finish line. “I was near collapse. I just wanted to get off the bike and hitchhike home.” It was at that moment of desperation, with everything she had survived in the previous year flashing through her mind, that Beverly determined she would do it. So she switched into the lowest gear and standing on her pedals, stubbornly inched her way up.

“As I flew down the backside of the mountain and crossed the finish line, I knew that I was my own hero. I was a survivor. I had summoned the courage to reclaim my life. There was nothing I couldn’t handle now. And even though I had lost my marriage, my money, and for a while, my health, I hadn’t lost myself. When I crossed that finish line, I knew I was my own hero,” she says now.

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Becoming a Nationally-Known Speaker

In the fall of 1994, Beverly attended a self-esteem seminar led by Jack Canfield, co-creator of the bestselling Chicken Soup series of inspirational books. He had just released Chicken Soup for the Surviving Soul and asked if anyone in the audience would like to speak at an upcoming kick-off event for the book in Southern California.

Beverly surprised herself by raising her hand. “Trust me, I never raised my hand on anything! I was like the most bashful person in the whole world. So, I don’t know where it came from, but I raised my hand and said, I want to tell my story!”

After appearing before a crowd of 350, Beverly was approached by Canfield to become a co-author on future editions of the book, and join his speaker’s bureau – which began booking her for cancer events around the country. It meant first conquering her fear of public speaking with the help of Toastmasters .

The Inspiration Behind Her Book,
My Healing Companion

During her first year as a speaker, Beverly began hearing from people coping with cancer asking how she got through it. “There were hungry for tips on how to survive. They’d ask me things like ‘What were your survival tools?’ “When do you begin to believe you would survive?’ ‘How did you find the confidence to speak up to your doctor?’ ‘Do you have a handout of your presentation that I can take home with me?’”

She remembers: “I wanted to help in the worst way. I wanted to leave a piece of me with them, to give them hope that they, too, could make it. But how? What can I give them? Handouts, a video, a book? For some reason, none of these excited me, especially the book idea. I’m not a professional writer. Writing has always been a struggle for me.”

The inspiration for My Healing Companion struck during a speaking engagement for a cancer awareness program in Connecticut. That evening in her hotel room, she got a vision of a journal. She had kept a journal throughout her own ordeal. Even the title of the book suddenly came to her.

After returning to California, Beverly met with Matt Hahn, an acclaimed graphic designer who designs catalogs and books for leading museums around the country. He knew instantly how it should look, and sketched the cover and layout on a napkin. Matt would also play an instrumental role in helping her define and develop the narrative – a combination of Beverly’s own journey from diagnosis to recovery, healing exercises, and writing space for readers to record their own feelings and experiences as a way of achieving self-realization, empowerment, and serenity along the way.

Even though she was eager to get started, Beverly soon discovered that it wasn’t going to be as easy as she had thought. The problem: “I had to relive the excruciating times of my cancer experience. I was completely unaware of how much I had buried my painful feelings of this memory.”

She struggled each day, taking excerpts from her own journal – such as “I feel so out of control, beaten down, worthless…why live another day?” “My heart truly hurt to read those words. It was hard to believe that I had been that depressed and lifeless for literally years.”

Matt urged her on. “He would tell me, ‘This journal is about a survivor sharing with another survivor. Get to the core of your feelings and share. Be vulnerable. Survivors want to hear how you got through the tough times and made it. You must face this hurt and pain in order to get to the other side.”

Beverly also had help from other friends. “It was amazing how many people rally around someone who has a purpose to give back.” As an example, in the very beginning of the writing process, Beverly realized she didn’t have a clue how to get started. A friend introduced her to an editor who’s sister-in-law had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. The editor donated hours of her time helping Beverly outline each chapter of the book. After it was completed, Beverly sent copies of the manuscript to over 25 other survivors, caregivers, doctors and nurses, asking for their feedback.

Ultimately, it took over three years to complete the project. “All along this writing journey, I had to make choices. I set up self-imposed deadlines with completion dates for each chapter. This created tension with my family and friends, because there were a lot of times when I’d be invited to parties, holiday events, trips, whatever. I had to chose: do I push back the deadline or do I participate in this event? For three and half years, the writing came first.”

It was a sacrifice she would happily do again. “It was a healing process for me, but more importantly this book represents a deep sense of giving back to help anyone else facing their own hardship.”