Retired teacher Felicia Pecoraro devotes one day a week to making others happy as a volunteer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center gift shop (inset).
Each week, as she volunteers in the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center gift shop on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, retired teacher Felicia Pecoraro looks across the street toward the window of the room at New York Weill Cornell Center where her best friend, Fay, lost her battle with cancer.
“I look out that window, the gift shop window, every time I’m there, and I say, ‘Hey, Fay, here I am,’” Pecoraro said of her lifelong friend who grew up in the same Williamsburg, Brooklyn, neighborhood as Pecoraro and, like her, stayed in the neighborhood as an adult. Their mothers even hailed from the same village in Italy.
Three years ago, Pecoraro traveled to Weill Cornell every day for seven weeks to keep Fay company. On breaks, she would wander across the street to Memorial Sloan Kettering and convince the security guards to let her visit the gift shop to buy an iced coffee. She would also purchase small gifts for Fay.
“I wanted a Starbucks, and it was a great gift shop,” said Pecoraro, who had recently retired at the time. “I love — I’ve always loved — gift shops.”
After losing Fay, Pecoraro continued her connection to the Manhattan neighborhood where Fay spent her last days by applying to be a volunteer at Memorial Sloan Kettering. With her three decades as an elementary school teacher, three master’s degrees and fluency in Italian, the hospital had other ideas for Pecoraro, but she was firm.
“I knew I only wanted the gift shop since I consider it the ‘happy place’ at MSK — where workers and guests come for candy, coffee and treats,” she said.
When a spot opened up the following year, she began spending one day a week among the cards, candy, magazines, gifts and other tchotchkes. She relishes filling up the dozens of jugs of sweets, from Jelly Belly and Laffy Taffy candy to Tootsie Rolls and Mary Janes. “If those M&M’s candies can make someone happy, whether it’s a visitor or a nurse coming in who just worked a 14-hour shift, if that makes them happy, then I think that’s amazing,” Pecoraro said.
That’s what it was like when she was a teacher and had a rough morning or a rough day. “One little thing could make us happy. It’s really meaningful,” said Pecoraro, who was a library teacher at PS 84 in Williamsburg for the last 10 years of her career.
Her volunteer work at Memorial Sloan Kettering may be “just a speck of what’s needed at the hospital,” but it’s a meaningful place to go, and she feels useful, Pecoraro said.
Pecoraro describes her journey to volunteering at the hospital as “bittersweet, with a serendipitous ending.” However, she thinks about Fay all the time and is sure she would have appreciated how she is giving back to others. “She would have loved it.”