In 2020, Jony Lee faced both joy and heartache. As she was anticipating her wedding to Alistair Lee, her family learned that her mom’s ovarian cancer had recurred.
“We thought she was all in the clear, and then it did come back,” Lee, 24, of Auckland, New Zealand, tells TODAY.com. “Her first thoughts were like, ‘Oh no, not this process all over again.’”
While Lee’s mom, Luna Macapagal, felt overwhelmed by undergoing grueling treatments again, she also worried about losing her hair.
“I told her, ‘Well, if there’s one that that I’ll do with you. … I will shave my hair,’” Lee recalls saying.
Lee found a way to make the moment truly special and raise money for charity. During their wedding reception, the bride and groom shaved their heads and asked guests to donate to a cancer organization. The moment has gone viral with more than 5 million likes on TikTok. It's also allowed Lee to share Macapagal’s story and raise awareness of ovarian cancer.
“Ovarian cancer is very hard to identify until it’s at its later stages,” Lee says. “If you feel there’s something wrong with your body, you know best. Go push for the things that you need.”
Showing 'solidarity'
For several years, Macapagal felt unwell and visited her doctors to investigate what caused her symptoms.
“(The doctors) were telling her it was menopause or diverticulitis or whatever,” Lee says. “Only ... two or three years after, they finally diagnosed her with stage 4 cancer and that’s crazy to me.”
Macapagal often visited her doctor, who would send her to the hospital for other tests. Those doctors dismissed her.
“Every time we got to the hospital, it wasn’t our GP acting. It was another doctor,” Lee says. “They would have different opinions and we would just get sent back home all the time.” It can be challenging to detect ovarian cancer early because it has few symptoms, TODAY.com previously reported. Even later stages of the cancer are not associated with specific signs.
Eventually, their family doctor pushed for a CT scan, and Macapagal was diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer in 2018.
“I honestly think they felt sick of her,” Lee says. “They were like, ‘Fine, we’ll put you through a scan.’”
Surgery revealed that Macapagal had stage 4 ovarian cancer. After chemotherapy surgery, Macapagal was in remission. But in 2020, she learned the cancer returned. She felt devastated to go through chemotherapy and lose her hair. Lee wanted to support her mom any way she could and suggested shaving her head with her mom.
“She’s like, ‘Oh, that would be lovely. I really like that,’” Lee says.
But soon the family learned sad news: Macapagal was too weak, and the cancer was too widespread for her to undergo more treatment. Emotionally, Lee had prepared to shave her head to support her mom. Now she felt at a loss of what to do. That’s when her husband proposed a plan.
“My husband, out of all people, said, ‘Oh we should just do it at our wedding and I’ll do it with you,’” Lee says. “That’s how it came about.”
The couple kept this part of the reception a secret from everyone except Lee’s sister-in-law and the videographer and photographer. Guests expected the couple to enjoy a traditional Filipino wedding dance where people pin money to the bride and groom’s clothes.
“It lined up perfectly because we knew culturally everyone would have cash,” Lee explains. “It’s like, ‘OK instead of taking this money for ourselves why don’t we just give back to the community that helped my mom.’”
When the time came for the dance, Lee took the mic and shared how much she loved Macapagal and how they wanted “to show our solidarity” with her. Lee informed guests that if they wanted to give the couple money, it would be donated to a cancer charity. Then she grabbed a pair of clippers and began shaving her new husband's head. When she finished, he shaved his wife's head. The gesture moved everyone.
“Everyone was crying,” she says. “It wasn’t like crying with sadness … This mood (powered) through the whole room where you could just feel everyone’s all connected and understood exactly what we were standing for. It was unreal.”
Later, Lee realized that this gesture touched many guests.
“I was doing it for my mom,” she says. “Cancer affects everyone you know. It affects your coworkers, your aunts, your uncles, cousins, boyfriends, girlfriends and so on and so on. There’s so many people who have been affected by it that I didn’t realize the impact of it.”
Macapagal felt stunned.
“My mom was obviously full of emotion, and when I asked her what she thought of it, she did a chuckle, and she was like, ‘You’re so crazy. But you are my daughter, this is something you would do,’” Lee says.
Creating a legacy
Macapagal “was a very fierce woman” and was always “unapologetically her.” Lee recalls her mom always wearing high heels and loving shopping. Family felt important to Macapagal. Growing up, the mother and daughter didn’t “have the best relationship,” Lee admits.
When Macapagal became sick, the two became closer.
“For it to take her getting sick for me to realize and mend that relationship, it feels a bit s-----,” she says. “When I look back on it, it reminds me that with all the relationships that I have now I need to make sure I value them.”
Macapagal passed away in January 2021.
“I didn’t experience much of married life with her. So, I don’t know what married life with her would have actually looked like,” Lee says. “There’s moments where I get sad that every time we do something cool — like when we moved out for the first time or you get a promotion or graduated or whatnot — and she wasn’t there for all that.”
Still, Lee believes her mom would be proud that their story reached so many people.
“She definitely would have taken complete credit for my whole career,” she says. “Every small thing to do with my career … stems from that story. So, she would be very sassy and be like, ‘I did that for you.’”
