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Surviving With a Smile

Jane Beatty was a survivor. When her first marriage broke up, she was thrust into the job market for the first time and found work as a cocktail waitress in Toronto, where she was raised. Then she learned computer skills and switched careers, eventually becoming a technical supervisor at Marsh & McLennan in New York.

Ms. Beatty, 53, faced another challenge more recently when she was found to have breast cancer. By that time, she had left Canada and moved to Belford, N.J., to marry the retired police officer she had met on a blind date while visiting a friend. The friend, Lorraine Greskow, said Ms. Beatty remained upbeat, even after her mastectomy. "She always had a smile on her face, even through all that," she said.

In August, Jane Beatty and her husband, Bob, went to Atlantic City to privately mark her fifth anniversary of being cancer-free. She told her mother it was too early to make a big fuss. "She said she wasn't going to celebrate until she was clear for six years," said her mother, Beth Chrystal.

Profile published in THE NEW YORK TIMES on December 3, 2001.