Strong as Steel
Twenty years after losing her son Nick to cancer, HEADstrong Foundation President Cheryl Colleluori builds on the work he started by supporting families affected by the disease.
Cheryl Colleluori can partition her life into two distinct yet stark categories—before her son’s Nick cancer diagnosis and after.
Prior to the diagnosis, Colleluori was leading the fulfilling and mildly chaotic life of a mother of four boys, while working as the manager of strategic enterprises for Business Interiors by Staples. Today she leads the HEADstrong Foundation, a nonprofit enterprise founded by Nick to procure much-needed resources for others who have been affected by cancer.
When comparing the before and the after, just about everything else is different, too.
Colleluori describes Nick as a “very old soul” known for his wonderful sense of humor—“the guy everyone wanted to be friends with,” she says. People knew him as humble, a helper and a doer, someone who wanted to work with children. Also, as a three-sport athlete in football, wrestling, and lacrosse, he was intensely competitive, both on and off the field. He played in all 16 games as a freshman on Hofstra University’s lacrosse team.
His trajectory changed toward the end of that season, when he first noticed some concerning health symptoms. The eventual diagnosis: a type of blood cancer known as diffuse large B-cell Hodgkin lymphoma. Despite the months of chemotherapy, radiation, and experimental treatments Nick endured, the disease took his life on November 28, 2006. He was only 21 years old.
“Nothing can ever compare to losing a child,” says Colleluori, who lost both of her parents earlier this year. “Losing a child is life altering. I changed even the way that I was as a mom, because I started to panic about my other children. Like, could lightning strike twice? If they get a sniffle, I’m panicking. What mattered prior to losing Nick didn’t matter anymore. … Everything is different before and after Nick.”
Although nearly 20 years have passed since she succeeded Nick as president of the HEADstrong Foundation, she will never forget how she came into the title. He had effectively passed the torch during an emotional drive home from the hospital, after his medical team effectively told him there was nothing more they could do to stop the progression of the disease.
Some people might have been overcome by emotion, or paralyzed by the fear of failing, of disappointing their child. Not Colleluori. The idea of not rising to the challenge never occurred to her.
“I’m filled with gratitude that he chose me and that I was the lucky one he called ‘Mom,’” she says. “[The word failure] wasn’t in Nick’s vocabulary, and it certainly isn’t in mine. I thought: I’ve done hard—I buried my child—so how much harder could it be? … I was never afraid because the worst thing that happened already happened to me.”
While she and her husband both continued to work full time after Nick’s passing, the demands and mounting success of the HEADstrong Foundation ultimately compelled her to leave her job and focus her energies on building out the nonprofit. Her efforts have paid off, as the nonprofit has raised tens of millions of dollars over the years to provide residential, emotional, and financial support to the families of loved ones receiving treatment for cancer.
The nonprofit’s most significant achievement to date is the creation of Nick’s House, which now has three locations near some of the country’s finest facilities for cancer care: one in Boston; one in Durham, North Carolina; and one in Swarthmore, a short drive from Penn Medicine, Jefferson Health’s Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Each fully staffed Nick’s House location provides cost-free accommodations for the families of six patients who are receiving treatments nearby, including cutting-edge therapies such as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell immunotherapy and proton radiation therapy.
Nick’s House locations have sheltered families from all 50 states. Having a safe, comfortable, and cost-free home base can be a monumental help for families already dealing the exorbitant costs of medical treatment.
The costs of cancer-related healthcare in the United States are expected to increase to $246 billion by 2030, according to the American Cancer Society. Regarding the three phases of cancer diagnosis and treatment—initial, or the first year after diagnosis; end of life, or the year before succumbing to the disease; and continuing, meaning the time in between—per-patient annualized average costs tend to be highest in the last year of life, followed by the initial and continuing phases, according to the National Cancer Institute. Costs of medical services for the end-of-life phase total more than $109,700 per year, though those costs do not include oral prescription drugs, which can run several thousand dollars per year.
The first Nick’s House location opened in 2011. Colleluori intends to open two more locations within the next 10 years. Next up, in all likelihood, will be Baltimore.
“Income, geography, and circumstances should not prevent someone from accessing the best cancer care that’s available for their cancer,” she adds. “We have met a lot of people who are vulnerable when they’re going through cancer. The income is cut in half, like our income was cut, and I didn’t care; I would have traveled to the ends of the earth for my son. … We want people to have that opportunity to access care in hopes of a greater outcome, without incurring $30,000 in travel-related expenses.”
The HEADstrong Foundation, which welcomes donations all year long, hosts a high-profile event every November called A Night for the HEADstrong Foundation. Those interested in attending this year’s event or otherwise donating to the cause can visit shopheadstrong.org for more information. They can also lend support by purchasing accessories emblazoned with the HEADstrong Foundation’s logo, including the lime-green shoelaces Nick once championed.
“I hope nobody has to understand what it’s like to deal with the loss of a child,” Colleluori adds. “For anybody who has, I’m always happy to lend an ear and share a story and talk about how we get through things. I look at it as we’re in it together. No matter what the end result is, the loss of a child is crippling, it’s devastating. We’ve seen families just fall off, like a landslide, and there’s no coming back from that.
“It’s been 20 years, so what does the next 20 years look like to grow our supporters’ base and continue to make a difference in Nick’s name?” she continues. “One of our big, hairy, audacious goals back in the past was bringing Nick’s House to life. We’ve achieved that and then some. I know Nick was very competitive, and he’d be sitting there and saying, ‘It’s not enough. We need to do more. What’s next?’ I can hear him.”
Photo courtesy of the HEADstrong Foundation
Published (and copyrighted) in Suburban Life, November 2026
