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jayfurrI'm often asked precisely what caused me to become so, well, passionate about breast cancer. It strikes some people as sort of odd -- not bad, but odd -- that I'm so devout about finding a cure and raising money for the fight. I was asked that very question yesterday by a high school classmate of mine who told me that while he certainly agreed that the cause was worthwhile, he wondered precisely how I came to care so much. "Would you care to elaborate?" he asked.
I started writing the words below as a reply to his question -- and as things sometimes do, it got a bit out of control and quickly exceeded the 8,000 character limit that Facebook permits. So I wound up copying it over here -- and I hope it makes sense and explains my motivation.
----------------
Sure.
I have a job that involves such frequent, constant travel that I am effectively prevented from being involved in *any* sort of regular volunteer commitment. I would miss three volunteer shifts out of four, at a minimum. So I can't play a role in making my community a better place.
And I have no children. My wife and I decided that it would be irresponsible at best to have children together given that she works as an accountant and I'm rarely home. They'd be neglected and who knows how they'd grow up? So the main leave-the-world-a-better-place opportunity that an average adult male has (being involved in the lives of his kids) is also denied to me.
When I turned 40, I realized that I was existing simply as a consumer of resources -- not contributing or giving back AT ALL to the world around me. (Attending my local Methodist church when I could, and writing checks to random environmental causes, does not count.) And I was, frankly, not very impressed with my lifestyle. I wasn't exactly in shape, wasn't really ever venturing out of my comfort zone... and hello, mid-life crisis.
I had two paths I could have chosen at that point: I could go out and buy a sports car or boat or some other pointlessly expensive toy, OR, I could find some way to redeem myself, some way to make a difference. The problem was, I couldn't for the life of me see what that was going to be.
So there I was one day, uselessly kvetching via email about my going-nowhere life to a friend of mine from college. She heard me out and then said "Well... you COULD come walk the DC 3-Day with me this fall." I seriously doubt that she expected me to take her up on the offer. She'd walked the Cleveland 3-Day in 2007 and had lots of reasons for having done so -- lots of people in her family and circle of acquaintances have had breast cancer. But me, I had no personal or familial reason for getting involved in the Susan G Komen movement -- other than that it was offered to me at a time in my life when I *really* felt a need to matter and to make a difference. To stop feeling so *useless*, as it were.
So I surprised both of us by saying "Okay, I will."
So that's how I got started.
That summer of 2008 I got started doing my training walks, attempting to follow the steadily-ramping-up-the-distance schedule laid out in the walker handbook I'd been sent after registering. Since there was next to no one else from rural northern Vermont signed up for the walk, necessarily a lot of my training walks were done solo, usually involving my wife Carole dropping me off 10 or 15 or 20 miles from our house, equipped with a Camelbak hydration pack, an MP3 player and headphones, and a few miscellaneous snack bars. And I found that I *really* *really* liked the Zen of walking through the Vermont countryside, under my own power and on my own two feet. I gained an appreciation for the country around me that I hadn't ever gotten from the driver's seat of my car.
So that was a win, right off. That, and the weight loss that began, slowly, to take place.
But I didn't *really* get the full sense of what the 3-Day was about, and how important the cause of fighting breast cancer was, until I actually showed up in Washington in October of 2008. Even though I was signed up as part of Sandy's team, I wound up walking most of the 60 miles as a solo walker. One of our teammates, a tall, lanky woman named Heather, found it next to impossible to amble along at the slower pace preferred by Sandy and Jennifer, so she tended to walk off by herself. And Sandy and Jennifer wound up on the sweep van each day because Jennifer, um, wouldn't hydrate, and kept having health issues as a result. So with no one on my team with me for much of the distance, I found myself walking along talking to whoever was near me.
One woman -- whose name, unfortunately, I forgot almost as soon as she told it to me -- was a seven year survivor of breast cancer. Unfortunately, those seven years had been far from cancer-free -- cancer had come back repeatedly, each time defying the drugs and radiation and surgery. She looked tired and exhausted as she walked, but she absolutely refused to take a sweep van to the next pit stop or to lunch. She was determined to walk every foot of those sixty miles no matter what it took. She owed it to her adult children and to their children -- she wanted to find a cure so they wouldn't have to go through what she'd been through.
At another point I found myself chatting with sisters. They were walking wearing t-shirts with an aged woman's picture on the front and on the back, captioned with something like "Mary's Angels". I asked if Mary was their mother and they said "No, she was our first grade teacher. She lived down the block from us most of our childhood. When we were in high school she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. She kept on teaching and fought it for five years. Died the day before her sixtieth birthday." Or words to that effect -- I can't quote exactly from memory. But they were walking because they respected the fight this woman, not even their relative, had put up, refusing to just quit and give in, sharing one last life's lesson before the end. The thing that started the tears flowing, though, was the dénouement to their story: people had been coming in from all over the country for her sixtieth birthday party. When she died the day before, there had been talk of, well, not holding the party. But in the end everyone realized that she would have wanted it to be held anyway -- and when they lit the candles on the cake so her granddaughters could blow them out, there were over a hundred people present, all there to celebrate the life of this incredible woman who had been so important to them all.
I could go on. You simply cannot take part in a 3-Day and not meet dozens of incredible people, if not hundreds. There is something about the diagnosis of breast cancer that brings out the best in some people, awakening an iron resolve to make the most of their life and to do what they can to appreciate every moment. And to do what they can to *beat* the disease, on a personal level AND on a societal level. I'm no M.D., but I *have* to believe that the determination and resolve that I see on so many faces goes a long way toward helping one's body repel the invader.
Then there's the thing that happened on the third day of the 3-Day that October in Washington. We were in south Arlington, a whole mob of us traipsing along in the morning light, when we rounded a corner and saw it: Walter Reed Hill. I won't say it's the biggest hill in the area around DC, but it was big enough that as each walker rounded the corner and saw what lay ahead, out came an involuntary groan. Everyone had the same thought: "OH, no WAY!" Everyone, that is, except a scrawny, elderly woman -- probably ninety-eight pounds soaking wet. Bald and wearing a chemo cap and a fanny pack. She looked sourly at the rest of us and said "It BEATS CHEMO." And then she powered right up that hill.
Well, hush my mouth.
It's pretty insanely hard to continue feeling sorry for oneself and feeling all mopey about one's advancing years when you're face to face with people who are up against the ultimate enemy, staring it in the face every day, and yet REFUSE to let it get them down.
Problems? I don't have problems. Not compared to the problems of a woman or man stricken with breast cancer knowing what the drugs and radiation and so on are going to do to them. Not compared to the people who don't know if they have six months left, or five years left, or a full lifetime ahead of them. And not compared to the little kids who may lose their mother and the husbands who may lose a wife and the families who may lose an aunt or a grandparent or a beloved friend.
Every time I step out to start a training walk I'm reminded of the faces of the walkers on the walls of the Remembrance Tent at the 3-Day camp, former 3-Day participants who lost their own personal fight with breast cancer. I wonder how many of the people I've met at a 3-Day won't be back to walk again -- but whose smiling faces will be commemorated in Remembrance Tent photographs. This year in the Twin Cities 3-Day I saw photos of walkers and crew who had taken part in the DC 3-Day in 2008. I wondered how many of them I might have walked with -- or whether one of the smiling faces I remember handing me a snack or filling my bottle with Gatorade in DC might now be looking down on me from one of those far-too-numerous photographs.
It's depressing and at the same time uplifting and inspiring. Sad, because of the loss each death represents -- but uplifting, because of the hope that you see on every face when you show up to walk a 3-Day.
While I have no blood relatives who've suffered from breast cancer -- and only one aunt by marriage (a seven-plus year survivor), the reason I keep coming back, year after year (and at three years, I'm a piker compared to some people who are in their tenth year of participation) is because the 3-Day community has *become* my family. I may not go home from a walk and correspond with each person I've met on the route, but nonetheless, I feel very close to each person I've met and spent time with. The other day, I sat in front of one of the Twin Cities camp shower trucks with a woman I'd never met before in my life, someone who'd just come out of the shower at 5:15 AM, and just ... talked. For about a half hour. About personal health details many people would never discuss with anyone other than a doctor or family member. And yet, on the 3-Day, we're all family.
That's why I walk -- and why I'm so incredibly devoted to the cause. I may have no children of my own and may have no blood relatives with breast cancer... but I've found the opportunity to make a difference that I was looking for and I've found something larger than myself that I can take part in and contribute to. And I've found a whole new family to be part of. And no one in my family should have to live life terrified that one day breast cancer will come and snatch everything away.
That's why I walk.
I started writing the words below as a reply to his question -- and as things sometimes do, it got a bit out of control and quickly exceeded the 8,000 character limit that Facebook permits. So I wound up copying it over here -- and I hope it makes sense and explains my motivation.
----------------
Sure.
I have a job that involves such frequent, constant travel that I am effectively prevented from being involved in *any* sort of regular volunteer commitment. I would miss three volunteer shifts out of four, at a minimum. So I can't play a role in making my community a better place.
And I have no children. My wife and I decided that it would be irresponsible at best to have children together given that she works as an accountant and I'm rarely home. They'd be neglected and who knows how they'd grow up? So the main leave-the-world-a-better-place opportunity that an average adult male has (being involved in the lives of his kids) is also denied to me.
When I turned 40, I realized that I was existing simply as a consumer of resources -- not contributing or giving back AT ALL to the world around me. (Attending my local Methodist church when I could, and writing checks to random environmental causes, does not count.) And I was, frankly, not very impressed with my lifestyle. I wasn't exactly in shape, wasn't really ever venturing out of my comfort zone... and hello, mid-life crisis.
I had two paths I could have chosen at that point: I could go out and buy a sports car or boat or some other pointlessly expensive toy, OR, I could find some way to redeem myself, some way to make a difference. The problem was, I couldn't for the life of me see what that was going to be.
So there I was one day, uselessly kvetching via email about my going-nowhere life to a friend of mine from college. She heard me out and then said "Well... you COULD come walk the DC 3-Day with me this fall." I seriously doubt that she expected me to take her up on the offer. She'd walked the Cleveland 3-Day in 2007 and had lots of reasons for having done so -- lots of people in her family and circle of acquaintances have had breast cancer. But me, I had no personal or familial reason for getting involved in the Susan G Komen movement -- other than that it was offered to me at a time in my life when I *really* felt a need to matter and to make a difference. To stop feeling so *useless*, as it were.
So I surprised both of us by saying "Okay, I will."
So that's how I got started.
That summer of 2008 I got started doing my training walks, attempting to follow the steadily-ramping-up-the-distance schedule laid out in the walker handbook I'd been sent after registering. Since there was next to no one else from rural northern Vermont signed up for the walk, necessarily a lot of my training walks were done solo, usually involving my wife Carole dropping me off 10 or 15 or 20 miles from our house, equipped with a Camelbak hydration pack, an MP3 player and headphones, and a few miscellaneous snack bars. And I found that I *really* *really* liked the Zen of walking through the Vermont countryside, under my own power and on my own two feet. I gained an appreciation for the country around me that I hadn't ever gotten from the driver's seat of my car.
So that was a win, right off. That, and the weight loss that began, slowly, to take place.
But I didn't *really* get the full sense of what the 3-Day was about, and how important the cause of fighting breast cancer was, until I actually showed up in Washington in October of 2008. Even though I was signed up as part of Sandy's team, I wound up walking most of the 60 miles as a solo walker. One of our teammates, a tall, lanky woman named Heather, found it next to impossible to amble along at the slower pace preferred by Sandy and Jennifer, so she tended to walk off by herself. And Sandy and Jennifer wound up on the sweep van each day because Jennifer, um, wouldn't hydrate, and kept having health issues as a result. So with no one on my team with me for much of the distance, I found myself walking along talking to whoever was near me.
One woman -- whose name, unfortunately, I forgot almost as soon as she told it to me -- was a seven year survivor of breast cancer. Unfortunately, those seven years had been far from cancer-free -- cancer had come back repeatedly, each time defying the drugs and radiation and surgery. She looked tired and exhausted as she walked, but she absolutely refused to take a sweep van to the next pit stop or to lunch. She was determined to walk every foot of those sixty miles no matter what it took. She owed it to her adult children and to their children -- she wanted to find a cure so they wouldn't have to go through what she'd been through.
At another point I found myself chatting with sisters. They were walking wearing t-shirts with an aged woman's picture on the front and on the back, captioned with something like "Mary's Angels". I asked if Mary was their mother and they said "No, she was our first grade teacher. She lived down the block from us most of our childhood. When we were in high school she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. She kept on teaching and fought it for five years. Died the day before her sixtieth birthday." Or words to that effect -- I can't quote exactly from memory. But they were walking because they respected the fight this woman, not even their relative, had put up, refusing to just quit and give in, sharing one last life's lesson before the end. The thing that started the tears flowing, though, was the dénouement to their story: people had been coming in from all over the country for her sixtieth birthday party. When she died the day before, there had been talk of, well, not holding the party. But in the end everyone realized that she would have wanted it to be held anyway -- and when they lit the candles on the cake so her granddaughters could blow them out, there were over a hundred people present, all there to celebrate the life of this incredible woman who had been so important to them all.
I could go on. You simply cannot take part in a 3-Day and not meet dozens of incredible people, if not hundreds. There is something about the diagnosis of breast cancer that brings out the best in some people, awakening an iron resolve to make the most of their life and to do what they can to appreciate every moment. And to do what they can to *beat* the disease, on a personal level AND on a societal level. I'm no M.D., but I *have* to believe that the determination and resolve that I see on so many faces goes a long way toward helping one's body repel the invader.
Then there's the thing that happened on the third day of the 3-Day that October in Washington. We were in south Arlington, a whole mob of us traipsing along in the morning light, when we rounded a corner and saw it: Walter Reed Hill. I won't say it's the biggest hill in the area around DC, but it was big enough that as each walker rounded the corner and saw what lay ahead, out came an involuntary groan. Everyone had the same thought: "OH, no WAY!" Everyone, that is, except a scrawny, elderly woman -- probably ninety-eight pounds soaking wet. Bald and wearing a chemo cap and a fanny pack. She looked sourly at the rest of us and said "It BEATS CHEMO." And then she powered right up that hill.
Well, hush my mouth.
It's pretty insanely hard to continue feeling sorry for oneself and feeling all mopey about one's advancing years when you're face to face with people who are up against the ultimate enemy, staring it in the face every day, and yet REFUSE to let it get them down.
Problems? I don't have problems. Not compared to the problems of a woman or man stricken with breast cancer knowing what the drugs and radiation and so on are going to do to them. Not compared to the people who don't know if they have six months left, or five years left, or a full lifetime ahead of them. And not compared to the little kids who may lose their mother and the husbands who may lose a wife and the families who may lose an aunt or a grandparent or a beloved friend.
Every time I step out to start a training walk I'm reminded of the faces of the walkers on the walls of the Remembrance Tent at the 3-Day camp, former 3-Day participants who lost their own personal fight with breast cancer. I wonder how many of the people I've met at a 3-Day won't be back to walk again -- but whose smiling faces will be commemorated in Remembrance Tent photographs. This year in the Twin Cities 3-Day I saw photos of walkers and crew who had taken part in the DC 3-Day in 2008. I wondered how many of them I might have walked with -- or whether one of the smiling faces I remember handing me a snack or filling my bottle with Gatorade in DC might now be looking down on me from one of those far-too-numerous photographs.
It's depressing and at the same time uplifting and inspiring. Sad, because of the loss each death represents -- but uplifting, because of the hope that you see on every face when you show up to walk a 3-Day.
While I have no blood relatives who've suffered from breast cancer -- and only one aunt by marriage (a seven-plus year survivor), the reason I keep coming back, year after year (and at three years, I'm a piker compared to some people who are in their tenth year of participation) is because the 3-Day community has *become* my family. I may not go home from a walk and correspond with each person I've met on the route, but nonetheless, I feel very close to each person I've met and spent time with. The other day, I sat in front of one of the Twin Cities camp shower trucks with a woman I'd never met before in my life, someone who'd just come out of the shower at 5:15 AM, and just ... talked. For about a half hour. About personal health details many people would never discuss with anyone other than a doctor or family member. And yet, on the 3-Day, we're all family.
That's why I walk -- and why I'm so incredibly devoted to the cause. I may have no children of my own and may have no blood relatives with breast cancer... but I've found the opportunity to make a difference that I was looking for and I've found something larger than myself that I can take part in and contribute to. And I've found a whole new family to be part of. And no one in my family should have to live life terrified that one day breast cancer will come and snatch everything away.
That's why I walk.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-31 11:45 pm (UTC)Enjoy your training
Carrie
DC 2004, 2008, 2009, 2010
Boston 2005, 2006, 2007
no subject
Date: 2010-09-01 02:51 pm (UTC)My husband & I don't have children either, it was a decision we made when we first met each other, however we do have 2 dogs and 2 cats that are wonderful companions.
My oldest sister had breast cancer 13 years ago and has been cancer free since then. My sister in law had breast cancer 20 years ago and had been cancer free until last year when she developed bone cancer. She's gone through chemo and radiation and right now she's doing great! Nothing has grown and she's feeling wonderful!
That is why my other sister and I are walking. I wanted to do something in my life that might make a difference and this is it!
I just hope I can finish 60 miles!!! I'm training, but everything I'm reading has me a bit concerned.
Caryle
1st time Philly 3 dayer
Love reading your blogs and comments!