For those touched by cancer, Terry Fox seems more alive with every passing year
He ran with Jeff in his pocket.
Brady Shaw is only 12 years old and on a crisp Sunday morning when even the sky seems freshly washed and drying in the wind, he looked little different from the hundreds of other youngsters running through the streets of this small community on the outskirts of Ottawa.
He looked, in fact, almost exactly like a dozen other 12-year-olds in similar dark tracksuits, all members of the Kanata Lightning soccer team that, only the day before, had won the championship.
Today, however, they were competing for Jeff Hayden and a prize that too often seems forever out of reach.
All the players wore red and white ribbons, the team colours Jeff liked best, but only Brady, Jeff's closest Canadian friend, carried the picture.
It showed Jeff on Parliament Hill. The youngster from Cincinnati stood with his twin brother Joey, with Brady and two Mounties, the Peace Tower behind him, more cancer treatments ahead of him.
On September 8, less than two weeks earlier, Jeff Hayden died if inoperable brain cancer. Brady Shaw set loose 12 red and white balloons that day and then talked to his soccer team about running for the smiling sports nut from Cincinnati that Brady had befriended last year while Brady's father, Brad, was coaching hockey in the city.
Brady had used a school project to tell Jeff about Terry Fox, and now Terry Fox would tell all Brady's Canadian friends about Jeff.
And yet not one of them was even born when Terry Fox was still alive.
It is an astonishing story. A young man from British Columbia says he is going to run a marathon every single day until he has crossed the country. Improbable for anyone; impossible, surely, for anyone with only one leg.
He begins on April 12, 1980, in St. John's and is barely noticed for the first half of his trip Ð yet, by the time he is forced to stop because the cancer has spread, he has covered 5,743 kilometres in 143 days and has won over a nation that too often has trouble believing in anything.
What is now equally astonishing is what has happened in the 23 years since.
Brady Shaw's school is but one of 4,500 involved in these annual runs. There are now 50 countries holding Terry Fox Runs. Nuns run in Ireland. A million run in Cuba. Some $340-million has been raised for cancer research.
The cancer that took Terry Fox's leg in 1977 left him with a one-in-five chance of survival; today those chances are four out of five.
Perhaps one day everyone will survive; perhaps one day the brain cancer that took Jeff Hayden will be operable.
This Friday in the Peel District School Board outside Toronto, another Terry Fox run will involve 343 schools and 257,000 students and staff.
They will run, will likely raise millions, and after will sit and watch a new documentary called Terry Fox:Keeping the Dream Alive. The documentary was produced for Rogers Television by Carolyn Weaver, whose highly empathetic interviews show how, 23 years after his death, Terry Fox's parents and siblings remain in awe of the young runner who hopped and skipped halfway across a continent.
"I believe," says mother Betty Fox at one point, "he was meant to do it." Whatever drove him to it, it still drives others, by the millions.
Weaver's loving documentary was inspired by a book about Fox for young readers, Run, by Mississauga writer Eric Walters. Walter's fictionalized account of Fox's life has already sold more than 100,000 copies, with every penny of royalty going to the cause and the book's publisher, Penguin, matching every dollar Walters commits.
"For me," says Walters, "it's a continuation of Terry Fox's legacy. Terry said he couldn't continue on and others had to run in his place.
"What gets to you is the emotional impact. I'm not doing this just for Terry Fox. I'm doing it for the mother I lost to colon cancer when I was four years of age."
What motivates Walters is the awareness that his mother's unfortunate death led to the rest of the family being regularly check for early signs of colon cancer, a perfect example of those cancers that can be beaten through early detection.
"Cancer is still killing people, obviously," says Walters.
"But they are getting results."
Terry Fox has now been dead more years than he lived, and yet in many ways he is more alive each year.
Brady Shaw stands on the grass, catching his breath with his teammates, when he is asked the simplest question of all.
Who was Terry Fox anyway?
"He lost his leg to cancer, " Brady says between puffs. "He was 22 years old. He ran across the country to raise money for cancer research. But he had to stop at Thunder Bay. He didn't make it." Oh yes he did, Brady.
He made it, all right.