Reflections on Terry Fox

Growing up in the '80s was awesome. For those of you who have seen the series, “Stranger Things,” it was just like that, but without the Demogorgon. Metal lunch boxes, BMX bikes, walkie-talkies, no cell phones, and parents who didn’t always know where we were, so long as we were home for dinner – mud and minor injuries optional.

 

When we had heroes, real-life heroes, we could believe in them. Like Rick Hansen or Bobby Orr or Elizabeth Manly. Our heroes were unimpeachable back then; there was no Twitter to take them down, no awkward Facebook posts from years previous, no screen-shots of misjudged Snapchats. Perhaps it was youthful naïvety, but it seemed to me, as a kid, that our heroes were good and pure and incorruptible, and the greatest, most important of them all, in my opinion, was Terry Fox, and I’m here this morning to tell you a little bit about him…

 

He was born in Winnipeg in 1958 and grew up in Port Coquitlam in the 60s and 70s: a small kid, but feisty. He and his best friend, Doug Alward, tried out for the basketball team every year, and got cut every year, until they finally made it in their senior years – and were by all accounts ferocious and feisty: think of a honey badger in 1980s short-shorts and floppy hair! That was Terry. He was a good athlete, but not a great one. He had to work harder than everyone else, to have a chance.

 

In 1976, when he was 18 years old, he was driving his sweet, green 1968 Cortina home – a make of car I think Mr. Noble still drives – when he lost control of the vehicle. He wasn’t texting and driving, he got distracted by bridge construction.  He walked away from the accident with little more than a sore right knee. A little bit of rest, and he’d be fine, he thought. A month went by, and the soreness was still there, but he was a very active athlete, and this was to be expected. Finally, after three, then four, then five months of treating himself with painkillers, he made an appointment at the health clinic at Simon Fraser University, where he was in his first year of study for his Bachelor of Kinesiology.

 

He wasn’t injured. He was sick. Osteosarcoma. Cancer. He was diagnosed on March 3, 1977. Within six days, his right leg was amputated just below the knee. Ten days after that, he went in to get fitted with a prosthetic leg.

 

Life can come at you pretty fast. It was a blow that shattered his dreams and rewrote the story of his life. It would have crushed most people. But not Terry.

 

When I think about him, the word ‘indomitable’ comes to mind. You just couldn’t keep him down. He never thought about his diagnosis as “Why me?” – rather, “Why not me?” While undergoing chemotherapy he bore witness to the suffering of children all around him. Little kids, three and four years old, dying of cancer.

 

Why him? No: Why them!? Cancer doesn’t distinguish, it doesn’t care. The brutal injustice of this horrible disease lit a fire in him and he literally wasn’t going to take it sitting down. He got into running instead. 

 

Full disclosure: running is a terrible sport.  Your lungs hurt, your legs hurt, it’s boring, I’m really slow, Mr. Swannel makes me feel inadequate. I hate it. For me it sucks my will to live, but for Terry it became his life.

 

Terry decided to learn how to run. The first time he went out running at the local track on his new, running leg, he kept losing his balance and crashing to the ground which prompted this horrible woman, who was there with her children, to yell at his friend Doug, who was with him, to “get that freak out of here.” Maybe the 80s weren’t so great after all.

 

How did Terry respond to this?  He started training at night. He set small goals: make it to the end of the street, then to the corner, then to the sign.

 

Then he signed up for his first race, the Prince George Half Marathon (27 kilometres). He’d never even run ten. He ran it and he finished dead last, a full 12 minutes behind the second-to-last runner. Terry’s attitude? He was pumped that he finished.

 

So pumped, in fact, that he announced then and there that he was going to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research. That Christmas, he took one day off training, at his mom’s request. He had trained for 101 days in a row. Before he left for Newfoundland, to dip his foot in the Atlantic, he had run 3,159 miles (or 5,084 kilometres), just in training.

 

His plan was simple: Just an easy 200 marathons in a row. Considering no-one had even run 100 in a row, this was ambitious, to say the least. His support network was his pal Doug, and an old camper van that must have smelled like pure hell.

 

On Day One he set out for his first marathon. He only made it 16 kilometres, less that half of the 42 required. Too cold, too wet, too dangerous, too many dogs. He didn’t earn a dollar. But he didn’t give up.

 

His routine was the same each day. He loved the mornings, so was up at 4 a.m. each day to start running. He was dizzy, nauseous, his stump chafed and bled regularly, but he kept going. Into the wind, into the hail, and into the rain. One foot after another. Hoping to inspire each Canadian to donate one dollar. He was cold at first, then too hot, as the temperature soared when he entered Ontario. He was sunburned, always on his left cheek as he ran West.

 

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when Terry transformed from some kid running on the road, into a national hero, but it was around Canada Day in 1980. He was met by throngs of well-wishers in Ontario and his movement blossomed.

 

He became a symbol for all Canadians who were up against it, who were trying their best each day to just get by. He became an inspiration because of his resolve and his suffering and his determination. He became bigger than his pain and bigger than his diagnosis.

 

When I’m having a hard day, or I’m struggling through a long run or ride, I think of Terry, running into the wind, with one leg. If he didn’t stop, why should I?

 

It was said of Terry, as he ran with that distinctive hop in his step, that “his face was grim, not of pain, but of concentration.” It’s the same look children get when they struggle with a difficult math question.

 

In Terry, parents saw their children. Young men and women saw in him their friends and brothers. Somehow, he became someone you felt you knew. He was so strong, and beautiful, and vulnerable, and he needed us, and we needed him. He was the thread that stitched together the country. He gave of himself so we could all benefit. He was pure.

 

On the first of September, just outside of Thunder Bay, Ontario, after running only 13 miles, he stopped. He had a debilitating pain in his chest that he hadn’t told anyone about. He would never run another step.

Terry Fox died on June 28, 1981, at the age of 23, at 4:35 a.m., his favorite time to go running, when he could enjoy the world, newly-born and filled with promise.

 

I think when you want to try to understand what it is that beats in the heart of Canada, you need look no further than Terry Fox. If you want to know about Canadians, really try to know Terry Fox.

He was the very best of us. He was young, like Canada, a little naïve – also like Canada – and motivated and resilient. He was just naïve enough not to know that what he was doing was an impossible ask. He stood up for people who couldn't stand up for themselves. 

 

As a nation, we don't really celebrate our nation-builders like many other nations do. We don't have many national “heroes,” beyond hockey players – and our scientists, politicians, generals, and other individuals of note are either understated or open to scrutiny.

 

We like it that way: That's how we want to be seen in the eyes of the world. Humble, yet proud. That's why Terry Fox is so important to us. Most people around the world have never heard of him, but for us, he is what we aspire to be like. For me, he is the closest thing we have to the ultimate symbol of all that is good about Canada. He is the very embodiment of the word hope.

 

Canadians have always been a hopeful bunch, from the soldiers at Vimy Ridge and Normandy, to figures like Paul Henderson and Gord Downie. From Nellie McClung to Bianca Andreescu.

 

Hope crafted the spirit of the suffragettes to demand the right to vote, of women who demand the right to equal pay, of the LGBTQ+ community who demand equal respect. It’s the spirit of every group or individual who was too naive, too stubborn, or too absolutely determined to know when to quit. It’s the spirit that will serve young people – you, each of you – who are going to take on the biggest task facing the world at this time, and perhaps all time: the challenge of climate change.

And guess what? You’re going to win. As a generation, you need to turn your face into the wind and take one step after another, and not turn around when it gets hard. Terry did that. You’re going to do that.

 

Terry didn’t start out trying to raise more that three-quarters of a billion dollars. He didn’t start out trying to raise anything at all. He started out trying to walk on his stump on a prosthetic leg.

But each obstacle that lay before him, whether it be people calling him a freak, or finishing last in his first race, or the weather in Newfoundland, or the cancer that finally claimed his life, Terry didn’t stop. He still hasn’t stopped. And so I think about Terry when the challenges of my life seem too great, I think of his painful gait and the grimace on his face, and I think: If he can take one more step, so can I, and so can you.