Relay for Life offers mothers, daughters a chance to fight cancer

By Darrell Laurant

Published: May 12, 2008

This will be a bittersweet Mother’s Day for the Spice Squirrels.

Their leader, Christy Fleenor, is currently dealing with her mother’s terminal cancer. Her mom, Shirley Breeden, beat breast cancer 15 years ago, only to suffer a recurrence that crept into her kidneys and spread. She is currently at home, under hospice care.

Aimee Burns, another Spice Squirrel, lost her mother to Hodgkins lymphoma when Burns was 3 years old. Spice Squirrel Janie Abell’s father died of the same disease when she was 5.

Events like the June 6 and 7 Relay for Life at Heritage High School were formed primarily for the purpose of raising money for cancer research, but they have come to serve another purpose: therapy.

It’s something I see happening more and more, from the Spice Squirrels to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, who formed an anti-cancer foundation almost immediately after keyboard player Danny Federici succumbed to melanoma in April.

Relay for Life is a serious commitment. It begins at 7 p.m. and lasts until the next morning, and during that time each team must keep at least one member walking around the Heritage track (a good reason to get a lot of people on your team). Money is pledged per lap.

If you want to help cancer research, it’s a lot easier to simply write a check and avoid missing sleep. But many members of the 100-plus teams that will be involved are driven by something stronger than an urge for philanthropy. They’re angry.

I guarantee that somewhere inside, Christy Fleenor is mad as hell about what is happening to her mom. Bad enough that the family had to go through the first bout with cancer, more than anyone should have to endure in one lifetime. Now, it’s back.

Cancer not only kills your loved ones, it taints your memories of them. When you spend months or years at the side of someone whose body, and sometimes mind, is deteriorating, it becomes more and more difficult to look past that grim experience to the happier times.

Still, it’s futile to be angry at cancer. Not only is it a killer without a mind or a motive, it is the ultimate betrayal — the body rebelling against itself.

That’s where events like Relay for Life and others like it come in. They enable those who are going through the heartbreak of loss to channel their inner fury into physical action.

The Spice Squirrels (from Shirley Breeden’s nickname, “Squirrel”) came to Relay for Life a little late, but have already raised more than $7,000 to lead all the Lynchburg teams.

“Christy has brought a real passion to this,” said Amanda Darling-Thompson, community manager for the local American Cancer Society.

“How it started,” Fleenor said, “was I went to the local cancer society office to pick up some turbans for my mom, because she had lost all her hair from chemotherapy. They had some (wigs) there, and they were free, and they also gave me a Raquel Welch wig that my mom loved.

“I was so moved by this that I wanted to help them out some way.”

Other members of the Spice Squirrels (team motto: “We’re nuts about finding a cure for cancer”) include Christy’s husband, Jeff, her sister-in-law, Dusty Fleenor, former co-workers Michelle King and Janie Abell, and friends Aimee Burns, Vicky Delrue and Christopher Harris.

And they’re not waiting until June 6 to raise money. On May 17, the group will hold a yard sale at 1168 Macon Loop in the Boonsboro area, offering furniture, clothes, books, dishes, a punch bowl and dessert. Later, they plan a raffle.

“I met Christy through my friend, Janie,” said Burns. “They used to work together (in the dental office of Don Wallace and Karen Kenny) and are close friends. Janie asked me if I wanted to be on the relay team a few months ago, and I jumped at the chance. Christy and I finally met face-to-face two weeks ago at La Carreta for dinner, and we sat and talked about our mothers.”

Aimee Burns has already shattered her personal goal of $500 raised.

Relay for Life also provides an outlet for another emotion — gratitude. Candles are lit for cancer survivors, many of whom will be out on the track in June.

“Doing it overnight is symbolic,” said Darling-Thompson. “It symbolizes the dark night of cancer treatment, and the sunrise symbolizes hope.”

w As a young woman, Vivian Pinn experienced this twilight of the soul firsthand. She was a sophomore at Wellesley College in 1959 when she learned that her mother back in Lynchburg had been diagnosed with a tumor that had invaded her bones and then metastasized throughout her body. Pinn left school and came back to Lynchburg to care for her mother until her mom died.

“I wanted to be the kind of physician who paid attention to my patients,” Pinn says in her biography, “and didn’t dismiss my patient’s complaints, something that has really carried through and I think has been central to my way of thinking and approaching women’s health.”

But Pinn was black, and she was female — not the face of physicians in the early ’50s. Perhaps her own anger drove her to return to Wellesley, graduate in 1963, then become the first black woman to graduate from the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

She is now the director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, and she’s coming back to Lynchburg to speak to the local Academy of Medicine on Monday night.

The day after Mother’s Day.