a day ago
Like Terry Fox had hope, my friend Vanessa Davis had gratitude until the very end
Jillian Horton is a physician and author of We are All Perfectly Fine: A Memoir of Love, Medicine and Healing.
My friend, Vanessa Davis, died on April 27. The day before her celebration of life, I was in St. John's, Newfoundland. I'd planned to write her eulogy on the flight home to Winnipeg. I went for a walk that morning; it was bitterly cold. I saw an arrow pointing me toward the Terry Fox monument, and so I followed the signs.
St. John's Harbour is where the 21-year-old Fox started the historic 1980 Marathon of Hope, a cross-country run to raise money for cancer research. Fox ran for 143 days before he had to stop just outside of Thunder Bay, where he learned cancer had spread to his lungs.
Shivering despite the morning sunlight, I read a series of commemorative plaques that tell the too-short story of his life. I learned that Fox was born in Winnipeg – just like Vanessa. And I was reminded that, in 1981, he died on June 28 at the tender age of 22. As of 2024, the foundation in his name had raised more than an incredible $900-million, and Terry Fox is rightly considered to be one of the 'greatest Canadians' – a young man who transformed our country's national vocabulary of courage, a regular person who was exceptionally moved by the suffering of people around him.
That morning in the harbour, looking up at the bronze rendering of Fox's youthful, determined face, I was struck by how well that description also suited my friend Vanessa: a regular person, exceptionally moved. I wrote about her in 2022, when she was a few months into treatment for her highly aggressive form of breast cancer. She was a brilliant, compassionate ward nurse who worked through the worst parts of the pandemic. She was also a beloved mother of two sons, and a cherished wife with a massive circle of loving family and faithful friends.
We ached for a miracle; it never came. But I believe there are traces of other miracles in her life – and in the brave, painful, disrupted lives of almost everyone we love and lose to cancer.
Cancer treatment is like Terry Fox's run: another kind of marathon of hope. Vanessa had two mastectomies and endured endless rounds of chemotherapy, countless emergency department visits, agonizing waits and occasional system snafus. But hope wasn't the word Vanessa used the most. That word was gratitude. Gratitude for her life. Gratitude for the time she did have, for the care she was receiving, for the years she had spent nursing, for the people who were there with her at every turn. Even starting chemotherapy – she was 'grateful to be getting the show on the road,' and excited. Excited to start destroying some cancer cells, excited to get up to the lake, excited to watch movies with the family, excited quite literally just to be alive. Vanessa hadn't transformed the vocabulary of her family and friends. She'd done something much quieter, subtler, but deeply impactful: She'd reordered it.
This is where I make a critical distinction, because even though I knew her for more than 20 years, it took me time to understand what I thought at first was just her coping in a 'silver-linings' way. I was utterly wrong. This wasn't a mechanism. It wasn't toxic positivity or censorship of hard emotions or a delusional spin on the devastation of what she faced – a cancer she knew would inevitably kill her. This was a choice. A deliberate, intentional, life-altering choice.
She didn't need to make up stories about silver linings. She knew the life in front of her was gold.
I recently read about a talk given by author Suleika Jaouad, the author of Between Two Kingdoms, who has chronicled her life with leukemia. Ms. Jaouad said she didn't want to live each day as if it were her last – that was depressing, uninspired, no bridge to anything. She wanted to live each day as if it were her first. In those words, I recognize the mindset that allowed a 21-year-old man with a prosthetic leg to wake up every morning and run half-way across the second-largest country in the world, despite almost unfathomable physical pain, determined to help legions of people he would never live to meet. And I recognize my friend Vanessa's life-affirming mindset – her gratitude, her authentic and bone-deep joy, her excitement to tackle whatever the day would bring, knowing how tightly those days were numbered.
When Vanessa was hospitalized for the last time in April, I couldn't go see her – I'd been sick at home, running a fever for days. Even as her situation was deteriorating, she would interrupt my constant requests for updates to make me promise I would text a colleague about getting a chest x-ray – for myself. She wanted very specifically for me to tell this colleague that she, Vanessa, was worried I had pneumonia (which, as it turns out, I did). To paint this picture in its fullness: She was in the hospital, post-bronchoscopy, on several litres of oxygen with cancer everywhere in her body – but she was worried about my lungs, still deftly, lovingly nursing until the very end of her life.
'It took cancer to realize that being self-centered is not the way to live. The answer is to try and help others.' Those words are Terry Fox's. That last sentence might as well be Vanessa's. That's how she lived, and that's how she died too.
Terry Fox said he believed in miracles; he had to. The hardest part to handle in his story – like Vanessa's – is that hope doesn't always win. But that's also not where either of their stories end. Sometimes the most transformative, radical act is to think far beyond a finish line, to run because you believe there is nothing more urgent, more sacred, more beautiful, than lighting someone else's way.
